Suspected militants attacked an ambulance in a Pakistani tribal region on the Afghan border on Thursday killing at least six people, including two paramilitary soldiers, a government official said. The ambulance was taking people to a health meeting when it was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday declared the birth of an Anglo-French axis as a force for progress in Europe and the world, on issues ranging from climate change and nuclear power to United Nations reform and the war in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s new prime minister was sworn in by President Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday as two senior United States envoys arrived for talks aimed at shoring up Islamabad’s role in the ”war on terror”.
Pakistan’s new prime minister triggered an immediate showdown with Pervez Musharraf on Monday, ordering the release of judges detained by the president just moments after being elected. Musharraf had ordered the judges held in November amid fears they might challenge his grip on power in the nuclear-armed nation.
Islamic militants in a Pakistani border town blew up 36 tankers supplying fuel for United States and Nato troops in neighbouring Afghanistan, wounding up to 100 people, officials said on Monday. The rebels late on Sunday destroyed the tankers that were parked in Landikotal, the main town of the troubled Khyber tribal district.
The road from Harar runs for more than 960km east towards the border with Somalia, penetrating deep into the desiccated badlands of the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia’s war-torn Somali regional state. This is the land that the self-styled separatists of the Ogaden National Liberation Front claim as their own.
The number of United States soldiers to die in Iraq has reached 4Â 000, the US military said on Monday, just days after the fifth anniversary of a war that President George Bush says the US is on track to win. The US military said in a statement four soldiers were killed late on Sunday by a roadside bomb.
Pakistan’s Parliament prepared on Monday to elect a new prime minister as the coalition government appeared set for a confrontation with key United States ally President Pervez Musharraf. Yousuf Raza Gilani, the candidate nominated by the party of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, is a virtual certainty to win.
Rebels in northern Mali are holding about 30 soldiers hostage following an attack last week, military officials said on Sunday. Ethnic Tuareg rebels raided a military convoy in the desert Kidal region last week, taking several dozen troops hostage, a military official said on condition of anonymity because he was not an authorised spokesperson.
A wave of attacks across Iraq on Sunday killed 51 people, while insurgents fired a barrage of mortars at Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, sending United States embassy staff scurrying into bunkers. The deadliest attack was in the city of Mosul where a suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden truck into an Iraqi army base.
A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi is mediating over two Austrians held by al-Qaeda in North Africa and is hopeful they will be freed soon, an Austrian politician was quoted as saying. Saif al-Islam, who heads the Gadaffi Foundation charity, has been in touch with the kidnappers, said Carinthia governor Joerg Haider.
Mehdi Army fighters attacked police patrols in southern Baghdad, police said on Friday, further fraying a seven-month-old ceasefire called by Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his militia. The clashes in Baghdad’s Shurta district, which started late on Thursday and continued into Friday morning, follow outbreaks of violence in the southern Iraqi city of Kut.
Osama bin Laden urged Palestinians on Thursday to use ”iron and fire” to end an Israeli blockade of Gaza, in a recording after the Vatican rejected accusations by the al-Qaeda chief of a ”new crusade”. In an audiotape broadcast by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite channel on Thursday, bin Laden urged Muslims to keep up the struggle against US forces in Iraq
An internet audio message from Osama bin Laden was released on Wednesday night in which the al-Qaeda leader threatened the European Union over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad two years ago, but did not address contemporary issues.
George Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion on Wednesday with an uncompromising speech in which he described the war as noble, necessary and just and claimed there was now an unprecedented Arab uprising under way against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
United States President George Bush said on Wednesday he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the ”high cost in lives and treasure” and declared that the US was on track for victory. With less than 11 months left in office and his approval ratings near the lows of his presidency, Bush is trying to shore up support for the Iraq campaign.
President George Bush will acknowledge on Wednesday the Iraq war has been fought at a high cost but will insist a United States troop build-up has opened the door to a ”major strategic victory” against Islamic militants. ”The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable,” Bush will say in an upbeat assessment.
