Dozens of anti-American insurgents stormed Iraqi security compounds in the volatile town of Falluja yesterday in a bold attack that left at least 22 people dead and freed a number of prisoners.
Falluja police chief Aboud al-Dulaimi said about 70 guerrillas firing rockets, mortars and machineguns launched the closely coordinated attack on a police headquarters as well as on a compound for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) and the mayor's office.
Police and hospital officials said 14 policemen, four insurgents and four civilians were killed in the attack, the latest in a series of assaults on Iraqi security forces seen by the insurgents as supporting the US occupation.
At least 35 others were wounded in the attack.
An Iraqi police officer said the guerrillas outgunned the policemen at the station. A government building several hundred meters away was assaulted at the same time.
"Unknown men fired mortars, explosives and light machineguns from four directions.
Their weapons were more powerful than our Kalashnikovs," said police officer Earazan Abu Issa, who was outside the police station when it was attacked.
The attack signalled a growing boldness on the part of insurgents fighting US-led forces and Iraqis they regard as supporting the occupiers.
On Thursday, the top US commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, narrowly escaped an assault on his convoy at the attacked ICDC compound in Falluja, located some 50km west of Baghdad in what is known as the "Sunni Triangle" center of resistance to US forces.
US planes circled overhead and dropped heat balloons to divert heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles, witnesses said.
Guerrillas have killed more than 600 security and police forces since April in an attempt to undermine US efforts to prepare Iraqis to take over security of the country.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS