SYRIA: Syria said yesterday it had protested to Washington about what US officials have described as a military strike near the Iraq-Syrian border last week in which several Syrian border guards were wounded.
In Damascus's first official reaction, the Syrian Arab News Agency said Syria had demanded Washington "return . . . the wounded soldiers to continue their treatment at a Syrian hospital to avoid any misunderstanding that might lead to an escalation that both sides do not desire".
The United States said on Tuesday it was discussing with Syria how to return five Syrian border guards wounded when US special forces attacked a convoy believed to be carrying aides of toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Three of the guards were still being treated for their wounds, US officials said. The attack was carried out by a highly-secretive Special Forces unit known as Task Force 20.
Meanwhile, at least 12 people, including 10 suspected Islamists, were killed yesterday in a Yemeni government offensive on militants believed to be behind an attack on army medics, security forces said.
Yemeni troops besieged Islamists' hideouts in the mountainous Sarar area in the southern Abyan province on Monday, where an estimated 80 members of militant Yemeni group Islamic Jihad, which aims to topple the government, were said to be hiding.
Sources at Ibn al-Razi hospital in the provincial capital Zinjibar said they received the bodies of six suspected militants and two soldiers killed in the fighting. Five soldiers were also wounded, they said.
Security sources said about 30 suspected militants were captured, before the fighting died down. Yemeni troops continue to surround the area, where other suspected militants are still entrenched, they said.
Earlier troops pounded the mountains with missiles and artillery as helicopters flew overhead before special forces moved against the militants.
It was the latest offensive in a crackdown on militants in Yemen, where there have been several attacks on Western targets, including the 2000 bombing of the US warship Cole and 2002's attack on the French supertanker Limburg.
"The shelling has stopped now and troops are looking for the suspects," a journalist travelling with Yemeni forces said.