A suicide car bomber hit a fleet of fuel tankers intended for a NATO base in southern Afghanistan, killing eight Afghanis and wounding 21, officials said yesterday.
The attack in Helmand Province late on Friday burned six fuel tankers parked outside the town of Gereshk, said Dawood Ahmadi, the spokesman for the governor of Helmand. The trucks had been headed to a large NATO base that houses US and British troops.
The attack killed eight Afghani drivers or their assistants, said Abdel Ahad Khan, the Gereshk district chief. Twenty-one people were wounded, he said.
Attacks late last year against US and NATO supply trucks raised concerns that militants were squeezing military supply routes. At the time, US and NATO commanders said they were exploring other ways to bring supplies into the country, including through Russia and the former Soviet satellites that border Afghanistan to the north.
But a spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said yesterday that there have been few or no attacks on supply trucks in recent months. He said he could not be identified by name because he is not the lead spokesman.
Militant attacks have risen steadily in the last three years and have reached a new high. US General David Petraeus said Afghanistan saw 400 insurgent attacks during the first week of this month, including ambushes, small-arms attacks, assaults on Afghan infrastructure and government offices, and roadside bomb and mine explosions.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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