Middle East, Taliban | featured news

The year's tally was 319, compared with 155 in 2008, due mostly to the crude but ever larger and deadlier roadside bombs built by the Taliban.

NATO and Afghan officials claimed on Monday their forces had killed at least 130 Taliban fighters in a major operation over the past week in an area of Afghanistan's north where militant activity has surged.

Afghanistan's insurgent Taliban mark the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion saying they will continue fighting as long as America and its allies remain in the troubled nation.

Pakistani soldiers killed at least 45 Taliban militants in scattered gunbattles across the northwestern Swat Valley after a suicide bombing on a police station killed 17 cadets, the army said Monday.

Two commanders of the Pakistani Taliban say the militants' top leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is dead. They say he died from wounds from a U.S. missile strike.

An Afghan vote monitoring group says Taliban militants in Afghanistan's south cut off the fingers of two Afghan voters, carrying out a gruesome pre-election threat.

Early indications point to a low initial turnout, as Taliban has pledged to disrupt today's balloting.

An Afghan militant group is willing to "help" U.S. and coalition forces, if they prepare to leave Afghanistan, the group's leader said in a statement given to CNN on Monday.

Two Pakistani intelligence and one army official said Wednesday that a U.S. missile strike in northeastern Pakistan had killed a wife of top Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Taliban militants fired at least nine rockets at the Afghan capital in a pre-dawn attack on Tuesday, police said, injuring a child and causing some damage in the biggest such attack in years.