Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan — When 14-year-old Khorshid took to her skateboard, her face would light up with an enormous smile. For an Afghan girl whose short life had been filled with hardships, the swooping and whooshing and rocketing speed were an undreamed-of taste of freedom. Khorshid, together with her little sister and two teenage boys who were her friends from Kabul's first and only skateboarding school, were among the six Afghan civilians who died in a weekend suicide bombing in Kabul, the international nonprofit group Skateistan said Tuesday.

Insurgents took aim Sunday at the Afghan security forces, ambushing an army bus in the capital, Kabul, and storming an army recruitment center in the north of the country. At least 14 Afghan soldiers and police officers were killed in the two attacks, each carried out by squads of suicide bombers and gunmen. The Afghan police and army are considered key to the West's exit strategy, which calls for Afghan forces to take over security responsibilities across the country in the next three years.

The setting sun casts ribbons of orange, red and purple along the horizon, producing a brilliant backdrop for the Muslim calls to prayer echoing from Kabul's mosques. But when darkness falls over Afghanistan's battered capital, the streets fall prey to thieves, gunmen and packs of wild dogs, and fewer and fewer worshipers are attending the day's last prayers. The walk home after dark is just too dangerous, said Imam Abdul Aziz, an elderly prayer leader at the historic Blue Mosque.

In a stark demonstration of insurgents' growing strength on the doorstep of the capital, assailants Saturday assassinated the governor of Lowgar province. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack that killed Abdullah Wardak, a longtime foe of the austere fundamentalist Muslim movement that ruled Pakistan until late 2001 when it was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion. The killing of Wardak was highly symbolic -- not only as the settling of long-held grudges by Islamic militants, but as a brazen show of the insurgency's strength in an area barely half an hour's drive from the capital, Kabul.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell heralded the historic agreement Wednesday creating a new broad-based government for war-ravaged Afghanistan, but he warned that the naming of a new interim administration is only the beginning phase of a long process. Powell said the United States will set up a liaison office in Kabul in the next 10 days, ending a 12-year U.S. diplomatic absence in the Afghan capital and signaling that America believes a turning point has genuinely been reached.

Cue music. (Man with accordion assaults the ears.) Lights! (They flicker a bit, but the studio brightens.) Cameras! (The picture seems slightly unfocused, but it will do.) And ... finally: Live, from Afghanistan! It's Saturday night! (So what if it's only live in a sort-of kind-of way.) More than 700 people applaud wildly. Those who can whistle do.

With just over two weeks remaining before presidential elections in Afghanistan, insurgents rattled nerves Tuesday by lobbing rockets into the capital, injuring two people. A separate suicide attack killed five people in the south. The Taliban claimed responsibility for firing rockets into an upscale residential neighborhood of Kabul that is home to a number of diplomatic missions and international organizations. One of the projectiles hit about 200 yards from the U.S. Embassy.

Khalid Fazly arrived on U.S. soil last month carrying his mother's homemade cookies, a prayer rug, dried dates and thousands in $100 bills tucked into his trousers. He was pretty certain he was prepared for America. Except for a car trip to Pakistan, Fazly had never been outside Afghanistan. Now he almost certainly is the only freshman at Indiana's Ball State University who has been threatened with death by the Taliban, survived insurgent ambushes and braved roadside bombs. In Afghanistan, Fazly worked as a translator and "fixer," or problem-solver.

Insurgents took aim Sunday at Afghanistan's security forces, ambushing an army bus in the capital, Kabul, and storming an army recruitment center in the north of the country. At least eight Afghan soldiers and police were killed in the two attacks. The Afghan police and army are considered key to the West's exit strategy, which calls for the nation's forces to take over security responsibilities across the country in the next three years. That plan was endorsed at a NATO conference last month and again last week in a White House assessment of the Afghan conflict.

An Afghan passenger plane carrying at least 43 people was believed to have crashed in a snowstorm in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains Monday, and Western military forces were aiding in efforts to locate the wreckage and rescue any survivors. Those aboard the missing plane -- an old Russian model -- included at least five foreigners, according to provincial officials in the northern city of Kunduz, where the flight originated. The plane, an Antonov-24 turboprop operated by private Pamir airways, left at about 8:30 a.m. for the capital, Kabul, but disappeared amid the jagged peaks of the nearly 13,000-foot-high Salang Pass.