Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

28 July 2003

NATO

• Iceland will ask NATO chief George Robertson during a visit on Monday to try to coax Washington into scrapping plans to withdraw air defences it has provided the North Atlantic island for more than 50 years. The NATO chief already got the United States to postpone its initial plans to remove the planes just before Iceland’s May elections. (Reuters 251445 GMT Jul 03)

IRAQ

• Turkey’s foreign minister said on Sunday that Turkey would work with its NATO ally the United States in Iraq but it would take time to respond to a U.S. request to send Turkish troops to help secure its war-torn neighbour. Speaking to reporters in Ankara after returning from Washington, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said a decision on any troop deployment would not come before parliament adjourns for its summer recess on August 1. He would not confirm Turkish media reports that the United States and Turkey are now carrying out joint exercises across the border in Iraq, but said he discussed with U.S. officials ways of ridding the enclave of the Turkish Kurdish militants. “Turkey and the United States are determined to act in partnership in northern Iraq,” he added. (Reuters 271412 GMT Jul 03)
  
  
• Iraq has become a “terrorist magnet” that is attracting fighters from a variety of countries to take the opportunity of attacking American troops, a top U.S. Army commander said on Sunday. Army Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said the level of sophistication of attacks against U.S. soldiers had increased over the last 30 days. “In the short term, we’re going to continue to see attacks against our American forces and our coalition forces across the country,” Gen. Sanchez, interviewed from Baghdad, said on CNN’s Late Edition. “But I believe that the elimination of the Hussein brothers will go a long ways in ... bringing back some security and stability to Iraq,” he added. (Reuters 271910 GMT Jul 03)
  
  
• A group of Arab foreign ministers will meet in Cairo on August 5 to discuss the future of fellow Arab state Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said on Sunday. An official said the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and Libya had already agreed to attend. (Reuters 271426 GMT Jul 03)
  
  
• U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, accusing two Arab satellite channels of biased reporting from Iraq, said on Sunday that Washington was talking to unnamed governments to try to get more “balanced” coverage - so far without success. Wolfowitz said in an interview on Fox News on Sunday that the Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya channels were guilty of “very biased reporting that has the effect of inciting violence against our troops.” (Reuters 271804 GMT Jul 03)

BALKANS

• Three more explosions shook Kosovo early on Saturday but caused no casualties just two days after one person was killed and five injured in a grenade attack, a UN official said. It was not immediately clear if Saturday’s explosions had any link to the one near the UN Mission in Kosovo headquarters in Kosovska Mitrovica on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the UNMIK police, said the explosions occurred in Pristina, the northern town of Podujevo and a village in south-eastern Kosovo. She said “no motive or suspects were known.” Local media have speculated that attack was linked to the first war crimes conviction of former Kosovo Albanian rebels. (Reuters 261454 GMT Jul 03)
  
  
• Former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri, a one-time president of the UN General Assembly, was named on Friday as the new UN administrator for Kosovo, a compromise candidate. The decision to appoint Holkeri, who has no experience in the Balkans, was made by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan after interviewing about a dozen candidates amid squabbles between the U.S. and the EU, which finances most of the operation. (Reuters 251835 GMT Jul 03)

RUSSIA

• Russia has acquired a batch of Soviet-built ballistic missiles from Ukraine and is preparing to begin producing a new generation of nuclear submarines, officials said Friday. The Ukrainian government decided last October to sell its SS-19s to Russia, and Russia’s Interfax-Military News Agency reported Friday that Ukraine had completed their transfer. A spokesman for Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, who asked not be named, confirmed in a telephone interview that Russia had received the missiles. Also on Friday, Defense Minister Ivanov said that in 2006 the navy would receive a new nuclear submarine armed with next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles currently under development, the Interfax-Military News Agency reported. (AP 251702 Jul 03)

AFGHANISTAN

• A senior official in southern Afghanistan’s volatile Zabul province on Sunday urged U.S. forces to step up operations against the Taliban there after the guerrillas named a rival provincial governor. The deputy governor of Zabul said that Taliban officials, meeting in the Pakistani city of Quetta, had named Mullah Abdul Jabar as the rival governor and that hundreds of Taliban roamed freely in several districts of the province. He said provincial forces were not able to do anything as they have not received sufficient support from the U.S.-backed central government. (Reuters 270926 GMT Jul 03)