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Entries in Abdul Raziq (2)

Thursday
Sep292011

Afghanistan Feature: Meet America's Man in Kandahar (Aikins)

Though Raziq has risen in large part through his own skills and ambition, he is also, to a considerable degree, a creation of  the American military intervention in Afghanistan. (Prior to 2001, he had worked in a shop in Pakistan.) As part of a countrywide initiative, his men have been trained by two controversial private military firms, DynCorp and Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, at a U.S.-funded center in Spin Boldak, where they are also provided with weapons, vehicles, and communications equipment. Their salaries are subsequently paid through the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a UN-administered international fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor. Raziq himself has enjoyed visits in Spin Boldak from such senior U.S. officials as Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus.

In public, American officials had until recently been careful to downplay Raziq’s alleged abuses. When I met with the State Department’s Moeling at his Kandahar City office in January, he told me, “I think there is certainly a mythology about Abdul Raziq, where there’s a degree of assumption on some of those things. But I have never seen evidence of private prisons or of extrajudicial killings directly attributable to him.”

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Wednesday
Jul272011

Afghanistan Latest: Mayor of Kandahar Killed by Suicide Bomber (AFP)

UPDATE 1000 GMT: The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the killing of the Mayor of Kandahar by a suicide bomber.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said Mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi had ordered the destruction of homes that city officials claimed had been illegally constructed. He added that the mayor was killed to avenge the deaths of two children who allegedly were killed during the demolition.
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The French agency AFP reports:

The mayor of Kandahar, the biggest city in southern Afghanistan and the birthplace of the Taliban movement, was killed in a suicide attack on Wednesday, police said.

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