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An Australian woman vowed never to wear her hiking boots again after Colombian guerrillas kidnapped eight fellow travellers but left behind herself, her husband and three others. Michelle Walkden, 30, from Bendigo in Victoria, said the 13 members of her group were woken early Friday in the remote Sierra Nevada mountain area about 750km north of Bogota. But the guerrillas, believed to be members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), apparently decided sandals would be unsuitable for a long trek. Safe again ... Michelle Walkden, 30, and her husband Mark Tuite, 33.Photos: AFP They were left behind but...

Guerillas Kill U.S. Soldier in Baghdad By Patrick Quinn AP News Sep 15, 2003 TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - Guerrillas killed a U.S. soldier in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in central Baghdad on Monday, and American forces arrested five men suspected of helping finance insurgents during raids on homes in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. The 1st Armored Division soldier died of his wounds early Monday in a military field hospital, the military reported. He was the 156th U.S. soldier to die in Iraq since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1. In heavy fighting before...

The interviews for this story were conducted in clandestine meetings in Baghdad and at a camp in a rural area north of the city. They provide a chilling insight into a shadowy organization responsible for at least some of the attacks that have killed 70 Americans since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. The story may disturb some readers who will believe that American journalists should not talk with the enemy and that American newspapers should not publish anything they say. But the story provides important information to help the public understand something of the nature of...

AUTOMATIC gunfire crackled above the rooftops of Falluja, a town with a burgeoning reputation as a battleground for Islamic militants and American troubleshooters, as I drove through its fetid streets to the bolthole of some of the US Army’s most dangerous enemies. Hundreds of foreign fighters have entered Iraq in recent months to pursue “jihad”, or holy war, against the Americans. Last week, in a disused Falluja garage barred by heavy metal gates, the first such fighters to speak to a western reporter revealed the explosive secret of their training. Three young militants from a previously unknown group called Martyrs...

BAQUBA, Iraq, Sep 13, 2003 (Saint Paul Pioneer Press - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- A mournful voice singing of dreary days and disappointing harvests drifted across a canal and onto the hidden grounds where Abu Abdullah teaches his recruits to kill. Faded Iraqi army uniforms dried on pomegranate trees, and combat boots lined a dirt path leading into the camp. Young Iraqis picked ripe grapes and offered them to visitors. And waited for orders to attack another American convoy. From this farm hidden among tangled grapevines and tall date palms an hour north of Baghdad, guerrilla fighters,...

Masked Guerrillas Battle U.S. Soldiers in Iraq Thu September 11, 2003 02:17 PM ET KHALDIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Masked guerrillas attacked U.S. soldiers repairing a broken-down truck on Thursday, prompting a firefight that left buildings burning in a town in Saddam Hussein's former heartland, witnesses said. The U.S. military could not immediately give details of the incident, which took place in the so-called "Sunni Triangle," and it was unclear if anyone was hurt. The attackers fired two rocket-propelled grenades at soldiers working on the truck in the afternoon, after which two U.S. tanks arrived and fired at nearby buildings in...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Unidentified guerrillas fired two missiles at a U.S. transport plane taking off from Baghdad just hours before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew out of Iraq, military officials said on Sunday. The missiles missed their target and caused no damage. "Multiple missiles were fired which missed the aircraft," a U.S. military spokeswoman said of the incident, which happened on Saturday morning. Rumsfeld was thought to have passed through the airport on his way out to Kuwait, but the U.S. military refused on Sunday to comment on his exact travel route in and out of Baghdad. The military said,...

Rumsfeld: Lebanese, Syrians among those carrying out attacks   BAGHDAD, Iraq - Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon, who have been battling Israel for the past two decades, appear to be among Arab fighters seeking to undermine the American pacification and reconstruction of Iraq, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq said Friday."People who have been trained are coming in here," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and they are either directing or participating in the kinds of truck bombings that have rocked Baghdad and the holy Shiite city of Najaf in recent weeks.His remark to reporters who are traveling with Defense Secretary...

TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - U.S. troops exchanged fire with Iraqi guerrillas who lobbed at least six mortar rounds at them in downtown Tikrit, and detained four people, including a suspected bomb maker, in a night of intense fighting early Thursday. The mortar shells missed their targets, causing no injuries or damage, said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment, which patrols Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, 120 miles north of Baghdad. An American reconnaissance patrol, responding to the mortar attack, was ambushed with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades on the eastern bank...

TIKRIT, Iraq, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Iraqi troops ambushed and killed three Iraqi guerrillas laying explosive devices of a roadside northeast of Baghdad, the U.S. military said on Thursday. Lieutenant Colonel William MacDonald, spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division, said the gunmen were digging holes to plant explosives on a roadside southeast of the town of Baquba, 50 km (32 miles) northeast of the capital, when soldiers fired from small arms and a tank on Wednesday night, killing all three. "(The U.S. soldiers) were on a mission to conduct an ambush at the site because there had been many...

