Around 2,000 people chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ (God is greater) massed for the burial of a pro-Taliban Pakistani cleric killed in the army raid on Islamabad’s Red Mosque.
   The crowd, under tight police watch, prayed for Abdul Rashid Ghazi, 43, due to be buried later in this dust-bowl village as his brother vowed the fight would go on to bring Pakistan under Islamic law.
   The hardline mullah’s bearded face, minus his signature glasses, could be seen as he was wrapped in a burial shroud and placed in a wooden coffin two days after he was cut down in crossfire making a last stand at his mosque.
   His elder brother Abdul Aziz, the leader of the mosque who was captured last week, and other family members who had been arrested by authorities were allowed to attend the last rites.
   ‘I lost my brother, my students, for the enforcement of Islamic sharia (law),’ Aziz told mourners, speaking under tight police guard.
   ‘Ghazi and all those who died in the mosque are shaheed (martyrs). My wife and daughters are in custody but this will not stop us from struggling for an Islamic system,’ he said.
   Several people began to chant slogans against the government of president Pervez Musharraf but were quickly stopped by other mourners, witnesses said.
   Witnesses said Aziz, who was arrested while leaving the mosque dressed in a burqa, was taken away before his brother’s burial as hundreds of people surrounded the police car carrying him.
   Uniformed and plainclothes police were deployed in their hundreds in the area to maintain security as authorities feared a backlash over the killings at the Red Mosque complex, officials said.
   In Islamabad, where the army ended the week-long standoff in a hail of gunfire and explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday, at least 27 unidentified bodies were buried by officials, an AFP photographer said.
   Troops Wednesday cleared the final clutch of diehard extremists from the mosque after two days of intense fighting that left at least 73 rebels and nine soldiers dead and turned the heart of the capital into a battleground.
   Ghazi and students at
   the mosque, which houses a female madrassah, had been involved in an aggressive Taliban-style campaign to impose Islamic law, including the kidnapping of seven Chinese accused of involvement in prostitution.
   Asma Aziz, the 14-year-old daughter of the surviving cleric Aziz, said she wanted to die inside the mosque, her lawyer said.
   Meanwhile, parents and relatives frantically searched hospitals, hoping to find missing children.
   ‘I have searched almost every hospital in the city,’ sobbed Noor Mohammad from Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region, whose 13-year-old son Mirza Alam was in the mosque when the commandos moved in.
   ‘My elder son talked to Alam two days after the siege began and since then we have not heard from him.’
   Most sentiment in the country appeared to be that militant students in the Taliban-style movement had brought disaster on themselves.

Tamil Tiger rebels have admitted losing a key stronghold in eastern Sri Lanka to government forces and said they would revert to guerrilla tactics in the troubled region.
   Government forces were clearing landmines in the Thoppigala area which they captured from rebels on Wednesday, after months of heavy fighting, military officials here said.
   But Tiger guerrillas fired mortar bombs and killed a soldier in the northwest of the island on Thursday morning, the defence ministry said, adding that other sporadic attacks were being reported in the rebel-held north.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fighters melted away from Thoppigala, a mountainous jungle area they dominated for more than 13 years, rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiriyan told reporters from the north.
   Tamil Tiger forces who remained in the east had gone into ‘guerrilla’ mode, he said, adding that ‘winning the war was not about taking control of real estate.’
   ‘They are mentioning this as the end of the war in the east,’ Ilanthiriyan said. ‘But that is not the truth. We have the experience in guerrilla tactics. In fact, we have already changed our approach to guerrilla tactics.’
   Sri Lanka’s government claimed Wednesday it had captured the ‘nerve centre’ and last remaining Tamil Tiger stronghold in the eastern district of Batticaloa following months of intense combat.
   Senior military commanders maintained that they would focus on the rebels’ mini-state in the north after neutralising the Tigers in the east of the country.
   Norwegian ambassador Hans Brattskar, who is to leave Sri Lanka shortly, returned from the northern Tiger bastion of Kilinochchi Wednesday after failing to clinch a deal on restarting peace talks, diplomats said.
   The LTTE had previously said they will not resume discussions unless government forces halt their military campaign.
   Fighting across Sri Lanka has worsened since the breakdown of a 2002 truce around 19 months ago.
   Sri Lanka’s 35-year-old conflict has claimed more than 60,000 lives, and over 5,200 people have been killed in fighting in the past 19 months, according to government figures.

