Sweden reaffirms its commitment to Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Sweden's foreign minister says his country will maintain its long-standing support for Afghanistan by keeping about 200 soldiers in the country after most foreign troops turn over combat responsibilities to Afghan forces next year.

Carl Bildt said in Kabul on Wednesday that Sweden's commitment remains and will be even stronger in the years ahead.

Bildt spoke during a news conference with Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin.

Repeating a pledge he has made before, Bildt says Swedish soldiers remaining in Afghanistan will support and train the country's security forces.

He says they probably will operate in northern provinces where Sweden's more than 400 soldiers currently are deployed.

But Bildt says he is still discussing with Afghan officials about what exact role the Swedish troops will play.

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Afghanistan helicopter crash kills 2 US troops

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A NATO helicopter crashed in a field in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing two American service members.

The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force said the cause of the crash is under investigation but initial reporting indicates there was no enemy activity in the area at the time.

It did not immediately identify the nationalities of those killed. But a senior U.S. official confirmed they were Americans. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information ahead of a formal announcement.

The deaths raised to nine the number of Americans, including three civilians, killed in Afghanistan so far this month.

A local official, Mir Baz Khan, said the helicopter crashed in an agricultural field in the Pachir Wagam district in Nangarhar province.

Shir Azam, a teacher who lives in a village near the site, said he heard a loud explosion, then saw the helicopter in flames as it plunged to the ground.

Then, he said, more helicopters came and American troops sealed off the site. He also said he heard nothing to indicate any shooting before the crash.

Americans and other foreign troops rely heavily on helicopters and other aircraft for transportation and to avoid roadside bombs and other dangers on the ground in the mountainous country.

The deaths raised to at least 25 the number of American troops killed this year, according to an Associated Press tally.

With three weeks to go, April has already proven to be the deadliest month this year for Afghans and foreigners serving in the country, an ominous sign as the annual fighting season gets underway with improved weather. Fighting usually abates during the country's harsh winter season.

A roadside bomb also killed three civilians and wounded three others as they were driving in Nawa district of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, according to provincial government spokesman Mohammad Omer Zawak.

At least 107 people have been killed — 62 Afghan civilians, 36 Afghan security forces, six U.S. service members and three American civilians, including Anne Smedinghoff, the first American diplomat to die on the job since last year's attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The violence comes as U.S. and other foreign combat troops increasingly hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces as they prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014.

The British Ministry of Defense said Tuesday that the last commando group of Royal Marines to serve in Afghanistan was returning home after more than a decade in the country.

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Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.

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UN condemns targeting of insurgents in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan officials released harrowing new details on Thursday about an attack in a western province where assailants shot everyone in their path, sending terrified people jumping from windows trying to escape the assailants who killed at least 46 civilians and security forces.

Civilians have frequently been caught up in the fighting between militants and Afghan and U.S.-led combat forces, but the U.N. condemned Wednesday's attack, saying civilians were deliberately targeted at the courthouse and other government offices in Farah province. Two judges, six prosecutors, administration officers and cleaners working at the site were among the dead, the U.N. said.

Also Thursday, NATO reported that an American F-16 fighter jet had crashed in eastern Afghanistan, killing the U.S. pilot. The U.S.-led military coalition did not release further details about Wednesday's crash.

"While the cause of the crash is under investigation, initial reporting indicates there was no insurgent activity in the area at the time of the crash," the coalition said in a statement.

Illustrating other dangers, an airstrike by U.S.-led forces mistakenly killed four policemen and two brothers as their car was being searched at a checkpoint in eastern Afghanistan, an Afghan official said Thursday.

The strike occurred in the Deh Yak district of Ghazni province, according to district chief Fazel Ahmad Toolwak. He said NATO troops were fighting Taliban militants about 10 kilometers (six miles) away, but those killed in the strike were not involved in that battle.

A NATO spokesman, U.S. Army Maj. Adam Wojack, said the international military coalition was looking into the report, adding it "takes all allegations of this type seriously."

According to a recent U.N. report, 2,754 Afghan civilians were killed last year — down 12 percent from 3,131 killed in 2011. But the number killed in the second half of last year rose, suggesting that Afghanistan is likely to face continued violence as the Taliban and other militants fight for control of the country as foreign forces continue their withdrawal.

The U.N. said the Taliban and other insurgents were responsible for 81 percent of the civilian deaths and injuries last year, while 8 percent were attributed to pro-government forces. The remaining civilian deaths and injuries could not be attributed to either side.

The number of casualties blamed on U.S. and allied forces decreased by 46 percent, with 316 killed and 271 wounded last year. Most were killed in U.S. and NATO airstrikes, although that number, too, dropped by nearly half last year to 126, including 51 children.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Farah, the capital of the province of the same name near the border with Iran.

