British troops killed nine suspected insurgents as Taliban militants ambushed a Canadian convoy and wounded two soldiers in restive southern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday.
Meanwhile US forces hunting an al-Qaeda agent detained three men yesterday in the east.
The insurgents were killed when British troops targeted them with high explosive ammunition in Naw Zad district of the southern Helmand Province, said Major Toby Jackman, a spokesman for the NATO-led force.
The Canadian soldiers were wounded late Monday in the Panjwayi district of southern Kandahar Province, where 71 militants and five Afghan security forces were killed over the weekend.
The Canadians were wounded when insurgents ambushed their convoy in Panjwayi, said Major Quentin Innis. There were no reports of militant casualties.
Insurgents also ambushed a police patrol in Ghazni Province yesterday. wounding four officers including a district police chief, said Abdul Ali Fakuri, the provincial governor's spokesman.
In all, more than 100 people died -- including four US troops and one British soldier -- in several days of intense fighting centered on southern Afghanistan that threatened NATO efforts to stabilize the volatile region where holdouts from the toppled Taliban regime are escalating violent attacks.
But in a sign that the government has not closed off channels of communication with their foes, authorities in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar returned the bodies of 22 militants slain in Panjwayi to their families through tribal elders on Monday.
US soldiers detained three suspects during a pre-dawn raid on a compound in Khost Province's Paru Kheyl village "to capture a known al-Qaeda facilitator," the US military said in statement.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the