Palestinian negotiators have called on the Middle East Quartet to give the grouping’s new envoy, Tony Blair, a wider role that included the responsibility for policing Israeli obligations, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
   Blair’s job description mandates him to focus on helping to mobilise international assistance to the Palestinian Authority and to spearhead efforts to establish a Palestinian state. Citing a copy of a letter delivered to representatives of each member of the Quartet – the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia – that it had obtained, the paper said that Palestinians wanted Blair to also focus on Israeli pledges under the region’s stalled peace process.
   The letter, written by Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat, assures the Quartet of the PA’s support of Blair, but asks that the former British prime minister ‘place equal emphasis on the fulfilment of Israeli obligations and responsibilities under the ‘road map’.’
   The so-called roadmap has formed the basis for peace in the region, and calls for two states, Palestine and Israel, living in peace and security.

The average daily death toll from insurgency-related violence in Indian Kashmir has fallen to its lowest level since the revolt began nearly 18 years ago, officials said on Thursday.
   Daily killings have dropped to two from ten in 2001 and a peak of 13 in 1996 when the revolt was at its height with daily bomb explosions, gunbattles and ambushes, according to official police records in Indian Kashmir.
   ‘Violence has fallen to an all-time low since 1989,’ said a police officer, who asked not to be named, referring to the year when the separatist revolt began in the Muslim-majority Himalayan region.
   The fall in daily deaths comes against the backdrop of a slow-moving peace process between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India, each of which hold the region in part and claim it in full.
   Indian officials also attribute the drop to India’s fencing of the border between the two countries and what Indian officials say are more effective counter-insurgency tactics.
   The insurgency has left more than 42,000 people dead, according to official figures. Human rights groups put the toll at 70,000, including 10,000 people who have disappeared and are presumed dead.
   Despite the easing of violence, Indian Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Thursday he opposed any reduction in Indian troop levels in the state.

US ties with Southeast Asia are facing a setback as the president, George W Bush, cancelled his scheduled first summit with ASEAN leaders and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s trip to the region for annual talks seems uncertain.
   US officials have informed Singapore, host of the much-touted US-Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, that the September 5 date for the talks was now ‘not convenient,’ ASEAN diplomats said.
   September is critical for Bush as a much-awaited assessment of the situation in insurgency-wracked Iraq would be released that month amid a revolt within his own Republican party over failed war strategy.
   ‘We are actually disappointed,’ one ASEAN diplomat said.
   The landmark summit was aimed at highlighting 30 years of official ties between Washington and ASEAN, which comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
   On the heels of the failed summit is growing uncertainty about Rice attending an annual ASEAN ministerial meeting, which includes an August 1-2 dialogue between the region and its key trading partners as well as a high-level regional security forum.
   The 27-member ASEAN Regional Forum is the only high level official security group in the Asia-Pacific region, and includes Russia, India, China and the European Union.
   Foreign diplomats say they have heard that Rice may skip the trip to the ASEAN meeting due to a conflict of schedules.
   ‘We will keep you up to date on her travel schedules,’ State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters Wednesday when asked whether Rice would attend the meeting or send her deputy, John Negroponte.
   In 2005, Rice became the first American secretary of state to send her deputy to the ARF since it was first held in 1994, drawing criticism from the region which felt its stature had diminished in Washington’s eyes.
   Walter Lohman, former senior vice president of the US-ASEAN Business Council, said that based on information he had received, ‘it looks all but certain that Secretary Rice would take a pass on the ASEAN meetings.’
   With Bush’s cancellation of his summit with ASEAN leaders and Rice’s possible non-attendance, Lohman said the immediate future seemed grim for ties between the two sides.
   ‘It is a significant setback in US-ASEAN relations after two good years and the question is, if the administration doesn’t quickly get back on track, will there really be enough time in the next 18 months to patch it up,’ said Lohman, director of the Asian studies centre at Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
   With 18 months left in the White House for Bush, his administration’s Asian diplomacy had been largely focused on trying to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons drive in the hope of achieving its true foreign policy victory.
   After refusing to engage directly with North Korea, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, Christopher Hill, decided to make a sudden visit to Pyongyang last month.
   In his rush to make the trip, he reneged on an annual meeting with his ASEAN counterparts in Washington.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has appealed to Nepal’s government to determine the fate of a journalist kidnapped a week ago and rescue him if he is still alive.
   An unknown group called the National Republican Army said this week it had killed Prakash Singh Thakuri, who was picked up from the western town of Mahendranagar. His body has not been found yet.
   Thakuri’s writings in a local daily, Aajako Samachar, are known to have supported unpopular King Gyanendra, who was forced by weeks of violent protests to give up power last year. ‘Authorities must do everything possible to rescue Thakuri, if there is still time, or otherwise identify and arrest those responsible for his murder,’ the Paris-based watchdog said in a statement late on Wednesday.
   ‘If his death is confirmed, he would be the first journalist to be killed since the fall of King Gyanendra’s authoritarian regime in April 2006 and the return to democracy,’ it said.
   Violence by some small rebel groups and little-known outfits has continued in Nepal despite the end of a decade-long Maoist conflict in which more than 13,000 people were killed.

