President Karzai has paid “blood money” to the families of nine children killed in a brutal night raid after Nato admitted that they were gunned down by mistake.

US-led forces had originally claimed that the victims were part of a terrorist cell making improvised explosive devices but an investigation by The Times found that Nato now believes the victims, aged 12-18, were killed in an operation based on faulty intelligence.

The President paid relatives Afs100,000 (£1,300) for each of the victims — eight students from one family, a 12-year-old shepherd boy who was the family’s guest and a farmer from a neighbouring compound.

Silence from the usual quarters.

This post: "£1,300: the value of an Afghan life: Pre…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

Reliable “pro-Israel” advocates cannot seem to grasp this, but almost all Western objections to this action have nothing to do with any sympathy for Mabhouh or his cause. Just as objections to drone strikes in Pakistan have nothing to do with sympathy for Al Qaeda or opposition to U.S. objectives in the region, Western protests over the manner in which Israel fights it enemies is almost always motivated by an interest in keeping Israel from making counterproductive blunders that empower its enemies and isolate it from those states that would otherwise be willing to support Israel. There is probably no better ally of genuine anti-Israel sentiment than the reflexive apologists for every mistake and crime the Israeli government commits. As the old proverb goes, “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.”

This post: "Larison talking about US drone strikes a…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

The UK use of drones to kill “high-value targets” in Afghanistan should have come as no surprise. British troops are fighting in some of the most dangerous and rugged parts of Afghanistan, and drones have great attractions. They are a relatively cheap way of killing people in areas that are otherwise largely inaccessible. The lives of British troops are not put at risk. Remote pilots carry out an apparently clinical operation, with none of the gore and messiness of military combat.

Nor is it surprising that the Ministry of Defence responds to the news with bland assurances that every effort is made to ensure that drones are used in compliance with the laws of war. There are “no reports” of civilian casualties, the ministry adds. If taken at face value, these are heartening assurances. But they also illustrate the heart of the problem: the use of killer drones is shrouded in secrecy, and the accountability mechanisms that apply to regular warfare are simply absent.

This post: "A killer above the law? The UK use of dr…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

This post: "“IDF ethics advisor on civilian casualt…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

This post: "it’s a valid point: withdrawal of troop…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

At least 87 refugees have been killed in an army air raid on a makeshift camp in north Yemen.

The camp at Adi in Harf Sufyan has been at the centre of fighting between government forces and Zaidi Shia fighters, which erupted in early August.

News Yemen, an independent website, aid on Thursday the raid hit the refugees while “they were sleeping under trees and plastic awnings.”

There’s talk of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, although one informed commentator says viewing this conflict in this way “does not help”.

(Side note: I was interested to discover Saudi had been at loggerheads with Oman and pre-UAE Abu Dhabi in the 1950s. Over oil, of course.)

This post: "Aerial bombardment is an indiscriminate …" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

An Afghan couple and their daughter have been killed and two other people wounded after a rocket hit a house in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Afghan officials said on Monday that a rocket had hit a house in the city’s Spin Kalay neighbourhood on Monday morning, killing a father, mother and young girl as they slept.

…and in Somalia:

Mortar shells slammed into Somalia’s capital, killing three civilians and at least 12 men at a home for disabled veterans, an official said Saturday. Nearly a dozen other former soldiers were wounded in the attack.

Islamic insurgents fired mortar shells Friday night toward Mogadishu’s port, but the explosives landed in residential areas, including a home for former army officers paralyzed or missing limbs from the country’s 1977 war with Ethiopia, according to a government spokesman, Sheik Abdirisaq Qeylow.

This post: "‘Islamic’ rules of warfare on show in …" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

This post: "Reports say up to 150 villagers, includi…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

I wonder which ‘international courts’ and ‘world forums’ these people can turn to?

This post: "~Sky News has a very distressing report …" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

At least 90 people including 40 civilians have been killed in northern Afghanistan after Nato launched an air strike on two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, Afghan officials said.

Militants seized the two trucks, which were delivering jet fuel to Nato forces, around midnight Afghan time. Nato launched the strike in Kunduz province as the Taliban fighters tried to drive the vehicles across a river, according to the local police chief, Gulam Mohyuddin.

The Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, announced an investigation, saying: “A number of Taliban were killed and there is also a possibility of civilian casualties.”

The provincial governor, Mohammad Omar, told Reuters the dead included villagers who had gathered to collect fuel from the tankers.

This post: "‘Protecting civilians’: At least 90 pe…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/