Combined Afghan, Canadian and other troops backed by gunship helicopters killed or wounded about 100 Taliban in raids on a stronghold in southern Afghanistan, officials said yesterday
The operation, launched Saturday in Kandahar Province, also cost the lives of two Canadian troops and their interpreter, as well as an Afghan soldier.
The Canadian Defense Ministry confirmed the identity of the soldiers as Corporal Nicolas Raymond Beauchamp, 28, and Private Michel Levesque, 25, both from Quebec.
Three other Canadian soldiers were also injured when the team's light-armored vehicle struck an improvised explosive device about 40km west of Kandahar, the ministry said in a statement.
The three wounded soldiers were taken by helicopter to the Multinational Medical Unit at Kandahar Airfield for treatment.
Meanwhile, Kandahar police chief Sayed Agha Saqeb said "100 Taliban have been killed and wounded" over the weekend.
"Twenty-five Taliban have been buried in one location," he said.
Mostly Canadian NATO troops and Taliban insurgents have been engaged in fierce fighting in the Zherai district, west of Kandahar, for more than a year with each side seizing then losing the same ground several times.
NATO forces have called in airstrikes against insurgent positions and fighting was still going on, a Kandahar police official said.
Meanwhile, a car bomber rammed his vehicle into a convoy of foreign forces in the Girishk district of Helmand Province yesterday but no one was wounded, provincial police chief Hussain Andiwal said.
The target of the attack was a US Humvee, a spokesman for NATO forces said, and it was not clear if it was a suicide attack or not.
Elsewhere, two policemen and three insurgents were killed when the Taliban attacked a police patrol in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni Province, southwest of Kabul, the local intelligence chief, Mohammad Zamaan, said.
In related developments, the head of the British army has warned of serious overstretch and morale problems among troops in excerpts from a high-level report published by the Sunday Telegraph.
Sir Richard Dannatt said the present level of operations was "unsustainable," the British army is "undermanned" and troops are feeling "devalued, angry and suffering from Iraq fatigue," the newspaper said.
The report, which was drawn from months of interviews with thousands of soldiers, warned that increasing numbers of troops were "disillusioned" with service life and "the tank of goodwill now runs on vapor -- many experienced staff are talking of leaving."
"We must strive to give individuals and units ample recuperation time between operations, but I do not underestimate how difficult this will be to achieve whilst under-manned and with less robust establishments than I would like," Dannatt's report said.
In a separate article in the Sunday Telegraph, UK Defense Secretary Des Browne acknowledged that "we are now asking a lot of the services and their families ... Iraq and Afghanistan place huge demands on our personnel."
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of