Afghanistan timeline

Table of contents
1 December 31, 2001
2 December 30, 2001
3 December 29, 2001
4 December 26, 2001
5 December 24, 2001
6 December 22, 2001
7 December 20, 2001
8 December 17, 2001
9 December 10, 2001
10 December 5, 2001

December 31, 2001

  • U.S. President George W. Bush named Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, a top-ranking Muslim in the U.S. government, as a special envoy to help Afghanistan recover from Taliban rule.
  • Pashtun soldiers, once loyal to the Taliban, attacked 20 Uzbek troops walking toward Yol Abad, Afghanistan. The gun battle lasted 20 minutes. A soldier from each side died.
  • Seventy British troops arrived in Kabul, as Afghan Interior Minister Yunus Qanooni and British Major General John McColl, who is to lead the international force, signed an agreement setting up an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
  • In a US air-raid on a suspected arms dump, US bombs killed 107 civilians at a village near the town of Gardez. Witnesses found pools of blood, scraps of flesh and clumps of human hair among the destroyed houses. The U.S. military rejected the accusation.
  • A US military spokesman said that the US was holding 180 prisoners from al-Qaeda or the Taliban; 164 are being held in Kandahar.

December 30, 2001

  • An unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk surveilance drone crashed while returning from a mission supporting the war in Afghanistan. The aircraft was not shot down and plans were made to recover the wreckage.
  • In the early hours, Qalaye Niazi was bombed by at least one U.S jet, one B-52 bomber and two helicopters obliterating the village. The United Nations said the dead included 17 men, 10 women and 25 children, and quoted a reliable local source for the information that 52 people had been killed.

December 29, 2001

  • At least 92 Afghan civilians were killed in the US bombing of Nizai Qala in Paktia province overnight.

December 26, 2001

December 24, 2001

December 22, 2001

December 20, 2001

December 17, 2001

December 10, 2001

December 5, 2001

  • Three U.S soldiers and six Afghans were killed and 19 Americans were wounded in a friendly fire air strike when an Air Force B-52 dropped a 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb near their position north of Kandahar.
  • The Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions was signed by representatives of anti-Taliban forces and several other Afghan political parties and groups in Bonn, Germany.