KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai promised on Wednesday to make changes to a new law for Shi'ite Muslims, if any part is found to violate the constitution, after provisions on women's rights caused an international uproar. Karzai said he had met the justice minister and the country's most senior religious leaders to discuss the law, which has already been passed by parliament and signed by Karzai but has not yet come into effect. The law is meant to legalise minority Shi'ite family law, which is different than that for the majority Sunni population.But it has provoked an outcry among Afghanistan's Western allies concerned about its potential impact on women's rights in the former Taliban state. U.S. President Barack Obama has called the law "abhorrent."
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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