The Taliban also employ a sophisticated network of spokesmen to distribute messages and even have their own mobile radio broadcast service, which frequently moves location to avoid the threat of retaliatory airstrikes by NATO warplanes.
Unknown hackers brought down the main Taliban website earlier this month, when El Emara's English language page was replaced temporarily with images of Taliban atrocities and photographs of roadside bombs, according to the Long War Journal website, which tracks progress in the war, now dragging into its eleventh year.
Another cyber attack took place on June 20 last year, when false messages were distributed about the death of the Taliban's one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, from both the website and the phones of Taliban spokesman.
Thursday's hacking attack came as a man wearing an Afghan security forces uniform shot and killed a U.S. soldier in the country's south, in the latest incident of so-called green-on-blue killings by local police and soldiers of Western mentors.
Three soldiers were killed by an improvised bomb in the east, where NATO recently launched one of the last large offensives of the war to try to clear insurgent strongholds near the Pakistan border and around Kabul.
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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