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An oil tanker overturned and caught fire in the Salang Tunnel - which links the capital Kabul to the northern provinces - on Saturday evening. The blaze spread to other vehicles before it was put out the next morning. Some of the bodies were severely burned, a senior health official in Parwan said in quotes cited by AFP news agency. The Salang Tunnel is 2.6km (1.6 miles) long and is located at an altitude of around 3,400m (11,154ft). Hailed as an engineering masterpiece on its completion in the 1960s by the Soviet Union, the major route through the Hindu Kush...

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...