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AFGHANISTAN

France honours 7 troops killed in Afghanistan

President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday attended a remembrance ceremony for seven French soldiers killed in Afghanistan last week, including five who died in the deadliest attack on French forces since 2008.

Comrades carried the seven coffins draped with the French tricolour flag into the church under Les Invalides military hospital’s famous golden dome for a religious ceremony after they arrived in Paris on Monday evening.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon, MPs from across the political spectrum and the military top brass attended, with firemen turning out under driving rain and unseasonally cold weather to pay homage as the cortege drove past.

“You did not die for nothing. Because you sacrificed yourselves for a great cause. You defended our country’s most beautiful values,” Sarkozy said at Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried.

The soldiers were killed in three separate incidents over four days in Kapisa province, around 60 kilometres northeast of Kabul.

Five soldiers, aged 27 to 38, died along with an Afghan civilian in a suicide attack on July 13, the worst loss of life for French forces since August 2008, when 10 soldiers were killed in a Taliban ambush east of Kabul.

A French navy commando was killed by insurgents on July 14 during an operation alongside Afghan police in Kapisa, while another soldier lost his life in a friendly fire incident.

That brought to 70 the number of French soldiers who have died in Afghanistan since 2001, when they deployed to support the US-led campaign to overthrow the Taliban regime and hunt Al-Qaeda militants.

Around 4,000 French troops are serving in Afghanistan, most in Kapisa, and Sarkozy has said all will be withdrawn by 2014.

The deaths came during the week that France celebrated its national Bastille Day, notably with a military parade on July 14.

Even before the latest bloodshed, opinion polls showed that barely a quarter of voters backed France’s role in the conflict.

While Sarkozy insists that no French “combat units” will remain there after 2014, his likely rivals in next year’s presidential election are now urging him to speed up the withdrawal of French forces.

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AFGHANISTAN

Spain starts evacuating Afghan employees via Pakistan

Spain was on Monday evacuating via Pakistan Afghan helpers left behind when western forces quit Kabul, a government source confirmed on condition of anonymity.

A group of Afghan nationals stand on the tarmac after disembarking from the last Spanish evacuation flight at the Torrejon de Ardoz air base near Madrid in August. Photo: PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU / AFP)
A group of Afghan nationals stand on the tarmac after disembarking from the last Spanish evacuation flight at the Torrejon de Ardoz air base near Madrid in August. Photo: PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU / AFP)

The government source declined to give any details of the move, citing security concerns.

But Spanish media, including daily El País and National Radio, reported that Madrid would bring close to 250 Afghan citizens, who had already crossed into Pakistan and would be flown out on military transport planes.

The first flight was expected to arrive on Monday evening.

Spain’s evacuations have been weeks in the making, with Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares visiting Pakistan and Qatar in early September to lay the groundwork.

Madrid evacuated over 2,000 people, most of them Afghans who had worked for Spain and their families, during the western withdrawal as the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August.

But the flights had to stop once the final American troops that had been protecting the Afghan capital’s airport left.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in August that Spain would not “lose interest in the Afghans who had remained” in their country but wanted to leave.

The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, on Friday urged the bloc’s member states to host a “minimum” of between 10,000 and 20,000 more Afghan refugees.

“To welcome them, we have to evacuate them, and we’re getting down to it, but it’s not easy,” he said in Madrid.

The EU has said a demand by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to take in 42,500 Afghan refugees over five years can be achieved — although any decision lies with member states.

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