Word: raid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...night, the truce brokered by Egypt last June that has largely stamped out violence across the boundary between Israel and Gaza, appeared in danger of collapse: Israeli troops, backed by helicopter gunships and tanks, crossed into Gaza to destroy a tunnel being dug by militants, supposedly to launch a raid inside Israel...
...When the raid was all over, I could not help but think that here we were in Tora Bora a year after our first violent attacks in these mountains, but instead of having bin Laden within reach, as we did back then, we were now grabbing any little person who might have spoken to him at some time. ...The intel on Osama bin Laden remained...
This is not the first such raid into Syrian territory in recent years. In September 2007, Israeli jets bombed a site in northeast Syria suspected of being a nuclear facility. Syria has also been shaken by attacks from within its borders. In February, Imad Mughniyah, posthumously identified as the top military commander of Lebanon's militant Shi'ite Hizballah, was assassinated in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus. Last month, a rare car bomb exploded in the Syrian capital, killing 28 people...
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...
Still, there are widespread suspicions that political rather than military considerations dictated the timing of the raid, since the Republicans could be expected to benefit from any renewed concerns over terrorism. "This is all related to the elections in the U.S. The timing is so close," contends Sami Moubayed, a Syrian political analyst. "Bringing out the 'terrorist threat,' magnifying it, projecting it as a monster that needs to be dealt with on the spot ... serves nobody but John McCain." A parting shot from the Administration of President George W. Bush, or the beginning of a new military policy...