Taliban Beheadings Take Days To Report

Once again, the Taliban inflict horrors on the Afghan people, but it takes a week for the media outlets to get wind of the story? Yet, if a NATO airstrike hits anywhere in the country, the Taliban and their media lackeys are at the ready to announce that the US and NATO hit civilians.

Funny how that works.

The Taliban purposefully target civilians.

And behead them.

Taliban insurgents pulled some 50 passengers off a bus in southern Afghanistan and beheaded as many as 30 of them after accusing them of being soldiers traveling in civilian clothes, Afghan officials in the region announced on Sunday.

A police officer guards a highway in Kandahar on Sunday. An attack on a bus traveling on the main ring road between Kandahar and Herat killed dozens, according to officials.

The police chief of Kandahar province, where the attack occurred, said that of six bodies retrieved so far, all had been beheaded, mutilated and dumped. The police had received information that 24 others had been killed but had yet to find the bodies, the police chief, Matiullah Qati, said.

The attack occurred Thursday on the main ring road running from the city of Kandahar to the western town of Herat, Mr. Qati said. It took place in Maiwand District, which is known as an area infested with Taliban, and attacks on military convoys are frequent there. It is also the main road for British and Afghan Army troops traveling to Helmand Province, where the insurgency is the strongest in the country.

The attack follows a pattern of intimidation and brutality that Taliban insurgents have pursued, spreading terror in an attempt to undermine support for the Afghan government.

A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, confirmed that the group was responsible for the killings and said that 27 passengers were taken from a bus three days ago and killed after appearing before a Taliban court.

“We discovered solid proof and documents that they were with Afghan National Army, and also we had solid information that they were going to Lashkar Gah to help the army,” he said when contacted by telephone. He said the Taliban had called the men’s families to announce that they had been caught and would be slaughtered by cutting their throats.

The Taliban thugs couldn't care less who was on board that bus. They're trying to send a message of fear and intimidation that anyone who considers going against the Taliban will see a similar fate.

It's the same message that al Qaeda, the insurgents, and Islamists sought to bring in Iraq, but the Iraqis finally got fed up with being cannon fodder, and turned on their co-religionists and began systematically rolling up those cells. A similar process must be engaged in Afghanistan, although the situation in Afghanistan is fueled by the ability of the Taliban to melt across the border into Pakistan, where they have safe havens in the lawless border provinces.

During the attack on the bus, a second bus was also attacked, but did not stop. A baby and an adult were killed.