The hospital in Farah was so overwhelmed with casualties that helicopters had to ferry some of the wounded to other hospitals in nearby areas.

Provincial Gov. Akram Akhpelwak said two more people had died from the attack, raising the death toll to 55 — 36 civilians, 10 Afghan security forces and nine attackers. More than 100 people also were wounded, he said.

One of the province's members of parliament, Humaira Ayobi, said one elderly man was found hiding in a bathroom, afraid to come out.

"Farah is a city of sadness," she said in a telephone call after attending a funeral for some of the victims. "The stores are closed. There's no traffic in the streets."

The attack began when two suicide bombers detonated an explosives-laden vehicle near the courthouse, shattering windows and devastating several buildings. Seven others jumped out of the pickup and ran toward the courthouse and attorney general's office, prompting an eight-hour gunbattle that left many buildings pockmarked from bullets and rocket-propelled grenades.

Ayobi said the attackers went from room to room shooting people, including nearly two dozen people who had taken refuge in a basement. She also said two judges were singled out to be killed in a separate room, and that their bodies were burned.

The attackers were wearing military-style uniforms easily bought in Afghan markets and had painted a pickup in camouflage to disguise it as an Afghan National Army vehicle so it could bypass checkpoints, she said.

An Associated Press photo shows a group of soldiers standing over the body of one of the slain attackers who was lying in a pool of blood and wearing a uniform nearly identical to theirs.

Local officials said Wednesday that they believed the attackers were trying to free 15 Taliban prisoners who were about to stand trial. But Ayobi said the initial target might have been the governor's compound until heavy security there forced the attackers to redirect themselves to the courthouse.

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Follow Kim Gamel on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kimgamel

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NATO: F-16 crashes in Afghanistan, killing pilot

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO says an American F-16 fighter jet has crashed in eastern Afghanistan, killing the U.S. pilot.

NATO said in a statement Thursday that the cause of Wednesday's crash is still being investigated, but initial reporting indicates that there was "no insurgent activity in the area" when the plane went down.

The U.S.-led military coalition did not disclose where the plane crashed.

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Kerry in Afghanistan to prod Karzai on future ties

KABUL (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry embarked on talks Monday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai amid concerns Karzai may be jeopardizing progress in the war against extremism with his anti-American rhetoric. The session came shortly after the U.S. military ceded control of its last detention facility in Afghanistan, ending a longstanding irritant in relations.

During Kerry's 24-hour visit to the country — his sixth since President Barack Obama became president but his first as Obama's secretary of State — Kerry planned to meet with Karzai, civic leaders and others to discuss continued U.S. assistance to the country and how to wean it from such aid as the international military operation winds down, and upcoming national elections.

Karzai has infuriated U.S. officials by accusing Washington of colluding with Taliban insurgents to keep Afghanistan weak even as the Obama administration presses ahead with plans to hand off security responsibility to Afghan forces and end NATO's combat mission by the end of next year.

U.S. officials accompanying Kerry said he did not plan to lecture Karzai or dwell on the apparent animosity but would make clear once again that the U.S. did not take such allegations lightly, They said he would press Karzai on the need for May's elections to meet international standards and continue to stress the importance of Afghan reconciliation and U.S. support for a Taliban office in Qatar where talks could occur.

Karzai is expected to travel to Qatar within the week and some movement on the opening of an office is likely then.

Kerry, who arrived in Kabul from Amman, Jordan, had hoped also to travel to Pakistan on his trip to the region but put it off due to elections there. Instead, he met late Sunday in Amman with Pakistani army chief for Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, officials said.

The pair had a private dinner at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Jordan as Pakistan continued to seethe in the aftermath of the return from exile to the country of former president Pervez Musharraf, himself a former army chief.

Earlier Monday, the U.S. military ceded control of the Parwan last detention facility near the U.S.-run Bagram military base north of Kabul, a year after the two sides initially agreed on the transfer. Karzai demanded control of Parwan as a matter of national sovereignty.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph Dunford, handed over Parwan at a ceremony there after signing an agreement with Afghan Defense Minister Bismullah Khan Mohammadi. "This ceremony highlights an increasingly confident, capable and sovereign Afghanistan," Dunford said.

The dispute over the center threw a pall over the ongoing negotiations for a bilateral security agreement that would govern the presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014.

An initial agreement to hand over Parwan was signed a year ago, but efforts to follow through on it constantly stumbled over American concerns that the Afghan government would release prisoners that it considered dangerous.

