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KABUL, Afghanistan -- Four aid workers, including two women, who were abducted May 22 were freed early Saturday in a NATO rescue operation in northern Afghanistan, according to a NATO spokesman and a Swiss-based aid organization, Medair. Captured by insurgents while returning from a visit to a nutrition and hygiene project in the remote mountainous region of Badakhshan Province, the group included two Afghans who worked with the aid organization. The area is so remote that it can be reached only on horseback, and the four were riding back when they were abducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. A NATO spokesman apologized for the child's death, which took place early Saturday in western Nangahar Province in the Hesarek District, a remote poppy-growing area close to Kabul Province and Logar Province. There has been almost no NATO presence there throughout the war, and the area is thought to be heavily penetrated by the Taliban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A cousin of Afghanistan's president was killed Wednesday during a night raid by NATO and Afghan forces in which they detained the man's son as a suspected Taliban commander, as well as at least two of the family's bodyguards. The case brought the delicate issue of civilian casualties into the presidential palace and added to the already tense relationship between the Afghans and the Americans. It also raised questions about whether a member of the extended family of President Hamid Karzai might have Taliban ties, or whether bad intelligence led to a deadly raid on the home of an innocent family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A Taliban court had already scheduled the sentencing of a young Afghan aid worker named Attiqullah, when NATO forces raided the Taliban prison where he was being held in mid-August. ''Friday your trial will start, and it will be up to the judge what happens to you,'' Attiqullah, 22, recalled being told by his jailers, who were registering his name on a list of detainees to be tried. ''It is up to him if they sentence you to death or cut part of your body.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A Taliban leader in northern Afghanistan believed to have been involved in the kidnapping of a New York Times reporter as well as the intimidation of the local population was captured on Tuesday in Takhar Province. The Taliban commander, whom Maj. Sunset R. Belinsky, a NATO spokeswoman, declined to name, was known as a district leader in Chahar Darah, in Kunduz Province, which borders Takhar. The area has become increasingly unstable in the last several months with frequent reports of Taliban activities there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- After intensive negotiations with NATO military commanders, the Afghan government on Wednesday approved a program to establish local defense forces that American military officials hope will help remote areas of the country thwart attacks by Taliban insurgents. Details of the plan are sketchy, but Americans had been promoting the force as a crucial stopgap to combat rising violence here and frustration with the slow pace of training permanent professional security forces -- the bottom-line condition for the American military to begin pulling back from an increasingly unpopular war. Many parts of Afghanistan have no soldiers or police officers on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In a successful effort to win back a remote district from the Taliban, NATO helicopters dropped more than 200 Afghan commandos and a smaller number of American Special Operations troops into northeastern Afghanistan, NATO officers and Afghan officials close to the operation said Tuesday. A recent influx of insurgents, primarily Pakistani Taliban fighters, into the Barg-e-Matal District of Nuristan Province led to battles with Afghan forces during the past week and had raised fears that the insurgents were trying to establish a haven there after being forced out of Pakistan by Pakistani military operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taliban militants fired rockets on a bazaar northeast of Kabul on Monday, near the site of a meeting between French soldiers and local tribal leaders, and police officials said 10 Afghan civilians were killed and 28 wounded. NATO troops reported that 4 civilians had been killed and 40 wounded. No troops were reported wounded or killed in the attack. Soldiers helped to ferry the wounded to local hospitals and to a nearby NATO base for medical care, a spokesman said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BRUSSELS -- The United States is helping senior Taliban leaders attend initial peace talks with the Afghan government in Kabul because military officials and diplomats want to take advantage of any possibility of political reconciliation, Obama administration and NATO officials said Thursday. Even as senior American officials cautioned that they were not yet ready to formally join a nascent peace effort with their Taliban foes of the past nine years, they acknowledged that the reconciliation effort was an important element in the American-led war in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]