Word: bordered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...what is thought to be the first such incursion from the Iraq side since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, at least four U.S. helicopters crossed Iraq's western border with Syria and attacked what officials in Damascus said was a half-constructed building in Sukkariyeh Farm, 5 miles from the Syrian frontier town of Abu Qamal. Eight people were reported to have been killed in the raid. Damascus "condemns this aggression and holds the American forces responsible," said the Syrian government in a statement that went on to demand that the Iraqi government launch an investigation into...
Last week, Major General John Kelly, commander of coalition forces in western Iraq, said security along Iraq's borders with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan was fairly tight but that the Syrian frontier remained porous. "The Syrian side is, I guess, uncontrolled by their side," Kelly said. "We still have a certain level of foreign-fighter movement." He told Pentagon reporters via teleconference last week, "We're doing much more work along the Syrian border than we've done in the past," adding that Iraqi security and intelligence forces "feel that al-Qaeda operatives and others operate, live pretty openly...
...Cross-border strikes are an increasingly common tactic by U.S. forces operating along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. U.S. missile-launching drones reportedly killed at least 20 people on Sunday in Pakistan's South Waziristan province close to the Afghan border, an area suspected of harboring al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Andrew Exum, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as founder of the influential Abu Muqawama counterinsurgency blog, suggests that the American action in Syria shows that the tactic may simply have been exported. "The precedent has already been established of crossing borders into...
That car-bombing was blamed on jihadists. It was followed by a gun battle in a Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus in which a number of militants were killed and arrested. Syrian troops have also deployed along the northern border of neighboring Lebanon in what Damascus says is an attempt to block jihadists from slipping into Syria. These recent developments have raised speculation that Syria is threatened by a blowback from jihadist militants who no longer have easy access to cross the border into Iraq and instead are turning their attention to the secular regime in Damascus. "We assumed...
Analysts in the region suspect that the decision to mount a cross-border raid into Syria was driven more by the military needs of Army commanders in Iraq than by political calculations from Washington. According to the analysts, the Joint Special Operations Command has considerable autonomy in choosing missions in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. "This is coming out of the Army. I don't think this is a parting shot from the Bush Administration," Tabler says...