Maoist rebels destroyed TV and power sites near a major port in southeast India on Thursday, less than a week after they killed 24 troops in an ambush in a nearby state, the police said.
   The attacks on a television transmission tower and a power station took place in a town near the busy port city of Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh state, a hotbed of left-wing insurgent activity.
   ‘They used gelatine sticks (dynamite) to blast the TV centre, the power station and a state guest house,’ police chief A Sabharwal said from the port, adding that no casualties were reported.
   The attacks came just a few days after troops fought a bloody battle with Maoist rebels in the jungles of nearby Chhattisgarh state.

Campaigning began on Thursday for a Japanese upper house election on July 29
   that could cost the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, his job and usher in a period of policy stagnation if his ruling bloc loses heavily.
   Chances that Abe’s coalition will keep its upper house majority have dimmed because of mishandling of pension records and a series of scandals and gaffes that cost the cabinet three ministers, two from resignations and one by suicide.
   ‘The battle starts from here,’ Abe told a crowd in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics shopping district, a mecca for ‘otaku’ geeks who adore manga comics and anime.
   ‘Will it be reform or moving backwards? Will there be economic growth, or going backwards?’ Abe shouted as rain fell.

The US president, George W Bush, and the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, discussed the US-India nuclear agreement and efforts to promote global trade, the White House said.
   The two leaders ‘spoke by phone this morning and discussed the transformation of our bilateral relationship, including the civil nuclear cooperation initiative,’ said national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
   ‘They also agreed on the need to provide leadership to achieve a successful Doha round,’ he added, referring to the stalled negotiations on global free trade.
   ‘The president noted the one-year anniversary of the July 11, 2006, Mumbai train bombing and praised the leadership of prime minister Singh in dealing with terrorism,’ said Johndroe.
   India and the United States have been discussing the fine print of the accord for two years after Washington agreed in principle to reverse three decades of US sanctions on nuclear trade with India.
   The outlines of the deal were agreed even though New Delhi refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and had tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

Six Afghan policemen were killed on Thursday when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle, part of a convoy of US-led forces in southeastern Afghanistan, a provincial police official said.
   There were no reports of casualties among soldiers from the blast, which happened on a dirt road in a district of Khost province, close to the border with Pakistan, he said.
   Afghan forces and US soldiers began an operation in the area following the attack, the official added. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast.
   Violence has surged in Afghanistan in the past 18 months, the bloodiest period since US-led troops overthrew Taliban’s radical Islamic government in 2001.
   Inspired by militants in Iraq, the Taliban largely rely on roadside bombs and suicide attacks as a major part of their campaign against foreign and Afghan government forces.
   More than 6,000 people have been killed in violence since 2006 in Afghanistan and this year is regarded as a crunch period for all sides involved in the conflict.
   The Taliban and their Islamic allies are active in southern and eastern regions and have vowed to drive out foreign troops from Afghanistan and topple the central government.

Another 26 people accused of forced labour and brutal conditions in brickyards have gone on trial in China amid a scandal that has outraged the nation, state press said Thursday.
   The defendants are all charged with forcing people to work in ‘unspeakable’ conditions at small brick factories in northern China, Xinhua news agency said. No verdicts have yet been reached, it said.
   Five brickyard bosses accused of murder and forced labour were put on trial earlier this month, and more than 150 suspects have been arrested over brick factories that were allegedly subjecting workers to inhumane conditions.
   The scandal erupted after about 400 distraught parents posted a plea on the Internet to help save their children, who they said had been sold into slavery in Shanxi and Henan provinces.
   Officials have said up to 1,000 youths had been forced to work at the kilns, while 576 enslaved workers – including 41 children – have been rescued.
   The parents alleged local officials and police had turned a blind eye to the rackets and refused to investigate the alleged crimes despite repeated requests.
   Police acted after the Internet posting filtered into the mainstream press.

