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Yemeni authorities said they arrested 10 Islamic militants in a major offensive on Saturday in the south of the country and witnesses said four policemen were killed in the fighting. Clashes erupted in Jaar, northeast of the port city of Aden, where police had been hunting for wanted members of jihadist groups. "This campaign comes after dissident elements attacked members of the security forces and government interests, and disrupted peace and security over the past few weeks," a Jaar security official told AFP. Four Yemeni policemen were killed in fighting, witnesses told AFP. But an interior ministry official denied the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered to halt attacks on the U.S.-led military if the Iraqi government and President Bush set a two-year timetable for withdrawing all foreign troops from the country, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The demand is part of a broad offer from the groups, who operate north of Baghdad in the heavily Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala. Although much of the fighting has been to the west, those provinces have become increasingly violent and the attacks there have regularly crippled oil and commerce routes. The groups...

The periodic success of mujahideen snipers in Iraq has been stimulating the imagination of jihadist forum readers, and this has taken the form of a number of video productions. A high-quality, 15-minute example of the genre, entitled Qannas Baghdad ("The Sniper of Baghdad") was circulated by the Islamic Army in Iraq last November on, among others, the Abu al-Bokhary jihadist forum (http://www.abualbokhary.net). The work is of professional quality, complete with American-English language commentary. It features the name "Juba," which refers to the infamous "Juba the Baghdad sniper" who is popularly credited with anything from several dozen to upward of 100...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 8:11 a.m. The Butcher with the Terror Ties The evidence mounts. Drip, drip, drip. Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics’ efforts to whitewash Baghdad’s ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: “There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq.” Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a “nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 11 - The story told by the two Iraqi guerrillas cut to the heart of the war that Iraqi and American officials now believe is raging inside the Iraqi insurgency. In October, the two insurgents said in interviews, a group of local fighters from the Islamic Army gathered for an open-air meeting on a street corner in Taji, a city north of Baghdad. Across from the Iraqis stood the men from Al Qaeda, mostly Arabs from outside Iraq. Some of them wore suicide belts. The men from the Islamic Army accused the Qaeda fighters of murdering their...

CAIRO, Egypt -- An Iraqi insurgent group said Thursday in an Internet posting that it killed a U.S. security consultant it had taken hostage. The claim's authenticity could not be immediately verified. The Islamic Army in Iraq said it had killed "the American security consultant for the Housing Ministry,"

FALLUJAH -- A Syrian found handcuffed in Fallujah and rescued by U.S. Marines was kidnapped with two French journalists in August, and has told authorities he last saw the Frenchmen a month ago -- the first confirmed word on the captives since they disappeared in August. Marines sweeping through Fallujah as part of a major U.S. offensive against insurgents located Mohammed al-Joundi, the U.S. military said, but there was no sign of journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. The Marines said the Syrian, who was found late Thursday, told them he was separated from the journalists a month ago. The...

Al-Zawra, the Iraqi Journalists Union newspaper, published "Who Kills Hostages in Iraq?" by Samir Addad and Mazin Ghazi on 19 September. A text in English has been released by BBC Monitoring International Reports. The article reports on the armed groups that are involved in violent resistance in Iraq, dividing the resistance into three categories: the Sunni resistance groups the Shi'i resistance groupsFactions abducting and killing.Below is an outline of the groups in these three categories: The main Sunni resistance groups The Iraqi National Islamic Resistance, "The 1920 Revolution Brigades" TARGETS: U.S. soldiersORIGIN: emerged on 16 July 2003GOAL: Expulsion of...

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi Islamist group has said it tried to assassinate Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi this week and that four men died in the attack, Al Jazeera television said on Saturday. The channel said it received a videotape from a group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq (news - web sites) in which one of the four men, who later died of his wounds, talks to camera. A group with the same name has said in an internet statement that it was holding two French journalists kidnapped on Aug. 20. Chalabi, now a vocal critic of U.S....