Cease Fires

After weeks of escalating battles with government troops, Taliban militants on Wednesday declared a cease-fire -- a move likely to frustrate U.S. officials who have urged Pakistan to act decisively against Islamic radicals ensconced in the country's tribal belt. The government of President Pervez Musharraf did not confirm that a truce had been struck, but Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz said the government was ready for "dialogue" with the militants.

Everything about Muqtada Sadr's announcement Friday that he was renewing a six-month cease-fire by his Mahdi Army militia appeared choreographed to reinforce his ascent from rabble-rouser to respected Shiite Muslim cleric and political power-broker. Until the last minute, Sadr kept Iraq on tenterhooks about whether he would extend the truce, which has been credited with helping to reduce sectarian violence and attacks against U.S. forces.

Hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr threatened "open war" as Iraqi and U.S. forces battled his Mahdi Army militia in two key strongholds Saturday, raising the specter that a truce credited with reducing violence could soon end. The warning was the closest the cleric has come to canceling the truce he called in August, and it coincided with an Iranian denunciation of U.S. airstrikes in support of the Shiite-led government's military offensive.

Radical cleric Muqtada Sadr reminded his followers Friday to observe a truce that has been nearing collapse, pulling back from a showdown against fellow Shiite Muslims in the government. In a statement read in mosques during Friday prayers, Sadr said his recent threat of "open war" was aimed only at U.S.-led forces and he urged his followers not to fight Iraqi troops.

Several Palestinian militant groups signed off Wednesday on a Hamas-sponsored temporary truce proposal that the Islamist movement says could bring calm to Israel's southern border with the Gaza Strip and ease the 10-month economic siege of Gaza. But a cease-fire appears unlikely. Israeli officials say it would merely be a pretext for Hamas and other militant groups to rearm for a new round of hostilities.

The corniche buzzes at night: drivers honking to friends on the sidewalk, teenagers joy-riding rickety motorboats along the murky Shatt al Arab, families lining up for rides on the yellow-lit Ferris wheel. Mazen Abdul Kareem gazes at the water, remembering when the gunmen trawled the boardwalk in their tinted-window Toyotas. Even then, he would come, just looking out where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers merge and flow into the Persian Gulf, wondering whether his time was near.

For Batya Ibo, it came down to a simple, everyday act. "Today I wasn't afraid to take out the garbage," she said. "The most trivial thing. But before, leaving the house was a tactical decision: yes code red, no code red." Code red, the alert for incoming rockets, was not sounded here Thursday or in other Israeli towns and farming communities bordering the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian militants fired two rockets at southern Israel from the Gaza Strip on Thursday, breaching a cease-fire for a second time. The truce, reached with Egyptian mediation between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls the strip, has largely held since it took effect June 19, but sporadic violations by other groups are threatening to unravel it, much like previous agreements.

The first Russian tanks rumbled past in the morning, witnesses said, startling the townspeople and then drifting away as casually as they had arrived. By afternoon, the tanks were back in a haze of smoke and dust. Russian soldiers lounged on top, sprawled in their fatigues, shutting down the roads out of the city. Russia and Georgia had signed a cease-fire agreement the night before, but it already seemed like an illusion.

An uneasy calm returned Thursday to this battered Congolese city as a tenuous cease-fire halted clashes and nervous residents struggled to resume their regular lives. Many of the thousands of panicked people who fled regional displacement camps a day earlier and stormed into Goma, a city in northeastern Congo, began traveling back to the nearby camps.