Wars, Nato | featured news

A Syrian opposition leader said Tuesday that he had asked the United States to defend rebel-held areas with Patriot missiles. NATO already has Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries in NATO-member Turkey to help defend the country from potential airstrikes by President Bashar Assad's regime.

A German official is saying Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has told NATO allies that the U.S. will leave between 8,000-12,000 American troops in Afghanistan after 2014, when combat ends.

The U.S. will send two batteries of Patriot missiles and 400 troops to Turkey as part of a NATO force meant to protect Turkish territory from potential Syrian missile attack, the Pentagon said Friday.

France on Tuesday ended its combat operations in Afghanistan, pulling hundreds of troops from a base in a volatile region northeast of Kabul and fulfilling promises to end its combat role on a faster track than other NATO allies....

The top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan offered a somber apology on Friday in an eastern province where officials say 18 civilians — half of them children — were killed in a coalition airstrike this week.

The second highest al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan was killed in a weekend airstrike in the country's volatile east near the border with Pakistan, NATO-led forces said on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama called Monday for NATO countries to sign off on his exit strategy from Afghanistan that calls for an end to combat operations next year and the withdrawal of the U.S.-led international military force by the end of 2014.

It was what President Barack Obama called a "war of necessity," a conflict thrust upon America by the 9/11 attacks. As NATO's mission here winds down nearly 11 years later, the insurgents remain undefeated, corruption runs rife and the peace process is stuck in the sand.

Already tense U.S. and NATO ties with Afghanistan were dealt another blow on Wednesday with photographs appearing in an American newspaper of U.S. soldiers posing with the maimed bodies of dead Afghan insurgents.

A secret U.S. military report says that the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control over Afghanistan after NATO-led forces withdraw from the country, The Times newspaper reported on Wednesday.