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AFP — Two US soldiers in Afghanistan died Thursday after separate insurgent attacks, NATO said, compounding the bloodiest year yet for American forces in the Afghan war. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said both had died following insurgent attacks, one in the country’s east, the other in the south.ISAF confirmed to AFP that both were Americans.A total of 326 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war in 2010, compared with 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. Read Article
Daily Times – Former British premier Tony Blair warned in an interview on Wednesday that the international community may have ‘no alternative’ to taking military action against Iran if it develops a nuclear weapon. “I am saying that I think it is wholly unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapons capability and I think we have got to be prepared to confront them, if necessary militarily,” he said in extracts pre-released by the BBC from an interview to publicise his memoirs. “I think there is no alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons. They need to get that message loud and clear.” Read Article
New York Times – Ismail Haji Noor, a local government official, recently arrived in this notorious pirate den with a simple message: we need your help. With the Shabab militant group sweeping across Somalia and the American-backed central government teetering on life support, Mr. Noor stood on a beach flanked by dozens of pirate gunmen, two hijacked ships over his shoulder, and announced, “From now on we’ll be working together.” He hugged several well-known pirate bosses and called them “brother” and later explained that while he saw the pirates as criminals and eventually wanted to rehabilitate them, right now the Shabab were a much graver threat. Read Article
Digital Journal – US Army officials expect an increase of unmanned aircraft flights in Iraq despite the government’s decision to withdraw some of its American combat troops. The US Army is predicting flight hours for drones will increase as the mission in Iraq changes due to a much-publicized troop withdrawal, even as President Barack Obama announced on Saturday that “the war is ending.” Read Article
The Independent – An apparent air strike by foreign forces killed six election campaign workers in Afghanistan’s north today, a government spokesman said, and NATO-led forces said hey were investigating the incident. Civilian casualties caused by foreign forces while hunting militants have been a major source of tension between President Hamid Karzai and Western nations. Violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001. Today’s attack happened in the Rostaq district of Takhar, a relatively peaceful province in the north near Tajikistan, said a spokesman for the provincial governor, unlike areas in the south and east where the resurgent Taliban are mostly active. Read Article
Reuters – Three bombs exploded at a Shi’ite procession in the Pakistani city of Lahore on Wednesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding over 170, piling pressure on a government already overwhelmed by floods. Read Article
Bloomberg – The American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. government over an alleged policy of killing American citizens who are suspected of terrorism. The lawsuit, filed today in federal court in Washington, argued that such targeted assassinations by the government are unconstitutional. “A program that authorizes killing U.S. citizens, without judicial oversight, due process or disclosed standards is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement announcing the filing of the case against U.S. President Barack Obama, the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Read Article
Reuters – Pakistani government air raids have killed up to 45 militants, their family members and other civilians with no ties to the fighters, officials said on Wednesday. Three strikes on Tuesday night targeted Pakistani Taliban militants in one of their strongholds in the Tirah Valley in the northwestern Khyber region on the Afghan border. Read Article
AFP — The number of US soldiers killed in the Afghan war in 2010 is the highest annual toll since the conflict began almost nine years ago, according to an AFP count Wednesday. A total of 323 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war this year, compared to 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. At 490, the overall death toll for foreign troops for the first eight months of the year is rapidly closing in the number registered in all of 2009, which at 521 was a record since the start of the war in late 2001. In all 1,270 American troops have lost their lives, out of 2,058 foreign military fatalities, since the conflict began with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Read Article
The Guardian – The British government has ordered an urgent inquiry into the disappearance of an injured Iraqi child who has not been seen since being placed in the care of UK military medics in 2003. In one of the most bewildering episodes of the Iraq occupation, Memmon Salam al-Maliki, an 11-year-old boy, disappeared within days of being taken to a British base after he was wounded while playing with unexploded munitions. Although his injuries appeared not to be life-threatening, his family have not seen him since. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – A series of bomb attacks have badly hit US troops in eastern and southern Afghanistan in the past 48 hours, contributing to the toll. Violence is predicted to rise towards the September 18 parliamentary elections and as American troops begin operations west of Kandahar after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Deaths among the Nato-led coalition have reached 485 this year and are predicted to surpass 2009’s total of 521. Read Article
Washington Post – The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the U.S. government’s authority to target and kill U.S. citizens outside of war zones when they are suspected of involvement in terrorism. The civil liberties groups sued in U.S. District Court in Washington after being retained by the father of Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical U.S.-born cleric who is in hiding in Yemen. The CIA placed Aulaqi on its list of suspected terrorists it is authorized to kill earlier this year; the cleric had been on a separate list of individuals targeted by the Joint Special Operations Command. Read Article
BBC – Four Israelis have been shot dead in the West Bank, Israeli police say. Their vehicle came under fire on a road between the settlement of Kiryat Arba and the Palestinian village of Bani Naim, near the city of Hebron. The military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, said it had carried out the “heroic operation”. Read Article
AP — Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-pyschotic called Seroquel. Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to make Seroquel one of the Veteran Affairs Department’s top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation. Several soldiers and veterans have died while taking the pills, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being up front about the drug’s risks. Read article
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Sydney Morning Herald – An Afghani woman whose schools for girls were forced “underground” during the height of the Taliban government has spoken of the positive signs emerging in her troubled country. Sakena Yacoobi founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in 1995, a non-governmental organisation that provides education, health and medical services. Dr Yacoobi says she believes “education is the key infrastructure that Afghanistan needs” although the security situation continues to get in the way of delivering it.
