The US military launched a major combat operation yesterday with 1,000 Marines and Iraqi soldiers in the hunt for insurgents and foreign fighters in a volatile western province straddling Syria.
Operation Spear started in the pre-dawn hours in Anbar province to hunt for insurgents and foreign fighters, the military said. The area, which straddles the Syrian border, is where US forces said it killed about 40 militants in airstrikes in Karabilah on June 11.
Syria is under intense pressure from Washington and Baghdad to tighten control of its porous 611km border with Iraq. The Marines have lost 11 men and two sailors over the past week in separate incidents around Anbar.
Elsewhere, a suicide car bomber rammed into an Iraqi army convoy in northern Iraq early yesterday, injuring at least seven people -- three soldiers, three civilians and one policeman, police Brigadier General Sarhat Qadir said. The blast came on the heels of a suicide car bomb on Baghdad's airport road Thursday that killed at least eight police officers and wounded 25 more.
On June 11, the Marines had engaged the insurgents after the militants took control of a road just outside Karabilah near the Iraqi-Syrian frontier city of Qaim, about 320km west of Baghdad.
The battle was also where insurgents had killed 21 people after beheading three of them. Those bodies, found on June 10, were believed to belong to a group of missing Iraqi soldiers.
During the airstrikes, Marine aircraft fired seven precision-guided missiles at insurgents armed with AK-47 assault rifles, medium machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. No US troops or civilians were injured.
Alston's focus on al-Zarqawi, whose small group is blamed for many of the bloodiest attacks and hostage takings in Iraq, apparently was aimed at reinforcing growing dissatisfaction among Iraqis over insurgents targeting civilians. He said that anger has brought an increase in calls to tip lines.
He said tips to Iraqi authorities resulted in Tuesday's arrest of Mohammed Khalaf, also known as Abu Talha, who was al-Qaeda's leader in Mosul.
Separately, US Staff Sergeant Alberto Martinez, of Troy, New York, was charged with murder Wednesday in the deaths last week of two Army officers at a base north of Baghdad, the military said.
The military initially attributed the June 7 killings of the officers -- Captain Phillip Esposito and First Lieutenant Louis Allen -- to an insurgent mortar attack near Tikrit but said further investigation showed the blast pattern was inconsistent with such an attack.
Martinez, 37, a supply specialist with a New York-based National Guard unit, is facing two counts of premeditated murder.
He was being held at a military jail in Kuwait and has been assigned a military attorney and has the option of hiring a civilian lawyer, the statement said.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
RSS