Archive for May, 2009

KABUL, May 31 (Reuters) – The majority of the 17,000 extra U.S. troops being sent to fight a growing Taliban-led insurgency in southern and western Afghanistan should be on the ground by mid-July, the U.S. military said on Sunday. A further 4,000 troops are arriving to train Afghan security forces and they will be deployed by August. Washington pledged to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to reinforce security ahead of presidential elections scheduled for Aug. 20 and to support NATO-led troops which have struggled to fight an escalating insurgency there. “10,000 Marines are beginning to arrive now and will continue to arrive for the next month and a half or so and they will be principally located in Helmand but also in Farah,” said Colonel Greg Julian, spokesman for U.S. forces. Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan and Farah in the west are among the areas that have seen the fiercest fighting as insurgents gathered strength in recent years, despite the presence of a growing number of foreign troops.

“Everyday we are faced with suicide bombers, an increased number of improvised explosive devices,” said General Zaher Azimy, spokesman for the Ministry of Defence. “If the violence wasn’t increasing there would be no need for the presence of foreign forces and Afghan forces themselves could handle this issue.” Some 7,000 U.S. army troops are also being deployed to southern Kandahar province. “3,500 are already on the ground in Kandahar with additional helicopters. Following that an additional 3,500 army troops will arrive in Kandahar and will be located in rural areas of that province,” Julian told a news conference. All 21,000 troops will be deployed by August, another U.S. military spokesman said, but declined to comment further. The 4,000 training troops will be sent mainly to south and west Afghanistan and more than half will train and mentor Afghan police, who are a younger force than the Afghan army and have suffered from poor training, illiteracy and corruption. The Afghan National Army (ANA) has also expanded its forces to 90,0000 troops from about 83,000, and will boost numbers further for the August poll, Azimy said.

“Currently we have 90,000 ANA forces and we expect to increase this number during the elections to 95,000 forces as well as the additional forces of the Afghan National Police and the international forces,” he told journalists. The Afghan army, described by U.S. military officials as a success story, now leads more than twice as many military operations per week in Afghanistan, compared with this time last year, a spokesman for NATO-led forces said.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — An Iranian airliner was forced to return to a southern airport minutes after takeoff when a homemade bomb was found aboard, said state television, in an incident a security official called a “sabotage operation.” The report said the bomb was found in a toilet, but gave no other details on the device. The incident took place late Saturday night. As Iran prepares for its June 12 presidential election, there have been a number of violent incidents. A bombing Thursday at a mosque in another southern city of Zahedan killed 25 people and wounded 80. A day later, a shooting at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s campaign office in the same city injured three people. Air guards chief Mohammad Hasan Kazemi, speaking to the official IRNA news agency, left open the possibility of a link between those two incidents and the package on the airliner. He said “enemies” were trying to create a sense of hopelessness among Iranians before the election. The plane, carrying 140 passengers, returned to an airport in the southwestern city of Ahvaz 15 minutes after takeoff Saturday after a passenger reported a suspicious package. The plane belongs to one of Iran’s commercial airlines, Kish Air. The flight was from Ahvaz to the capital, Tehran, about 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the northeast. A news web site, YaariNews, which is close to former President Mohammad Khatami, said Khatami was planning to come back to Tehran from Ahvaz about the same time, but he changed his schedule and departed earlier. It was unclear whether Khatami ever intended to travel on the Kish Air flight. Khatami is campaigning for Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading pro-reform challenger to Ahmadinejad.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w0cI6XdiVM

The world’s strongest laser – powerful enough to create conditions as hot as inside the Sun – was unveiled Friday in the western U.S. state of California for an audience of politicians and scientists. The stadium-sized National Ignition Facility actually houses 192 lasers that all point towards a tiny blob of hydrogen.  When the lasers shoot, scientists expect the hydrogen will fuse into helium, a chemical reaction like what makes stars burn and nuclear bombs explode.  The project began in 1997 and cost the federal government an estimated $3.5 billion. The government says it will allow scientists to study in a lab what happens in a nuclear explosion. They say it will help scientists assess the safety of the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal.

But critics say the laser is unnecessary and costly. Some also worry it could help develop new nuclear weapons. Proponents of the giant laser say there is another possible benefit. They say they hope to create a fusion reaction called “fusion ignition.” This reaction could create huge amounts of electricity. Scientists suggest such reactions could lead to a new green energy source, and eliminate the current dependence on fossil fuels. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hailed the laser as a breakthrough for his state. The unveiling was attended by around 3,500 people. Scientists say they plan to begin experimenting with fusion ignition by next year.

 “Only five to 10 per cent of the job is remaining and hopefully within two to three days, the pockets of resistance will be cleared,” he said. His comments came a day after the military said it had regained full control of Mingora, the Swat valley’s main city. Despite the military’s self-proclaimed success in Mingora, Imran Khan, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from Islamabad, the capital, said the military would probably find it difficult to meet its deadline for victory.

Pakistan has said it expects its military offensive against Taliban fighters in the country’s northwestern Swat valley will be over in two or three days. Syed Athar Ali, Pakistan’s secretary of defence, made the comments at a defence conference in Singapore on Sunday.

“Two to three days is an optimistic statement,” he said.”The army has said it’s going to take two to three weeks to get gas, to get energy, to get electricity to the Swat valley. “It depends in part on what your indicator is – whether you think it is routing the Taliban that means victory or whether its repatriating 3.4 million refugees and giving them back their homes and their land.” About 2.4 million people have fled in the wake of the military’s campaign against the Taliban, joining people displaced by earlier fighting. There are no figures of civilian casualties, but some of the displaced have told of innocent relatives being killed. Around 300,000 people lived in Mingora until the Taliban occupied the town in early May when the army first launched an offensive in Swat.

Also on Sunday, there were reports that 50 fighters and two soldiers were killed in clashes in South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Fighting there has intensified in recent days amid the offensive in the nearby Swat valley and there is an expectation that the military will turn its focus on the area, which borders Afghanistan, once its Swat operation is over.