American troops have arrested a senior commander of the US-trained Iraqi National Guard for alleged ties to insurgents even as Egyptian diplomats yesterday pressed an influential Sunni cleric to help win the release of hostages seized in Iraq.
In Baghdad, a rocket slammed into a busy neighborhood, killing at least one person and wounding eight, hospital officials and witnesses said. Hours after the attack, another loud blast shook the area near the Green Zone, site of the US Embassy and the interim Iraqi government.
Smoke rose above the zone and alert sirens sounded. It was not clear if anything had been hit.
Lieutenant General Talib al-Lahibi, who previously served as an infantry officer in Saddam Hussein's army, was detained in the province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, said Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, a spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq.
Boylan said yesterday that authorities were trying to clear up confusion over what exact position al-Lahibi held within the Iraqi National Guard, or ING, the centerpiece of US efforts to build a strong Iraqi security force capable of taking over from American troops and restoring stability to the country.
Boylan declined to provide details on the general's suspected ties to militants waging a 17-month insurgency to topple the interim Iraqi authorities and oust coalition forces from the country.
Attempting to secure the release of six Egyptian telecommunications workers abducted last week, Egyptian diplomat Farouq Mabrouk met with Harith al-Dhari, a Sunni cleric who heads the Association of Muslim Clerics, an organization that has helped win the freedom of foreign captives.
Mabrouk refused to speak to reporters after the 30-minute meeting at Baghdad's Um al-Qura Mosque.
Gunmen abducted two of the Egyptians on Thursday in a bold raid on their firm's Baghdad office -- the latest in a string of kidnappings targeting engineers working on Iraq's infrastructure in a bid to undermine the US-allied interim government. Eight other company employees, four Egyptians and four Iraqis, were seized outside of Baghdad on Wednesday.
Four of the Egyptians worked for telecommunications giant Orascom Telecom, the parent company of the local firm, Iraqna. Two other Egyptians were employed by Motorola, an Orascom subcontractor.
More than 140 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq -- some by anti-US insurgents and others by criminals seeking ransoms. At least 26 of them have been killed, including two American civil engineers beheaded last week by the Tawhid and Jihad group headed by Jordanian terrorist Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi.
Two senior officials of the Muslim Council of Britain were in Baghdad to try to win the freedom of Kenneth Bigley, a British civil engineer kidnapped on Sept. 16 along with the two executed Americans, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley.
"We will do everything to contact them [the captors] while we are here," Daud Abdullah, assistant secretary-general of the British council, said after talks at the British Embassy on Saturday.
He conceded, however, that his delegation had not arranged any meetings with Iraqi religious or political leaders and did not know whether they would be able to reach the kidnappers.
"The message is simple, it's a humanitarian one ... he [Bigley] was a noncombatant; Islam does not endorse the capture of noncombatants, let alone the killing of them," Abdullah said.
A posting on an Islamic Internet site on Saturday claimed al-Zarqawi's followers had killed Bigley, but the Foreign Office in London said the claim was not credible.
As the British delegation arrived, US warplanes, tanks and artillery repeatedly hit at al-Zarqawi's terror network in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah west of Baghdad.
The strikes targeted two buildings where militants were allegedly meeting and a cluster of rebel-built fortifications used to mount attacks on nearby Marine positions, the US military said. Doctors said a total of 16 people were killed and 37 wounded in Saturday's attacks.
The buildings were wrecked as explosions lit the night sky before dawn on Saturday, witnesses said.
NETWORK-MAPPING PROJECT: The database contains 170 detailed files of Taiwanese politicians and about 23 million records of household registration data in Taiwan China has developed a network-mapping project targeting political figures and parties in Taiwan to monitor public opinion during elections and to craft tailored influence campaigns aimed at dividing Taiwanese society, according to documents leaked by Chinese technology firm GoLaxy (中科天璣). The documents, collected by Taipei-based Doublethink Lab, showed a database was specifically created to gather detailed information on Taiwanese political figures, including their political affiliations, job histories, birthplaces, residences, education, religion and a brief biography about them. Several notable Taiwanese politicians are in the database, including President William Lai (賴清德), former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍),
RECOGNITION: Former Fijian prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry said that Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy serves as a stabilizing force in the Indo-Pacific region Taiwan can lead the unification of the Chinese people, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Polish president Lech Walesa said in Taipei yesterday, adding that as the world order is changing, peaceful discussion would find good solutions, and that the use of force and coercion would always fail. Walesa made the remarks during his keynote address at a luncheon of the Yushan Forum in Taipei, titled “Indo-Pacific Partnership Prospects: Taiwan’s Values, Technology and Resilience,” organized by the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Walesa said that he had been at the forefront of a big peaceful revolution and “if
North Korea tested nuclear-capable rocket launchers, state media reported yesterday, a day after Seoul detected the launch of about 10 ballistic missiles. The test comes after South Korean and US forces launched their springtime military drills, due to run until Thursday. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Saturday oversaw the testing of the multiple rocket launcher system (MRLS), the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. The test involved 12 600mm-caliber ultra-precision multiple rocket launchers and two artillery companies, it said. Kim said the drill gave Pyongyang’s enemies, within the 420km striking range, a sense of “uneasiness” and “a deep understanding
North Korea yesterday fired about 10 ballistic missiles to the sea toward Japan, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said, days after Pyongyang warned of “terrible consequences” over ongoing South Korea-US military drills. Pyongyang recently dashed hopes of a diplomatic thaw with Seoul, Washington’s security ally, describing its latest peace efforts as a “clumsy, deceptive farce.” Seoul’s military detected “around 10 ballistic missiles launched from the Sunan area in North Korea toward the East Sea [Sea of Japan] at around 1:20pm,” JCS said in a statement, referring to South Korea’s name for the body of water. The missiles
RSS