A key hurdle was a ruling by an Afghan judicial panel holding that administrative detention, the practice of holding someone without formal charges, violated the country's laws. The U.S. argued that international law allowed administrative detentions and also argued that it could not risk the passage of some high-value detainees to the notoriously corrupt Afghan court system.

An initial deadline for the full handover passed last September and another earlier this month.

The detention center houses about 3,000 prisoners and the majority are already under Afghan control. The United States had not handed over about 100, and some of those under American authority do not have the right to a trial because the U.S. considers them part of an ongoing conflict.

There are also about three dozen non-Afghan detainees, including Pakistanis and other nationals that will remain in American hands. The exact number and nationality of those detainees has never been made public.

A new agreement, or memorandum of understanding, was signed at the ceremony by Dunford and Khan, but the U.S. military said it will not be made public. The agreement supplants one signed last March, which had been made public.

The U.S. military said in a statement that the new agreement "affirms their mutual commitment to the lawful and humane treatment of detainees and their intention to protect the people of Afghanistan and coalition forces," an apparent reference to the release of detainees deemed to be dangerous.

There are about 100,000 coalition troops in Afghanistan, including about 66,000 from the United States. American officials have made no final decision on how many troops might remain in Afghanistan after 2014, although they have said as many as many as 12,000 U.S. and coalition forces could remain.

The U.S. started to hold detainees at Bagram Air Field in early 2002. For several years, prisoners were kept at a former Soviet aircraft machine plant converted into a lockup.

In 2009, the U.S. opened a new detention facility next door. The number of detainees incarcerated at that prison, renamed the Parwan Detention Facility, went from about 1,100 in September 2010 to more than 3,000.

After Monday's handover, it was renamed the Afghan National Detention Facility at Parwan and the U.S. military said it would provide the Afghan army with advisers and $39 million in funding.

The United States has spent about a quarter of a billion dollars to build the Bagram facility along with Kabul's main prison located in the capital.

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Patrick Quinn in Kabul and Rahim Faiez in Bagram, Afghanistan contributed to this report.

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Australia to withdraw most troops from Afghanistan by year-end

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia will withdraw most troops from Afghanistan's south at the end of this year and shut down a major base for NATO-led forces, handing security to Afghan soldiers and police, Defense Minister Stephen Smith said on Tuesday.

Western and Afghan commanders, Smith said, had agreed that the major multinational coalition base at Tarin Kowt and its NATO airbase in Uruzgan province would close at the end of 2013.

Most foreign combat troops are due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 under a planned security transition from foreign forces to Afghans.

"It is a necessary and logical and natural consequence of transition being effective," Smith said.

"The effect of that closure will be that Australia will no longer have a permanent presence in Uruzgan province, and the majority of Australian defense force personnel will return."

Australia has around 1,650 troops in Afghanistan, including special forces, based mainly in volatile Uruzgan, and was an original member of the U.S.-led coalition that helped oust the former Taliban government in late 2001.

It has lost 39 troops in the war, with 242 wounded.

The United States and NATO allies are racing against the clock to train a 350,000-strong force of Afghan soldiers to meet the 2014 deadline, although there is widespread skepticism that target can be met.

"A lot of people are worried about the military side and how are we going to get to 2014," Washington-based Australian counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television.

"How are we going to hand over to the Afghans effectively and prevent the Taliban coming back?" he said on the ABC's "Four Corners" program late on Monday.

Australia had not yet decided whether special forces troops would remain in Afghanistan next year or after 2014, Smith said, with negotiations still underway with the Afghan government.

(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Paul Tait)

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Bombing hits sports event in Afghanistan, 7 killed

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of Afghans watching the traditional sport of buzkashi on Wednesday, killing seven people in the north of the country, officials said.

Among the seven killed in the bombing in the remote village of Basos were several family members of the Afghan speaker of parliament, said regional police spokesman Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai. Another eight people were wounded.

The parliament speaker, Abdul Raouf Ibrahimi, was born in Basos. Ahmadzai said the dead include his father, two brothers and one nephew.

The bomber hit around 6 p.m. local time, just as fans were gathering around the players as they came off the field at the end of the match, said Kunduz province police spokesman Sayed Sarwar Hussaini.

Buzkashi is akin to polo, but players on horseback use a headless goat carcass instead of a ball.

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5 US troops die in helicopter crash in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A helicopter crash in southern Afghanistan has killed five American service members, officials said Tuesday.

Monday night's crash brought the total number of U.S. troops killed that day to seven, making it the deadliest day for U.S. forces so far this year. Two U.S. special operations forces were gunned down hours earlier in an insider attack by an Afghan policeman in eastern Afghanistan.

The NATO military coalition said in a statement that initial reports showed no enemy activity in the area at the time. The cause of the crash is under investigation, the statement said.

