Middle East, Nato | featured news

A NATO helicopter crashed during an operation against the Taliban near the Afghan capital late Friday night, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said 31 U.S. troops and seven Afghan soldiers were killed.
A second coalition helicopter was forced to make a precautionary landing in another part of Afghanistan, local officials and a spokesman for the multinational forces said Saturday.

General David Petraeus, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, handed over command of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan on Monday, a day after a gradual process of transferring security to Afghan forces began.

Pakistan's parliament joins its intelligence chief in condemning the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden and threatens to prohibit NATO convoys into Afghanistan if Washington continues its drone strikes against militants.At a marathon closed-door session, Pakistan's parliament Saturday joined the country's intelligence chief in strongly condemning the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

A "rogue" Afghan border policeman shot dead two foreign soldiers on a training mission on Monday, and hundreds of people turned out on the streets for a fourth day of protests against the burning of a Koran by a fundamentalist U.S. pastor.

A NATO special operations team mistakenly killed a relative of President Hamid Karzai during a raid late Wednesday in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Thursday, the latest incident in recent days to trigger an angry reaction from the president.

The attack on the boys amounted to one of the worst cases of mistaken killings of children by foreign-led forces in the Afghanistan war.

NATO is ready to begin turning security over to Afghan forces next year, U.S. leaders said on Friday, as the first step in a plan to withdraw almost all foreign troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

The military handover from NATO-led forces to Afghans could run past an end-2014 target date in some areas because of lingering security problems, a senior NATO official in Afghanistan said on Wednesday.

Suspected militants in Pakistan attacked NATO tankers carrying fuel to Afghanistan on Friday, officials said.

There was no sign of enemy fire, but the incident was under investigation, according to a NATO statement.