Afghanistan

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Jam Bigum, a drug addict in Afghanistan’s impoverished northern province of Badakhshan, feeds her three-month-old son opium three times a day to keep him quiet.

KABUL (AFP) – Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura met President Hamid Karzai during a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Sunday in which he urged better relations with Pakistan.

KABUL (AFP) – Pakistan should stop “terrorists” from using its soil to attack Afghanistan if it makes deals with Taliban militants along the troubled border, the Afghan defence ministry said.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Hungry Afghans looking for their next meal eye bread scraps piled up like heaps of trash at a Kabul market as a vendor weighs out fistfuls of the stale crusts on a scale. A Pashtun woman waits with an empty plastic sack.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Eight Afghan civilians, three of them children, were killed in two landmine explosions near the border with Pakistan, a senior provincial police official said on Thursday.

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A woman hemorrhages to death as she lies screaming in agony in a Spartan hut in a remote region of Afghanistan. There is no doctor or midwife to help and the hospital is several days journey away.

A strike force of US marines punched through Taliban frontlines in southern Helmand today as part of an Afghan “mini surge” intended to weaken the insurgents’ grip on the war-ravaged south.

KABUL (Reuters) – Half of Afghan children are still not going to school and the biggest group missing out on an education are girls, the United Nations said on Monday.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Hundreds of Afghans seeking to return home from northwest Pakistan have been stranded because a tribal clash has closed down a road leading to Afghanistan, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday.

SEOUL (AFP) – The United States has asked South Korea to send civilian and police personnel to Afghanistan, less than four months after Seoul withdrew its military forces, officials said Saturday.