KABUL, Afghanistan — The bus bombing that killed at least 35 people Sunday in the deadliest attack in the capital since the fall of the Taliban may have been carefully planned with a timed device, says one of Afghanistan’s leading conflict analysts, another possible sign insurgent tactics are evolving. The Taliban claimed one of its suicide bombers was responsible for the thunderous early morning explosion that tore off the roof and sides of a bus carrying police recruits and blasted through two other transportation vehicles near Kabul police headquarters, scattering metal and body parts as far as 30 yards away. [...]
LONDON — After months of fruitless shuttle diplomacy, threats of sanctions, broken promises and politicking, Sudan’s government has agreed to accept a coalition of United Nations peacekeepers to back up the beleaguered African Union mission in its western Darfur region. The deal, announced June 12 from the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, would bring an additional 17,000 to 19,000 troops and 3,700 police officers into Darfur, a region the size of France where fighting between troops, government-backed militias and rebels has raged since 2003. An estimated 2.5 million people have been made homeless and some 200,000 have lost their lives [...]
TEL AVIV, Israel — As a seemingly inexhaustible source of bad news, the Middle East is arguably the perfect place to go in search for the silver lining that the proverb promises for every cloud. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki demonstrated last week how it is done: In an article in the Wall Street Journal, he argued eloquently that the desperate situation in Iraq should be seen as part of a struggle comparable with the American civil war and he challenged skeptics with the question: “Why expect freedom to come easy to Iraq?” As it turned out, al-Maliki is [...]
