Troops aim to oust Taliban from town
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Afghanistan's security forces supported by NATO-led troops will "very soon" launch an operation to clear the southern Afghan town overrun and controlled by Taliban militants, an Afghan official said Saturday.
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U.S. and Afghan soldiers conducting a sweep in southern Zabul province arrested 10 suspected Taliban after a firefight in a forbidding mountain area, the governor said Saturday.
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A top Taliban commander said Wednesday the group has 4,000 fighters bracing to rebuff NATO's largest-ever offensive in southern Afghanistan, now in its second day. Suicide bombers are ready, land mines have been planted and helicopters will be targeted, Mullah Abdul Qassim, a top Taliban commander in Helmand province told The Associated Press.
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MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Somalia's government has sent hundreds of troops backed by Ethiopian soldiers to recapture a strategic southern town seized by the country's powerful Islamic movement, military officials and witnesses said yesterday, as dozens of families began fleeing the area.
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Taliban militants have taken control of at least one district in southern Afghanistan and were fought back after briefly taking another, Afghan officials said.
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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - In an audacious display of force, Taliban fighters yesterday ambushed a convoy of military vehicles in a remote tribal area and took more than 100 Pakistani troops hostage, military and local officials said.
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Days after Taliban fighters overran Musa Qala a U.S. commander pledged that Western troops would take it back. Nine months later, the town is still Taliban territory, a symbol of the West's struggles to control the poppy-growing south.
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Hundreds of Islamic militiamen in heavily armed trucks headed Saturday to the strategic town of Kismayo in what appeared to be an imminent takeover attempt of one of the last seaports outside their control in Somalia, witnesses said.
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About 18,000 American troops have started a winter-long operation against Taliban rebels in Afghanistan, vowing to eliminate insurgents who could threaten parliamentary elections slated for the spring.
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NATO-led troops dropped leaflets on a southern Afghan town overrun by militants, warning the fighters to leave after their leader was killed in a targeted airstrike, officials said Monday.
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Taliban guerrillas have overrun a town where British troops pulled out after a peace deal with local tribal elders, witnesses said on Friday.
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In its largest offensive yet, thousands of NATO troops moved Tuesday into the mountains of southern Afghanistan where hundreds of hardcore Taliban insurgents hold sway &#151; an operation in the world's biggest opium-producing region aimed at winning over a population long supportive of militant fighters.
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LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan  - British-led forces launched a major operation in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, aiming to clear Taliban insurgents from a valley in Helmand -- the most violent province in the country.
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Pakistani forces launched an operation on Tuesday to clear militants from a mosque compound after talks to end a week-long standoff broke down, the military said.
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In the final hours of British General David Richards' command of NATO forces in Afghanistan, a much-vaunted and equally criticized truce with tribal elders fell apart as the Taliban overran a key southern town.
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A commander of Taliban guerrillas in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan was captured last week while trying to hide in a well and handed over to U.S. forces, the provincial governor said on Monday.
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MINGORA, Pakistan  - Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing a northwestern town and outlying villages because they fear a showdown between the security forces and an Islamist militant Taliban-style movement, residents said.