Sunday, July 05, 2009 NAZRAN: Militants ambushed a Chechen police convoy in the neighbouring Russian region of Ingushetia on Saturday, killing 10 officers in one of the deadliest recent attacks in the volatile Caucasus. The convoy of six vehicles came under grenade and machine gun fire at around 0530 GMT as it travelled through along a forest road, security officials said. One vehicle burst into flames. "Forty-five members of the Chechnya police force were returning from a joint special operation when their convoy came under fire. Ten were killed and ten were wounded," an Ingush security source told media. The Chechen police were in Ingushetia to conduct a joint special operation against militants with their Ingush colleagues close to the regional border, the source added.The attack took place in the Sunzhensky district, east of Ingushetia's main city Nazran."We believe the convoy fell into a well-planned ambush. It was fired upon from at least three different points with machine guns and grenade launchers," an official Ingush source told a news agency. In a separate incident on Saturday, Nazran's former police chief Vakha Aushev was wounded when unknown assailants opened fire on his car, the Ingush interior ministry spokesman said, quoted by agency.
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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