COLOMBO: Sri Lankan forces attacked a rebel-held village in the north with heavy machine gun fire early Monday, just hours after rejecting the Tamil Tigers' call for a truce as a ploy to avoid certain destruction, a rebel-linked Web site reported.The military attacked the small, coastal village of Mullivaikal from the north, south and west about 3:45 a.m. Monday, Tamil Netreported. The village is in a no-fire zone the government demarcated inside rebel territory as a civilian refuge. The Web site said the area was densely populated with tens of thousands of civilians.``Confrontations are taking place,'' military spokesman Brig.Udaya Nanayakkara said. ``We are moving forward.'' The assault came amid growing diplomatic pressure for a cease-fire to allow tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the war zone to escape to safety.The top U.N. humanitarian official, John Holmes, met Sri Lanka's foreign minister Monday to express concern for the estimated 50,000 trapped civilians before flying to a village south of the war zone to inspect displacement camps overwhelmed by the massive influx of war refugees in recent days. The foreign secretaries of Britain, France and Sweden were to travel here Wednesday to try to mediate the conflict.
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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