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Letter to the editor

Afghan villagers flee fighting

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published November 1, 2007

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan - Afghan civilians piled belongings onto trucks Wednesday and fled two villages infiltrated by hundreds of Taliban militants outside Afghanistan's second-largest city. U.S., Canadian and Afghan troops had about 250 of the insurgents surrounded.

The troops killed 50 militants in three days of fighting 15 miles north of Kandahar city, the provincial police chief said. Three police officers and one Afghan soldier also died.

"The people are fleeing because the Taliban are taking over civilian homes," Sayed Agha Saqib said. "There have been no airstrikes. We are trying our best to attack those areas where there are no civilians, only Taliban."

Saqib said 250 militants were surrounded, and 16 suspected Taliban have been arrested.

U.S. Humvees and Canadian jeeps crossed Arghandab's countryside on patrols Wednesday alongside hundreds of Afghans fleeing the area.

Karimullah Khan, fleeing with three children and three female relatives, said: "The Taliban came into our village and they told us to leave. We just packed up our necessities and left. Our pomegranate orchard and home we left behind."

Violence in Afghanistan this year is the deadliest since the invasion that toppled the Taliban. More than 5,600 people have died in insurgency-related violence, according to an Associated Press count based on figures from Afghan and Western officials.

Opium warning: A "tsunami" of opium will hit Afghanistan's neighbors if border security remains weak and officials fail to intercept the drug, whose profits fund terrorism, Antonio Maria Costa, chief of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said Wednesday. Afghanistan saw a record harvest of 9,000 tons of opium in 2007, the United Nations said, a 34 percent increase from 6,724 tons in 2006. The export value of the country's opium is estimated at $4-billion, up 29 percent from 2006.

[Last modified November 1, 2007, 00:32:20]