Middle East, Military | featured news

A NATO helicopter crashed during an operation against the Taliban near the Afghan capital late Friday night, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said 31 U.S. troops and seven Afghan soldiers were killed.
A second coalition helicopter was forced to make a precautionary landing in another part of Afghanistan, local officials and a spokesman for the multinational forces said Saturday.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets outside Damascus, in Homs and elsewhere in response to the lethal military assaults centered in the besieged city of Hama. The growing civilian toll intensifies international condemnation of the Syrian regime.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Saturday his government would buy 36 F-16 fighters from the United States, doubling the number of aircraft it had initially planned to buy.

Turkey’s armed forced chief, Gen. Isik Kosaner, along with the heads of the army, navy and air force resigned Friday, Reuters reports. The reason for the generals' resignations was not immediately clear, but tensions between the military and the government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan have been high in recent years, and a blow up was expected at a major meeting of the the Supreme Military Council next week.

The United States is suspending $800 million in military aid to Pakistan, White House Chief of Staff William Daley said today.

Syrian tanks rolled into a northwestern village and opened fire Monday, wounding at least six people in the latest military maneuver in a weekslong siege near the Turkish border that seeks to crush the country's pro-democracy uprising, activists said.

Syrian tanks and helicopters opened fire and killed at least two civilians as the military advanced through a series of villages in northwestern Syria on Thursday, a push that sent residents running for the hills, several villagers said in phone calls with CNN.

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he will withdraw 10,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan by year's end and a total of 33,000 by the summer of 2012.

President Barack Obama has made a final decision on his plan for a drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and will announce it in a primetime address to Americans on Wednesday, the White House said on Tuesday.

Suicide bombers detonated two explosives-laden vehicles early Tuesday near a government compound south of Baghdad, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens, Iraqi officials said. The attacks come as Iraq’s top political factions started to discuss in earnest whether to ask some of the U.S. troops to stay beyond the Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline because of the security situation.