Free Republic

PESHAWAR: A suicide car-bomber attacked a police van in Dera Ismail Khan on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including three policemen, a doctor said. There has been a relative lull in militant violence in recent weeks since government forces stepped up offensives in the Orakzai and Khyber regions of the northwest after largely clearing Pakistani Taliban strongholds in other areas. The bomber attacked the police van in which an officer and some of his men were travelling to their police station, said policeman Iftikhar Khan. A doctor at the town's main hospital said 12 dead and 10 wounded people had been...

Baghdad (AP) - Iraqi police say at least two people have been killed and 10 others wounded in a bicycle bombing in Baghdad. Police and hospital officials say Thursday's bomb exploded near a downtown restaurant shortly before 8 a.m.

How The West Was Won The rapid and unexpected decline of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was officially recognized this week, when Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commanding the Marine Expeditionary Force, turned operational control of Anbar Province over to the Iraqi army and police. Anbar, a vast expanse of desert the size of North Carolina, had been the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency. For years, foreign fighters loyal to al-Qaida had sneaked across Iraq's northwestern border with Syria, into Anbar and down a "rat line" of safe houses in Haditha, Ramadi and Hit. From Fallujah, the arch terrorist Zarqawi...