Taliban killed 10 aid workers including 6 Christians

From the Presidential Prayer Team newsletter:

Taliban fighters ambushed and killed a 10-member medical team, including six Americans, as they were returning from a trip to a remote northern area to provide eye care to rural villagers, their aid organization and local officials said Saturday.

The 10 charity workers, who also included two Afghans, a German and a Briton, were found slain in remote forested area of Badakhshan province, according to provincial police and their Kabul-based group, the International Assistance Mission.

The Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the deaths, claiming those killed were spies and preachers of Christianity.

The attack was one of the deadliest strikes against foreign aid workers in the course of the Afghan war. It also represented the largest toll in a single episode for American civilians working in Afghanistan since a suicide bomber killed seven members of a CIA team at a base in eastern Afghanistan in December.

The International Assistance Mission, which has been working in Afghanistan since 1966, describes itself as a charitable nonprofit Christian organization. One of its major projects is a chain of eye hospitals and clinics.

In a statement posted on its website, the group condemned "this senseless killing of people who have done nothing but serve the poor."

The charity's medical team was led by Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, N.Y., who had been with the organization since its early days, Frans said. The group's website says its expatriate workers are volunteers.
(Source: Los Angeles Times and CNN)      

Please Pray for:

• The families as they await confirmation and any further news.
  
  
• People grieving over the loss of their loved ones.
  
  
• For International Assistance Mission and all their volunteers.

Your Prayer Team

From the New York Tmes http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/world/asia/08afghan.html :

KABUL, Afghanistan — Their last meal was a picnic in the forest in the Sharrun Valley, high in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern Afghanistan, as they were on their long way home.

Tom Lapoint/Albany Times Union, via Associated Press; Bridge Afghanistan via Associated Press

The medical team included Karen Woo of Britain and Tom Little of the United States.

Omar Sobhani/Reuters

An Afghan man rides his bicycle past the International Assistance Mission (IAM) in Kabul.

The group — a medical aid team of six Americans, a Briton, a German and four Afghans — had just finished eating when they were accosted by gunmen with long red beards, the local police said.

The gunmen marched the aid workers into the forest, stood 10 of them in a straight line, 7 men and 3 women, and shot them. The police found their bodies on Friday, the Badakhshan Province police chief, Gen. Aqa Noor Kentoz, said Saturday.

The Taliban claimed responsibility, accusing the group of being spies and Christian missionaries.

The killings, the largest massacre of aid workers in Afghanistan in recent years, vividly demonstrated the increasing insecurity in the northern part of the country, well outside the Taliban’s b ase, and the Taliban claim added to fears that the insurgency has turned even more vicious recent months.

Pressured in their traditional areas in the south and east by NATO’s growing concentration of forces there, the insurgents have become more active in areas once relatively quiet, like Badakhshan Province. They have recently dropped taboos on using women and children as suicide bombers and on assassinating tribal elders. Now it appears they have also breached the longstanding custom of providing safe passage to aid workers, who have often been free to work in both government and insurgent-dominated areas.

Read the rest here