BANGKOK: Thai troops launched a crackdown Monday to enforce a state of emergency in Bangkok, firing warning shots and tear gas as anti-government protesters hurled petrol bombs in clashes that left 70 injured.Columns of smoke rose over the capital Bangkok as hundreds of heavily-armed soldiers cleared a busy intersection blocked by demonstrators calling for Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to quit after just four months in office.Abhisit issued an emergency decree in and around Bangkok on Sunday to curb mass protests against his government, a day after demonstrators forced the humiliating cancellation of a major Asian summit at the Pattaya beach resort.The government said soldiers had cleared the intersection and arrested several of the red-clad protesters, who are loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra, the fugitive former premier ousted in a 2006 military coup.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
Comments