Free Republic

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified. Their revulsion increased with the news that many of the dead soldiers had been mutilated — and with the publication of photographs showing the militants triumphantly sporting their victims’ flak jackets and weapons. The French had been in charge of the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, for only a month, taking over from the Italians; it was one of the biggest single losses of life by Nato forces in Afghanistan. What the grieving...

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...

An Afghan warlord who settled in Britain kept a human dog to bite his victims and waged a campaign of kidnap and torture against civilians, the Old Bailey was told yesterday. Faraydi Zardad, a veteran fighter against the Russians and the Taliban, was the commander of soldiers manning checkpoints on the Jalalabad road, the vital supply route between Kabul and Peshawar. He had complete authority in the area between 1992 and 1996 and "had a fearsome reputation for being cruel and merciless", the court was told. In the first prosecution of its kind Zardad, 41, who was arrested while living...