Wednesday, September 09, 2009 ANKARA: Nine people were killed and two were missing on Tuesday as torrential rain triggered floods in north-western Turkey, media reports and officials said. A family of five were swept away from a farm near the town of Saray, Tekirdag province, when heavy rain caused a river to burst its banks overnight and inundate a large area, causing significant material damage, the town's mayor Nazmi Coban told a news agency. The bodies of the mother and her three daughters, aged six, eight and 12, were found several kilometres away from the farm. Rescue teams were still looking for the father. Rescuers also discovered the bodies of an elderly couple among the wreckage of a nearby house that was swept away by the flooding, Coban told Anatolia. In Silivri, a seaside suburb of Turkey's biggest city Istanbul, one person died of a heart attack when flood waters gushed into his home, governor Muammer Gulen told the Anatolia news agency. Rescuers were searching for a two-year-old girl washed away by the flood in a car from which her mother and sister managed to get out safely, he added. Dozens of people were evacuated from their homes by military helicopters and small boats
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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