Guerrillas

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Thursday fired a Katyusha rocket 10 1/2 miles into Israel, their deepest artillery strike yet, provoking some of the heaviest Israeli assaults in months. Nine Palestinians were killed in the day's fighting. The rocket landed harmlessly on the northern outskirts of the coastal city of Ashkelon.

Under cover of darkness Tuesday, American soldiers crept across a bridge where just days before insurgents had left a chilling warning: a severed head with a message identifying the Iraqi victim as a U.S. collaborator scrawled across the forehead with a black marker. Through the biting cold, the troops crunched down a winding gravel road, past frost-glazed reeds, empty storefronts and spacious homes surrounded by orange and pomegranate trees.

A stocky man in a dusty dishdasha and red-checked scarf squatted under a tree as U.S. soldiers dug up his yard looking for weapons or other incriminating evidence. Staff Sgt. Mario Cavazos knelt in front of him in the finger-numbing cold. "The reason we are here is because we have heard from townspeople that you have been kidnapping people. Is that true?" he asked through an interpreter. "No, I swear," the suspect said, shaking his head vigorously.

Striking at a prime symbol of the Western presence in Afghanistan, assailants armed with grenades, assault rifles and suicide vests stormed a heavily fortified luxury hotel in the heart of the capital Monday. The carefully coordinated assault killed at least six people, leaving trails of blood in the marble-floored lobby and forcing terrorized guests to cower behind locked doors or in the basement awaiting rescue.

In an unusual public criticism, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he believes NATO forces currently deployed in southern Afghanistan do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency, a deficiency that could be contributing to the rising violence in the fight against the Taliban. "I'm worried we're deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations," Gates said in an interview.

The Dutch Defense Ministry on Wednesday summoned the U.S. ambassador as other American allies denounced criticism of NATO forces in Afghanistan by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The U.S. ambassador, Roland Arnall, met with ministry officials to offer a "clarification of the comments" by Gates, said chief State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

Islamic extremists attacked and seized a small Pakistani army fort near the Afghan border, leaving at least 22 soldiers dead or missing. A military spokesman said this morning that the militants had left the fort and disappeared into the surrounding hills. Although the fighters did not gain significant ground in the attack Tuesday night on Sararogha Fort, they did further erode confidence in the U.S.

Pakistani authorities said they killed more than 70 Islamist militants in two separate clashes Friday and recaptured a fort in the largely lawless tribal region near the Afghan border. At last 50 militants who had assembled to attack a fort in the town of Laddah were killed by barrages of mortar and artillery fire, officials said. Meanwhile, army troops took back the abandoned Sipla Toi fort in the South Waziristan tribal region, the sources said.

Authorities said they had arrested a teenager who told them he would have been the next suicide bomber sent to target former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had she survived the Dec. 27 attack. The teen, identified as Aitzaz Shah, was arrested Friday in a mountainous region of the North-West Frontier Province and told investigators that he was not in Rawalpindi on the day Bhutto was slain.

The young man had been through a miserable few years. He had been rejected by the army and failed to finish his studies. Security officials kept summoning him for talks. At 25, he left his parents' home in the city, telling them he wanted to be a shepherd. They heard nothing more from him until newspapers reported that he was wanted in Germany for involvement in a plot to bomb a pair of trains.