Free Republic

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Opposition leader and former defense chief Ahmed Shah Massood was injured and his close aide was killed Sunday in an explosion in northern Afghanistan, said Hajji Kahar, an opposition spokesman. Two men from Algeria posing as journalists apparently hid the explosive device in their camera, Kahar told The Associated Press in a satellite telephone interview from Khodja Bahauddin in northern Takhar province, where the explosion occurred. It's not clear whether the two men with the camera were killed. It's believed they were suicide bombers. "There was a lot of noise and smoke," said Kahar. Massood ...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

BRUSSELS -- A Belgian court extended Tuesday the detention of a 35-year-old Moroccan accused in connection with the killing last year of the Afghan anti-Taleban commander Ahmad Shah Masood, officials said. The suspect, whose identity has not been officially revealed, was arrested on October 8 in Antwerp and has been charged with complicity in the September 2001 killing of the Afghan opposition leader, a spokesman as said. The Brussels court extended his detention warrant by a month pending an investigation into an operation to provide false passports, AFP quoted prosecution spokesman Jos Colpin as saying. Belgian press reports have named...

Editor's Introduction In her last book Thieves' World, the late Claire Sterling described the failing efforts of the Western democracies in addressing organized crime thusly: "...sovereign states cannot do anything simply. If they go down to dismal defeat in the war against crime, it will be largely because they are hampered by all the baggage of statehood -- patriotism, politics, accountable governments, human rights, legal strictures, international conventions, bureaucracy, diplomacy -- where the big criminal syndicates have no national allegiences, no laws but their own, no frontiers." Her words are just as applicable to the Western World today and to...