Marines battled a large force of Iraqi insurgents near the Syrian border yesterday in fighting that killed five Marines. At least 10 Iraqis, including the city police chief, were also killed, according to a hospital official.
Meanwhile, US forces waited outside Najaf yesterday with no sign of a breakthrough in efforts to avert a bloody confrontation with rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in an Iraqi city holy to the world's Shiite Muslims.
Fallujah, Iraq's other main flashpoint and a bastion for Sunni Muslim insurgents, was enjoying a second day of calm.
But five civilians were killed as they tried to escape overnight shelling by US forces in the nearby town of Karma, witnesses said.
The US military said an American soldier had been killed and two wounded when their patrol hit an anti-tank mine near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Friday.
On the Syrian border yesterday, fighting at the town of Husaybah appeared to be a new spillover of the intensified insurgent violence in the western towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
It began when insurgents ambushed Marines in the city on Saturday, sparking a 14-hour-battle with hundreds of gunmen. Fighting continued yesterday in three neighborhoods of the city, which was sealed off by US forces.
Five Marines were killed in the initial ambush and nine more were wounded throughout the fighting, an embedded journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Ten Iraqis were killed and 30 wounded -- a mixture of insurgent fighters and civilian bystanders, said Hamid al-Alousi, a doctor at the hospital in the nearby city of Qaim, 300km west of Baghdad.
Some were shot by Marine snipers as they left their homes to use their outdoor toilets behind their houses, the doctor told the Arab television station Al-Arabiyah.
Husaybah police director Imad al-Mahlawi was one of those killed by American snipers, according to a man who identified himself as al-Mahlawi's cousin, Adel Ezzeddin, Al-Arabiya reported.
Since March 31, at least 94 US soldiers have died in action in Iraq -- more than were killed during the three weeks last year between the invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam.
Tension remained high in Najaf, where 2,500 US troops are poised nearby with orders to kill or capture Sadr.
A spokesman for the fiery cleric said on Saturday that negotiations were at a dead end. A US spokesman denied any direct talks had taken place, although he said Iraq's US-led administration was keen to avoid bloodshed in Najaf.
Caught in the face-off between US troops and Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, Najaf residents complained their lives and livelihoods were at risk with shops closed and streets around the city's shrines crowded with gunmen instead of pilgrims.
Sadr's supporters say Iraq's top Shiite clerics back the uprising they staged this month against the US-led occupiers.
"We know that any assault from the Americans on the holy city of Najaf will be the zero hour for the revolution all over Iraq," said Sadr's spokesman, Qays al-Khazali. "The religious authority has a clear stand in providing us with moral support."
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS