Israel's raid on Syria
Israel is enforcing a news blackout regarding its alleged attack on a Syrian nuclear research facility. According to unconfirmed reports, six Israeli fighter planes slipped undetected into Syrian airspace on 6 September, destroying a scientific facility which had received aid in various forms from North Korea. Damascus denies that any such facility was destroyed, and insists the Israeli attacks caused little damage. The raid amounts to Israel's most daring military excursion since its strike against Saddam Hussein's nuclear facilities in 1981. Analysts suspect that the raid was calculated as a dry-run for a possible similar attack on Iran. Capitals around the region have denounced the venture.
War and Iran
Keep up to date with the latest developments and sharpest perspectives in a world of strife and struggle.
Sign up to receive toD's daily security briefings via email by clicking hereThe Council on Foreign Relations suggests that Washington's planned troop withdrawals from Iraq do not threaten the Bush administration's long-term plan of maintaining an enduring presence in the country to counter nearby Iran.
Mohammed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Association, will defend a pact struck between the IAEA and Iran over clarifying past nuclear research, which controversially leaves untouched the country's uranium enrichment programme. Western powers claim that Iran's uranium enrichment is camouflage for a more sinister bid for nuclear weapons. The IAEA's 144-nation assembly gathers today.
The New York Times profiles ElBaradei, the man in the middle, as he boldly stands up to western capitals and Tehran's attempts to undermine him.
The United States has struggled to implement UN-mandated sanctions against Iran because of an embarrassing lack of paperwork.
Talking heads
France's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner noisily suggested in a radio interview that the world must "prepare for war" with Iran.
Retired US general Wesley Clark cautions that American military forces must be ready for possible war with Iran.
US secretary of defence Robert M. Gates will attempt to reconcile the ideological and realist wings of the Republican Party in a speech today that lays the "philosophical" groundwork of US security policy.
A window for peace?
According to the Indian daily The Hindu, the recent military successes of the Sri Lankan army against Tamil Tiger rebels has now opened a window for real negotiation, in which Colombo should couple its martial gains with political programmes in order to gain concessions from the weakened rebels.
Battling and training in Kashmir
Militants in the district of Kupwara in Indian-administered Kashmir twice ambushed security convoys travelling towards the contested border with Pakistan. No casualties were reported, but the section of the district is now under military lockdown.
Beginning this Monday, UK and Indian special forces will hold a series of joint manoeuvres in the high regions of Ladakh in Kashmir.
Target Scandinavia
After three terrorism trials in the last two years - as well as an alleged bomb plot broken up this month - analysts fear that Denmark may now have become one of the principal targets for Islamist terrorists. Danish imams fear that Muslim youth in the country are much more strident and radicalised than their parents in large part because of events in the middle east and last year's Danish cartoon controversy.
After the recent publication of an inflammatory cartoon in Sweden depicting the prophet Muhammad, leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq have placed a $50,000 bounty on the head of Lars Vilks, the cartoonist.
Greenspan: Iraq war for oil
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has argued in his autobiography The Age of Turbulence that the Iraq war was clearly motivated by oil, taking the position of the war's most strident critics.
