Iraqi officials plan to dig a series of trenches around Baghdad in the coming weeks to seal it off and control movement into and out of the city, the New York Times reported yesterday.
The Baghdad anti-terror trench is intended to curb attacks such as the two suicide car bombings yesterday morning that killed at least 11 people and wounded 20 more.
"We're going to build a trench around Baghdad" -- a distance measuring about 97km -- "so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly," Brigadier General Abdul Karim Khalaf told the Times on Friday in an interview.
PHOTO: AP
"The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up," the newspaper quoted him as saying.
US officials have approved of the plan, which has been in the works for weeks, the Times said. It calls for cars to be funneled through the checkpoints along the main arteries leading out from the capital, and for smaller roadways to be closed. The trenches themselves would run through farmland or other open land to prevent evasions of the checkpoints, the newspaper said.
The Washington Post, quoting a US military spokesman in Baghdad, said yesterday that checkpoints would be placed along key arteries in and out of Baghdad to ensure that people move through "predictable paths" that can be controlled.
Traffic patterns are being studied and if the plan's outer perimeter is effective some current checkpoints inside the city's borders could be closed to help traffic move along, the Times story said.
The Iraqi official said he did not know the expected cost of the ambitious project, which follows a US-backed security program that set up traffic checkpoints throughout the capital but failed to quell escalating sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.
last month, a new tactic involved moving troops into trouble zones and conducting block by block searches before leaving battalions behind to bolster local residents. That program is expanding into eastern neighborhoods, the Times said.
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