US and Kurdish forces took Iraq's third city of Mosul without a fight yesterday, sealing their victory in the north, but gunbattles and looting continued in Baghdad in the absence of any government.
Kurdish guerrillas said they would hand over the important oil hub of Kirkuk to US troops later yesterday. The rich city, traditional capital of the Kurds, fell on Thursday to mixed units of Kurdish guerrillas and US special forces.
In Baghdad, Iraqi gunmen, apparently from the long oppressed Shiite majority in the east-side slums, battled Fedayeen paramilitaries loyal to deposed President Saddam Hussein overnight, US military sources said.
Elsewhere in the capital, there was a fresh outbreak of intense looting in an area newly abandoned by non-Iraqi Arab paramilitary fighters.
Hundreds of Iraqi civilians besieged the national headquarters of Iraq's military intelligence, searching for relatives they say had been detained there.
The chaos in Baghdad, the murder of a religious leader in the holy city of Najaf and a suicide bombing at a Baghdad checkpoint on Thursday highlighted the problems US troops face in restoring order despite a crushing military victory.
Humanitarian organizations criticized the US troops, saying the failure to prevent looting and anarchy threatened their efforts to provide desperately needed assistance.
Two days after US forces drove tanks into the heart of Baghdad, the whereabouts of Saddam and other former Iraqi leaders were still unknown.
US troops moved to take control of the strategic prize of Kirkuk and began by spreading through the oilfields near the city, which provide 40 percent of Iraq's oil revenue. Hundreds of dejected Iraqis were seen walking south.
The Kurds have promised to leave Kirkuk, helping to calm Turkish alarm after the Kurdish peshmerga militia took it over in a largely bloodless rout of Iraqi forces.
"Yes, we expect to be leaving when the Americans arrive, and that may well be later today," said Mam Rostam, a Kurdish commander whose forces had rushed into Kirkuk, apparently without the full agreement of Washington.
Ankara fears the Kurds could use the city's wealth to finance an independent state and stimulate separatist demands by Turkey's large Kurdish minority.
A Kurdish commander at a checkpoint just outside Mosul said fighters loyal to Saddam had fled. Journalists in Mosul said they saw no fighting but crowds went on a looting rampage, stripping buildings bare and torching a central market.
Events in the north left Saddam's home town of Tikrit, which is 175km north of Baghdad on the main road from Mosul, as the one significant target left to the US-led forces. Mosul is 390km north of the capital.
US forces pressed on with efforts to hunt down deposed Iraqi leaders.
A US aircraft hit the residence of Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence service, with six "smart bombs."
The results of the attack on the building, which was also an operations center for the intelligence service, were not yet known. There was no indication US forces thought Saddam might be in the house near Ramadi, 110km west of Baghdad.
In Najaf on Thursday, a mob stabbed and shot to death Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei and an aide in the gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque, the city's holiest shrine. The killings seemed certain to widen divisions and sow hatred among Shiites, who are 60 percent of the population.
A suicide bomber detonated explosives at a US checkpoint in the capital on Thursday evening. "Some are dead in the attack but I don't know how many," Marine officer Matt Baker said. A Pentagon spokesman said four soldiers were wounded.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) plans to make advanced 3-nanometer chips in Japan, stepping up its semiconductor manufacturing roadmap in the country in a triumph for Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s technology ambitions. TSMC is to adopt cutting-edge technology for its second wafer fab in Kumamoto, company chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said yesterday. That is an upgrade from an original blueprint to produce 7-nanometer chips by late next year, people familiar with the matter said. TSMC began mass production at its first plant in Japan’s Kumamoto in late 2024. Its second fab, which is still under construction, was originally focused on
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS