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.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
RSS