American occupation troops killed six Iraqis, who, according to a U.S. military spokesman, ambushed the US convoy and used rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Two American occupation troops were injured in this incident on Saturday afternoon close to the northern city of Kirkuk, Reuters quoted Lieutenant Colonel William MacDonald, spokesman for the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, as saying Sunday. According to him, all in all, eight men participated in the attack against the convoy, and the US forces returned fire, shooting to death six Iraqis and wounding two. Meanwhile, Najaf leaders asked the FBI for help investigating Friday's...

<p>Despite official denials, there have been signs for months that Saudi Muslim extremists have traveled to Iraq to take on U.S.-led forces.</p> <p>Internet memorials to those who died fighting the Americans have popped up and Saudis are quietly swapping tales said to be from the front lines. Many of the men going to Iraq had previously fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia and were experts on guerrilla warfare, said Abdullah Bjad al-Otaibi, who once counted himself among the extremists and now writes about them for Saudi newspapers.</p>

Darkness had descended outside, and a bare light bulb illuminated Mayor Teófilo Torres in his office here as he explained the danger posed by the reemergence of the Shining Path guerrillas deep in the Peruvian jungle. ''Shining Path could enter San Francisco at any time and shoot me,'' Torres said. ``They look for the mayors first.'' A decade after the Shining Path was believed to have been vanquished, the guerrillas -- known in Peru by their Spanish name, Sendero Luminoso -- are making a comeback in a potentially dangerous alliance with traffickers of coca paste, the basic ingredient of cocaine,...

BAGHDAD, Aug 26 (Reuters) - U.S. troops hunting guerrillas and criminals raided homes overnight in Iraq's restive "Sunni triangle," the Army said on Tuesday, as tension simmered among ethnic groups in the north and Shi'ite factions in the south. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division said hundreds of soldiers had raided homes around Khalis, north of Baghdad, on Monday night, looking for a gang accused of crimes in the area. Officers said several people had been detained. U.S. forces have mounted scores of raids in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland around Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, looking for the fugitive ex-dictator, his...

TIKRIT, Iraq, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Iraqi guerrillas waging low-level attacks on American occupying forces are poorly organised, militarily incompetent and quick to run, scornful U.S. commanders say. "The enemy tactics are 'miss and run'," said Colonel James Hickey, whose brigade controls the restive area round Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. "They're almost running when they pull the trigger." A more potentially devastating threat is that of suicide attacks against U.S. military bases like the recent bombs at the U.N. headquarters and Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, Tikrit area officers said in conversations with Reuters in recent days. "It could...

Some of the people attacking U.S. forces in Iraq are slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in a television interview on Friday. U.S. soldiers have faced daily guerrilla ambushes since the end of the war that ousted Saddam Hussein in April, but those attacks were overshadowed by Tuesday's suspected suicide bombing of the U.N. headquarters that killed 24 people. U.S. officials have long suspected some militants have come through Iran and Syria and has warned both against interference in Iraq but have not previously singled out Saudi Arabia, a key U.S....

Aug. 20 — TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Guerrillas ambushed U.S. troops in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in central Iraq on Wednesday, killing a contractor and wounding two soldiers, a U.S. military officer said. Major Bryan Luke did not give the nationality of the contractor. He said assault rifles were fired at a three-vehicle convoy near a market in the center of Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad. Luke had initially said rocket-propelled grenades had also been fired, but later said this was not correct. He said three gunmen had fired AK-47s at the U.S. convoy and one of the...

Marxist guerrillas tried to assassinate President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia and his wife, Lina, on a visit to the province of Antioquia. The attack happened as the couple were on their way by helicopter to the town of Granada to celebrate its reconstruction after a guerrilla attack in 2000 that left 29 people dead and many buildings in ruins. President Uribe speaks in Granada after the attempted assasination The helicopter was coming in to land when guerrillas in the mountains around the town tried to bring it down with machineguns. The helicopter quickly pulled up and its escort, a US-supplied...

In the sizzling heat of an Iraqi summer, Saddam Hussein’s loyalist guerrillas cannily select targets that will make the life of the ordinary Iraqi unbearable, trusting in acute disruptions to provoke him to rise up en masse against the Americans. Their organization is Saboteurs are systematically disrupting oil, electricity and water supplies. There is efficient organization somewhere in the background. In ten days, guerrillas set two calamitous fires at key points on the 600-mile pipeline just when oil exports were due to resume from northern Iraq’s huge Kirkuk fields, source of 40 percent of country’s oil, to Turkey’s Ceyhan terminal...

The United States has concluded that Al Qaida and its allies are taking over the Sunni insurgency war in Iraq. U.S. officials said Central Command officers in Iraq have seen increasing evidence of Al Qaida and Islamic volunteer forces participating and even leading the insurgency war in the Sunni Triangle. They said Al Qaida has succeeded in presenting Iraq as the next arena for what the movement terms the Islamic holy war against the United States. "Foreign terrorists are attracted to areas where the coalition is on the offense in the global war on terror, and in Iraq we are...