Austria sought international help on Monday to free two nationals seized three weeks ago in Tunisia after the kidnappers, a group linked to al-Qaeda, extended their deadline for a proposed prisoner swap. Abductors from the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb are now demanding a ransom of €5-million.
Five years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, his memory lives on through wrist watches as people in his home town and birth village seek reminders of a time of safety, jobs and cheap living. In Saddam’s home town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, watches featuring an image of the former Iraqi leader on the dial sell like hot cakes to a mostly older crowd.
A suicide attack near a Shi’ite shrine killed at least 36 people on Monday in the central Iraqi city of Karbala, a health official said. The attack came as United States Vice-President Dick Cheney visited Baghdad on a surprise trip and met several US and Iraqi leaders to discuss the recent improvement in security across the country.
United States Vice-President Dick Cheney, an architect of the US-led invasion of Iraq, made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Monday to assess the success of a troop build-up five years after the war began. Cheney arrived as Republican candidate John McCain, who will be the Republican choice in November’s presidential election, was meeting Iraqi leaders.
The highest and oldest wall is that which separates ”us” from ”them”. This is described today as a great divide of religions or ”a clash of civilisations”, which are false concepts, propagated to provide ”the other” — a target for fear and hatred that justifies invasion and plunder, writes John Pilger.
Kidnappers of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop found dead in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul had demanded a -million ransom, a senior police official said on Friday. Paulos Faraj Rahho, the archbishop of Mosul, 390km north of Baghdad, was abducted on February 29 after gunmen attacked his car and killed his driver and two guards.
United Nations peacekeeping troops are heading for ”Iraq-style disaster” in Darfur as long as talks between the government and rebel groups remain stalled and the United States maintains its hostile stance, Sudanese officials and regional experts warned on Wednesday.
Iraqi security forces found about 100 badly decomposed bodies in a mass grave north of Baghdad, the United States military said on Saturday, one of the largest such finds in the country for months. US and Iraqi security forces said it was not clear who was responsible for the grave near Khalis, 80km north of Baghdad, or when the victims had been killed.
Iraqi police said on Friday 68 people were killed in coordinated bombings blamed on al-Qaeda in a packed shopping area in central Baghdad on Thursday. Another 120 were wounded when two bombs exploded within minutes of each other on Thursday in Baghdad’s mainly Shi’ite Karrada district, police said.
Hundreds of residents of a remote town in southern Somalia staged an anti-American demonstration on Tuesday after the United States launched an air strike against ”a known al-Qaeda terrorist” there. The town of Dobley was hit by two missiles on Monday in the fourth US strike in 14 months against Somalia.
At least 30 people were killed and up to 40 injured when a suicide bomber attacked a traditional tribal meeting in north-western Pakistan on Sunday, officials said. Pakistan is in the middle of a wave of violence blamed on al Qaeda-linked militants based in tribal lands on the Afghan border and there have been three suicide attacks in as many days.
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/ 29 February 2008
A suicide bomber killed at least 40 people at a funeral of a policeman in the Swat district of Pakistan, days after the Pakistan army said it had begun to bring the mountainous region under control. Another suicide bomber rammed his car into a vehicle carrying paramilitary forces in the north-western tribal region, killing one civilian and wounding 17 others.
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/ 28 February 2008
Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama faced off on Wednesday in a possible prelude to a United States presidential election battle, tangling over whether Iraq would be prey for al-Qaeda if US troops are withdrawn. McCain, who has linked his candidacy to a successful outcome in Iraq, attacked Obama’s stance on the war.
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/ 27 February 2008
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Wednesday that Danes will not be allowed to set foot in his country after Danish newspapers reprinted a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Protests and rioting erupted in 2006 in Muslim countries around the world when the cartoons first appeared in a Danish daily.
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/ 25 February 2008
Foreigners wander freely among the handsome stone and baked-brick houses of Sanaa’s Old City, but elsewhere in Yemen al-Qaeda attacks have damaged a fledgling tourism industry already hurt by tribal kidnappings. The government, which hopes tourism earnings can help offset flagging oil revenues, is struggling to shore up security by providing armed police escorts for travel to certain areas.