NABLUS: Three Palestinian police officers and one Hamas militant were killed in an exchange of gunfire on Sunday in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, Palestinian police said.The policemen were killed while they were attempting to arrest Mohammad Yassine, a member of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing, who had barricaded himself in his home. Two other police officers were killed in the exchange of gunfire. A curfew was imposed on the town following the incident, said the police. Hamas, a bitter rival of the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, violently ousted Fatah from the Gaza Strip in June 2007, effectively limiting Abbas's rule to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
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.
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