The US Congress was Thursday set to launch a fresh attempt to wrest control of the Iraq war from president George W Bush, as a critical moment neared in the political battle over US strategy.
   The House of Representatives was due to debate and likely vote on a bill demanding the withdrawal of most combat troops from Iraq by April 1 next year, while the senate ploughed through its own emotional debate over the war.
   The Bush administration was meanwhile said to be ready to deliver a key interim report on its troop surge strategy to Congress, possibly as early as Thursday, as it struggled to contain a Republican revolt on Iraq.
   Tense political combat over the war took a new twist Wednesday, as another Republican Senator bowed to the logic of souring public opinion and declared she would back a Democratic bid to enforce troops withdrawals by next year.
   Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine said America had arrived at a ‘crossroads of hope and reality’ on the war, which has killed 3,601 US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis, and it was time to embrace ‘reality.’
   The White House, under withering political fire, admitted unhappiness over the war had become the ‘central fact’ of US politics, but brushed off demands to reverse Bush’s surge of 30,000 extra troops into Iraq.
   ‘There’s a lot of scepticism among Republicans. As I told you, they’re getting an earful from constituents,’ White House spokesman Tony Snow said.
   National Security adviser Stephen Hadley meanwhile held meetings with worried Republicans on Capitol Hill.
   ABC News said the administration would tell Congress the Iraqi government merited ‘satisfactory’ grades on eight of 18 benchmarks for political and military progress.
   That conflicted with reports earlier in the week that Iraq would fail every single test in the keenly awaited report, which will set the table for a more definitive judgement on the surge strategy awaited in September.
   The House was expected to debate all day, before voting on a measure which would require most combat troops to be out of Iraq by April 1, 2008.
   The redeployment would begin within 120 days and the president would be forced to report to Congress on why soldiers should stay in Iraq for limited purposes such as fighting terrorism or training Iraqi forces.
   A similar bill is also being debated in the senate, but both approaches mirror earlier Democratic attempts to end the war which Bush vetoed.
   Although Republican discontent is growing over Iraq, it is not clear if the Democrats have drawn enough ex-Bush allies to jump over the 60-vote hurdle in the 100-seat Senate needed to defeat delaying tactics by Republican leaders.
   Bush’s remaining supporters in the Senate succeeded in defeating a Democratic bid to grant US troops the same amount of time to recuperate back at base as they spend in combat in Iraq.
   The measure would have effectively limited the number of soldiers available for deployment to Iraq and therefore limited troop numbers.
   ‘Republicans today proved they are more committed to protecting the president rather than protecting our troops,’ said an angry Senate Majority leader Harry Reid.
   In one rare moment of unity on Iraq on Wednesday, the Senate voted unanimously to pass a measure censuring Iran for what it said was complicity in the killings of US soldiers.
   ‘Today’s unanimous vote sends a strong, clear message from the entire Senate to the Iranians that we know what they are doing in Iraq, and they must stop,’ said Senator Joseph Lieberman, who framed the legislation.

The UN Security Council is expected to authorise up to 26,000 troops and police for Darfur but implementation will take months providing the world body finds enough personnel and Sudan cooperates.
   On Wednesday, Britain, France and Ghana circulated a draft resolution for a joint African Union-UN force, which also threatened force against those who attack civilians, relief workers and obstruct peace efforts.
   The resolution, expected to be adopted this month, allows the United Nations to formally recruit troops for the mission.
   Estimated to cost more than $2 billion in the first year, the operation is an effort to quell violence in Sudan’s western region where more than 2.1 million people have been driven from their homes and an estimated 200,000 have died.
   The United Nations now has the uphill task of recruiting troops and police, a task not expected to be accomplished until well into next year. Sudan, which has approved the deal after months of reservations, still needs to find enough land and water for the building of new barracks.
   Infantry troops are expected to be drawn mainly from African nations. The new operation, called the United Nations-African Union mission in Darfur, or UNAMID, will absorb the 7,000 African Union troops currently in Darfur. Engineers and headquarters personnel are expected to be drawn from other nations.
   The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, at a conference on democracy in Latin America and Africa, urged African governments to ‘hold Sudan accountable.’
   ‘We must not let the government of Sudan continue this game of cat-and-mouse diplomacy, making promises then going back on them,’ Rice said in an apparent reference to Khartoum’s months of hesitation.