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Hindustan Times – After a lull, a spike in US strikes within Pakistani territory since mid-August has meant that the number of unmanned drone attacks carried out by the Americans in the first eight months of 2010 has exceeded that for the whole of 2009. It also makes this year the most lethal since the drone strikes commenced in 2004. The latest strike was in the tribal agency of Kurram that targeted the Tehrik-e-Taliban or the Pakistan Taliban. That took the total for 2010 to 54 exceeding last year’s 53, according to figures from the Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes within Pakistan. Read Article
Reuters – The U.S. military formally ends combat operations in Iraq on Tuesday as President Barack Obama seeks to fulfill a promise to end the war despite persistent instability and attacks that kill dozens at a time. U.S. troop numbers were cut to 50,000 in advance of the August 31 milestone in the 7-1/2-year-old war launched by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, whose stated aim was to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons was found. Read Article
Huffington Post – When federal investigators discovered that the manager of a Saudi Arabian company paid bribes to win two lucrative subcontracts supplying food to American troops in Iraq, they naturally wanted to know more. Did he act on his own? Had U.S. taxpayers been cheated? Five years later, investigators are still largely in the dark. They suspect similar activities by other subcontractors may have tainted contracts worth up to $300 million. But the investigators are unable to uncover even basic information, such as how the manager of the Saudi company had come up with $133,000 in bribe money. Read Article
BBC – A roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan has killed four US soldiers, Nato said. AFP quoted spokesman James Judge as saying that a home-made bomb, one of the main weapons of the Taliban, was used in the attack. The attack comes a day after seven US soldiers were killed in two bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan. Read Article
New York Times – In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers. In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word “majhoul,” or unknown: No. 5060 passed, with a bullet to the right temple; 5061, with a bruised and bloated face; 5062 bore a tattoo that read, “Mother, where is happiness?” The eyes of 5071 were open, as if remembering what had happened to him. Read Article
Press TV – The US Army leadership needs to establish a new suicide prevention office to curb the record number of self-inflicted deaths among troops, a new report says. Officials failed to recognize disturbing trends and are often too distracted by planning the next military mission, the findings of an independent task force report ordered by Congress said.
The report found that more than 1,100 members of the armed forces killed themselves from 2005 to 2009. Experts studying the effects of prolonged war on the human psyche say repeated tours without sufficient time between deployments may be part of the problem. Read article
Press TV – China has said that its navy is preparing to hold a military exercise in the Yellow Sea next week, condemning recent and planned US-South Korean joint drills. A naval fleet will stage the drill this week from Wednesday to Saturday in the sea between China and the Korean peninsula, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Chinese military as saying on Sunday. Read Article
Reuters – As U.S. combat operations come to a close on Tuesday 7-1/2 years after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis like Abboud, who fled mixed-sect neighborhoods at a time when bodies were piling up in the streets overnight, are living in squalor. Many Iraqis fear the reduction in U.S. troops and their full withdrawal next year will re-ignite sectarian bloodshed. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says the Iraq war produced the worst humanitarian crisis in the Middle East since 1948, when half the Arab population of Palestine fled their homes after the creation of Israel. According to the UNHCR, 1.5 million people are displaced inside Iraq, of which 500,000 are squatting in camps or public buildings. In Baghdad, 200,000 people live in 120 camps. There are also hundreds of thousands of Iraqis abroad, mainly in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Read Article
Press TV – Israel is reportedly preparing to strike arms depots and weapons manufacturing plants in Syria, claiming they belong to the Islamic resistance movement Hezbollah, a report says. Tel Aviv has escalated its military presence in the occupied Golan Heights and the northern part of the Shebaa Farms, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said, citing a report in the Saturday edition of the Kuwaiti daily Al Rai. Read Article
The Guardian – At least 19 people were killed today after Islamist rebels launched an audacious attack on the heavily defended residence of Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin president, Ramzan Kadyrov. Chechen officials said that 12 insurgents and two guards were killed after the rebels slipped into Tsentoroi, Kadyrov’s home village, also known as Khosi-Yurt, in the early hours of this morning . Russian TV reported that five civilians had also been killed in fierce fighting. Read Article
