War News for Saturday, February 26, 2011

The DoD is reporting a new death unreported by the military. Staff Sgt. Jerome Firtamag died Wednesday, February 24th somewhere in the United States after contracting a non-combat related illness in Kandahar, Afghanistan on Wednesday, December 1st.


Warning Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan

Pakistan Demands Data on C.I.A. Contractors


Reported security incidents

Baiji
#1: Gunmen attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery on Saturday, killing a guard and detonating bombs that sparked a fire and forced the facility to shut down, officials said. The assailants, carrying pistols fitted with silencers, broke into the Beiji refinery around 3:30 a.m., attacked the guards and planted bombs near some production units for benzene and kerosene, said the spokesman for Salahuddin province, Mohammed al-Asi. One guard was killed and another wounded, al-Asi said. By midmorning, firefighters were still trying to extinguish the blaze, said Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad.



Afghanistan: "The Forgotten War"
#1: A suicide bomber has blown himself up at a sports field in northwestern Afghanistan, killing at least four people. Governor of Faryab province, Abdul Haq Shafiq, says the bomber attacked Saturday while people were playing buzkashi, a traditional Afghan sport in which players on horseback wrangle for a headless goat carcass. He says four were killed and 19 people were wounded. Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for the Afghan Minister of Interior, says the bomber attacked in Shirin Tagab district.

#2: Nine civilians, including women and children, were killed by a roadside bomb Saturday in eastern Afghanistan, a police official said. The explosion occurred in Lakhan, a remote village in Khost province, provincial deputy police chief Yaqub Khan said. 'Three men, two women and four children were martyred in the blast,' he said. 'An investigation is under way.'

#3: In Kabul, police said three rockets were fired Saturday morning in a public area in the capital but caused no damage.

Militants have fired two rockets into Bagram Air Field in Kabul, the main US base in war-ravaged Afghanistan amid a surge in violence against the US-led forces in the country. The rocket attack on the US base -- located 11 kilometers southeast of Charikar in Afghanistan's Parwan province -- took place late Friday, a Press TV correspondent reported. Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, has claimed responsibility for the attack. Earlier, two rockets targeted central parts of Afghanistan's capital Kabul in an attack that left no casualties and caused damages to only a few buildings, officials say.


DoD: Staff Sgt. Jerome Firtamag