Lebanese troops pounded a refugee camp with heavy artillery on Thursday in what could signal the start of a final assault against al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist fighters holed up there for almost eight weeks.
   Vast clouds of black smoke billowed into the sky over the Nahr al-Bared camp as shells slammed relentlessly into the ruins of the shantytown where Fatah al-Islam guerrillas have been locked in a deadly standoff with the army since May 20.
   ‘Today’s bombardment is a first step in the final battle against the terrorist group whose fighters have refused to surrender to the army,’ an army officer at the scene said.
   Three soldiers were killed in battle on Thursday, the 54th day of the deadliest internal fighting in Lebanon since the 1975-1990 civil war that has further shaken security in the deeply divided country.
   An officer was killed by sniper fire while two soldiers fell in an ambush by Sunni Muslim gunmen on the edge of the southern part of Nahr al-Bared, medical sources said.
   Their deaths brought to 177 the number of people killed, including 89 soldiers and at least 68 Islamists, since the fighting first erupted at Nahr al-Bared and the nearby Mediterranean port city of Tripoli.
   Lebanese artillery was in action since daybreak, striking positions of the Fatah al-Islam militia in the south of the camp, where a few hundred people are still believed to be living although water and food are in short supply.
   Shells crashed into some of the few bombed-out buildings still standing in the seafront camp, which has been left in ruins, with houses shattered and collapsed like packs of cards, vehicles burnt out and empty streets sprayed with chunks of rubble.
   Elite Lebanese soldiers were also locked in gun battles with the Islamists in the southern and eastern sectors of the camp.

A growing rift between Russia and Britain over the London murder of a former Russian agent prompted warnings Thursday of a full scale diplomatic conflict, complete with tit-for-tat expulsions.
   Newspapers and analysts in both countries said the row over Moscow’s refusal to extradite the chief suspect in the case, Andrei Lugovoi, risked blowing bilateral ties back to the Cold War era.
   According to British newspaper reports, London is considering expelling Russian diplomats to protest what it sees as Moscow’s non-cooperation with the investigation into the poisoning murder of intelligence agent-turned-Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko.
   An unidentified government insider was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that the British government ‘is looking at a range of options.’
   ‘There is a process going on at the moment in which those options are being examined. But you can expect something to be announced to parliament very soon,’ the source told the business daily.

At least four people were killed in new violence in Mogadishu which saw the presidential palace come under attack days before a national peace meeting, witnesses said Thursday.
   Several mortar shells landed near the presidential palace late Wednesday and one hit the nearby Fiyore area, killing one civilian and wounding two others, local resident Farah Mohamed said.
   Mohamed Ganey, a government security officer who was in the palace, said none of the shells struck the palace buildings.
   ‘Several mortar rounds were fired from inside town but all of them were off target. Some of them hit nearby buildings but the palace suffered no damage,’ he said.
   Three other people were killed as violence flared in several southern neighbourhoods of the Somali capital, witnesses said.
   ‘We heard gunshots outside my gate and several minutes later I was told bodies were strewn in the street. Three young men were killed,’ said another resident Warsame Janogale.
   It was not clear what prompted the incident.
   ‘The three were shot in the head and they appear to have been tortured before they were killed,’ said Ahmed Sahal, another witness.
   Witnesses also said government forces exchanged gunfire with suspected Islamist rebels in the Hodan neighbourhood.
   The violence comes three days before a much-delayed national reconciliation meeting is scheduled to kick off.

A major US fire fighters’ union has launched a scathing attack on former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s leadership after the September 11 attacks, urging its members to oppose his bid for the presidency.
   In a video released Wednesday by the International Association of Fire Fighters, colleagues and relatives of New York fire fighters who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks accuse Giuliani of exploiting the tragedy in his campaign for the White House.
   ‘Whenever I hear him talk, I want to scream out to the world and say, God, he is so full of it’,’ says Rosaleen Tallon in the video, the sister of one of the fire fighters who died in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
   Titled ‘Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend,’ the video alleges that Giuliani failed as mayor to ensure fire fighters had working radios, that he based his emergency headquarters too close to the World Trade Centre site and that he moved too quickly to start cleaning up the area when efforts to recover the remains of the dead were still underway.

Prince William’s ex-girlfriend Kate Middleton and former prime minister Tony Blair are the most sought-after guests at British parties, society magazine Tatler said Wednesday.
   Middleton’s social standing has been given a huge boost by her split from army officer William, who is second in line to the throne.
   The 25-year-old heads Tatler’s annual top 100 ‘most wanted’ list, followed by Blair and his lawyer wife Cherie.
   ‘Suddenly single, this sexy siren is super in-demand. Life after Wills is rather better than you’d imagine,’ said Tatler.
   The Blairs are surprise entries at number two. The couple, known for their love of holidaying with the great and the good, have more time to work the social circuit since he retired from office last month.
   Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement as prime minister, fails to make the top 100.
   ‘And now for the great cash-in. Tony and Shezza are up for anything — except dinner with Gordon.’