Georgian Soldier killed as Trump says Afghan war lost

Afghanistan’s Taliban killed a Georgian soldier and injured three on Thursday night amid a nationwide offensive.

Two Afghan civilians were also killed when a suicide bomber disguised beneath a woman’s in a burqa rammed his motorcycle into a NATO convoy near the town of Qarabagh, north of Kabul.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia is not a NATO member but has some 900 troops in Afghanistan as part of the US-led occupation.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid took responsibility for the attack on Friday — claiming 11 US troops were killed.

Another Taliban suicide attack on a NATO convoy on Wednesday killed two US soldiers.

The top US commander in Afghanistan general John Nicholson said: "The commitment of Georgia as our largest non-NATO contributor is vital to our mission."

But on Thursday anonymous US government officials claimed Mr Trump repeatedly suggested Defence Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Joseph Dunford should sack Gen Nicholson at a heated meeting with top brass on July 19.

"I want to find out why we've been there for 17 years," he reportedly told the meeting in the White House Situation Room. "We aren't winning. We are losing."

Hawkish Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker urged Mr Trump to solider on in Afghanistan.

“If you don't listen to the generals... you're going to wind up losing Afghanistan like you did Iraq,” Mr Graham said.

Before his presidential bid Mr Trump was an outspoken critic of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But in April he gave Mr Mattis unprecedented autonomy over military operations abroad, including authority to order airstrikes or commando raids on suspected terrorists in countries such as Yemen without White House approval.

In June anonymous government officials said Mr Trump had given Mr Mattis the power to set troop levels in Afghanistan — which he planned to increase by thousands.

Yesterday the Taliban claimed they had captured an Afghan Army base and four checkpoints in the Mardyan district of northern Jowzjan province.

And in southern Helmand province they stormed a market in the Gareshk district and fired at a nearby police station — although no casualties were reported.

On Thursday a suicide car bomber hit a police outpost in Gareshk, killing two officers.

A Taliban attack early yesterday on a police outpost in Zabul province killed four officers. Three more were killed on Thursday in Kandahar province.

The mystery of the Guanches

The origins and language of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands remain a mystery, writes Dr Sabina Goralski Filonov Translation by James Tweedie The guanches, the aboriginals of the Canary Islands whose origin, lost in the mists of time, still arouses intense and passionate debate and great controversy about their origins and the how the seven Canary Islands were populated – which according to some studies occurred between 10,000 and 8,000 years BC. Literally, the word ‘Guan’ means man or person and ‘Chenech’ or ‘Chinet’ is applied to the island of Tenerife, thus meaning a man or inhabitant of Tenerife – although according to Núñez de la Peña, the Spanish named them the Guanchos during the conquest of the islands. But with the passage of time, experts in the subject are questioning whether the word Guanche was used to designate the primitive inhabitants of all the islands in the pre-Hispanic period. The term ‘Guanche’ has also ceased to be applied to the di...

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The Labour-Snatchers

WHAT do you call an event that would see a country lose a third of its population? A catastrophe? An apocalypse? In Europe they call it “Union.” According to the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the “free movement of labour” between European Union member states will see that fraction of some countries' populations emigrate in the next 40 years. A recent IIASA study, reported on Friday by the EU Observer website, says Romania and Croatia's populations will fall by 30 percent by 2060, and Lithuania's by 38 percent. By contrast, eight years of the West's proxy war on Syria, when much of the country was overrun by terrorists who behead followers of other religious sects, has seen between 12 and 23 percent of the population flee the country. The 1983-85 Ethiopian famine killed about 1.2 million people and drove another 400,000 out of the country, about five per cent of the population at the time. Another 41 years of EU...

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