February 08, 2007	Thursday	Muharram 19, 1428

JALALABAD, Feb 7: The Nangarhar provincial council went on strike for four days on Wednesday in protest against operations by foreign forces after allegations that soldiers killed a cleric.

The protest came as other provincial tribal elders meeting in Kabul complained that foreign soldiers were branding Afghan men with beards and turbans as Taliban or Al Qaeda rebels and treating them as ‘the enemy’.

The 19-member Nangarhar council presented a resolution to reporters criticising the provincial government as “weak and scared of foreign forces”.

“In protest against the continued house searches and arrests of mostly innocent people and disrespect to Afghan culture by foreign forces, we have stopped working for four days,” council deputy Maulvi Abdul Aziz said.

The move was in response to the arrest overnight of five people in Jalalabad in a raid in which a local cleric had been killed, he said.

He said the raid had been conducted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation deployment.

The International Security Assistance Force media centre said it did not have information that its forces were involved and the national police ministry could not immediately confirm the incident.

Mr Aziz said foreign soldiers conducted night-time searches of homes without accompanying Afghan security forces.

“We did inform the provincial government that such operations needed to be carried out with the coordination of the Afghan police or army, and during the day with Afghan forces, but this seems to fall on deaf ears,” he said.

In Kabul, tribal elders and religious leaders from five provinces along the border with Pakistan complained that foreign troops hunting militants were treating local men as if they were ‘enemies’.

“The international community and others (western military) mustn’t label those with beards and local customs ... as Al Qaeda,” a statement issued at the end of the two-day gathering of about 150 people said.

All Afghans should be free to practise their religion and local customs without fear of baseless accusations that they are enemies of the state labels which have been attached too loosely,” they said.—AFP