A U.S. official said all five of the dead were American. The official said the helicopter went down outside Kandahar city. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been formally released.

All five people aboard the UH-60 Black Hawk were killed, said Maj. Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the international military coalition.

At the same time as the crash was being reported, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was berating the Taliban for giving the U.S. a reason to stay longer in the country, by staging the deadly weekend attacks that killed at least 19 Afghans, including eight children.

"Do you think you really show America you are strong? No. This is not showing power, this just serves the Americans," Karzai was quoted in the statement released by his press office Tuesday. The Taliban claimed responsibility only for targeting the Defense Ministry in Kabul, not the second attack in the south where the children were killed, but Karzai blamed them for both.

"What the president means is that the attacks, by creating continued instability, give the international community a reason to keep foreign troops here," said presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi, reached late Tuesday.

This was a softening from Karzai's comments Sunday, when he accused the U.S. and the Taliban of cooperating to stage Saturday's deadly suicide attacks to scare Afghans into allowing foreign troops to stay in the country.

Top U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. Joseph Dunford rejected his charges of U.S. collusion with the Taliban as "categorically false," and U.S. ambassador James Cunningham said Monday, "It is inconceivable that we would spend the lives of America's sons, daughters...in helping Afghans to secure and rebuild your country, and at the same time be engaged in endangering Afghanistan or its citizens."

The troops killed in Monday's helicopter crash make 12 U.S. troops killed so far this year in Afghanistan. There were 297 U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan in 2012, according to an Associated Press tally.

It was the deadliest crash since August, when a U.S. military helicopter went down during a firefight with insurgents in a remote area of Kandahar. Seven Americans and four Afghans died in that crash.

In March 2012, a helicopter crashed near the Afghan capital, Kabul, killing 12 Turkish soldiers on board and four Afghan civilians on the ground, officials said. And in August 2011, insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter, killing 30 American troops, mostly elite Navy SEALs, in Wardak province in central Afghanistan.

Also Tuesday, a statement from the Interior Ministry said insurgent attacks killed six Afghan civilians.

Four died when the tractor they were on struck a roadside bomb in the southern province of Helmand on Monday. Then on Tuesday, two women were killed when a mortar fired by insurgents hit their house in the same province.

More details emerged Tuesday about the insider attack in Wardak the day before. Afghan officials also raised the number of Afghans security forces killed in the attack to four, from two reported previously.

According to a spokesman for the Wardak governor, Afghan and U.S. forces had just finished a meeting in the district police headquarters and were heading to their vehicles in the compound's courtyard when the attack took place. As they came out of the building, a policeman jumped onto the back of a parked police truck, grabbed the mounted heavy machine gun, turned it toward the group and opened fire, said spokesman Attaullah Khogyani.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said two soldiers were killed, in addition to the two police officers Khogyani had reported killed on the day of the attack. The attacker was also killed.

U.S. officials said Monday that in addition to the two special forces soldiers killed, 10 American soldiers — both special operators and regular military — were wounded in the attack. Three of their Afghan translators were also wounded, according to Khogyani.

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Associated Press writer Heidi Vogt contributed.

Dozier can be followed on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier and Vogt at http://twitter.com/HeidiVogt .

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Insurgents launch 4 attacks in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A series of early morning attacks hit eastern Afghanistan Sunday, with three separate suicide bombings in outlying provinces and a shootout between security forces and a would-be attacker in the capital city of Kabul.

The deadliest attack was a suicide car bombing at a state intelligence site just after sunrise in the eastern city of Jalalabad. In that attack, a car approached the gate of a compound used by the National Directorate of Security and exploded, killing two guards and wounding three others, said regional government spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai. The building was damaged in the attack, he added.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Shortly before the Jalalabad attack, an assailant detonated a van packed with explosives at a highway police checkpoint in Logar province, also in the east. That explosion wounded three police officers but no one was killed, said Deputy Police Chief Rais Khan Abdul Rahimzai.

In Kabul, meanwhile, police shot and killed a would-be suicide bomber who was trying to attack an intelligence agency office downtown, according to the city's deputy police chief, Gen. Mohammad Daud Amin. Intelligence agents spotted the bomber before he could detonate the explosives in his vehicle and shot him, Amin said.

The explosives in the vehicle were later defused, he added.

Later in the morning, a man wearing a suicide vest blew himself up outside the police headquarters for Baraki Barak district in Logar province. The man was stopped by police as he tried to force his way into the building, but still managed to detonate his vest, said Din Mohammad Darwesh, the provincial government spokesman.

One policeman was wounded in the Baraki Barak attack, Darwesh said.

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