Paramilitary

They're a ragtag team of about 1,000 young, impoverished men who sometimes shoot one another by accident or stick machine guns out windows and spray the area without looking. Yet they've also set up clever ambushes, demonstrated surprising resilience and executed defensive maneuvers that have impressed the U.S. military. After a week of butting heads with Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi army, U.S.

Police are investigating whether a twin suicide bombing at the home of a top paramilitary official that killed at least 23 people in Quetta on Wednesday is linked to the recent arrest of three top Al Qaeda operatives in the Pakistani city. Brig. Farrukh Shahzad, deputy head of the Frontier Corps paramilitary force for Baluchistan province, survived the morning attack but his wife was killed, police officials in the southern city said. More than 50 people were injured in the blasts.

Gunmen believed to be Maoist rebels killed at least 26 paramilitary personnel on Tuesday in a roadside ambush in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh, authorities said. The gunfight, which lasted for about three hours, occurred about 3 p.m. in the state's heavily forested Bastar region as the 63-member Central Reserve Police Force patrol was returning from a "road-opening mission" in preparation for a threatened two-day rebel strike expected to start Wednesday. Maoist rebels, who control a large swath of Indian territory, often erect roadblocks in jungle areas they control, which the government tries to raze to reassert its authority.

Mexican officials on Monday announced the capture of one of the country's most wanted fugitives, an army deserter who authorities say helped create the vicious Zetas gang and is suspected in the slaying of a U.S. federal agent. Mexican federal police paraded Jesus Rejon Aguilar before reporters early Monday, a day after he was caught — not in the Zetas stronghold of northeastern Mexico but barely an hour outside Mexico City. Among numerous alleged crimes, Rejon was wanted in connection with the Feb. 15 ambush death of Jaime Zapata, an agent with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on temporary assignment in Mexico.

The scandal tying political supporters of President Alvaro Uribe with outlawed paramilitary leaders widened Monday as prosecutors filed electoral fraud charges against Trino Luna, the governor of the influential coastal state of Magdalena. Also, Interpol disclosed that it had issued an international arrest warrant on kidnapping charges for Alvaro Araujo Noguera, a former congressman and minister who is the father of former Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo.

Guatemala agreed to pay former paramilitary fighters hundreds of millions of dollars -- $600 each -- for helping the army crush a rebel uprising in the 1980s. The former fighters had threatened to block roads and airports if Congress failed to give them the money. Human rights groups blame the paramilitary groups for some of Guatemala's worst war crimes, including massacres, torture and rapes. In 1999, a U.N.

About 550 right-wing Colombian paramilitary fighters turned in their weapons Saturday, bringing to more than 3,000 the number of such fighters who have laid down their arms since the government's pacification program began. In Saturday's demobilization ceremony in the western province of Valle del Cauca, Hernan Hernandez, commander of the Calima Front, asked forgiveness "for all the errors we have committed." The Calima bloc is part of the 20,000-strong United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.

"Colombia on the Upswing" (editorial, Aug. 4) paints a rosy picture of trends in Colombia under President Alvaro Uribe. Unfortunately, some trends are not so rosy. The negotiation process between the government and the right-wing paramilitary terrorists has received a lot of attention lately. But it's like the boss negotiating with his employees. The paramilitary groups campaigned for Uribe's election using violence or the threat of violence. In some cities and regions with a heavy military presence, the paramilitaries are the de facto government.

A founder of Colombia's anti-rebel paramilitary movement laid down his weapon Tuesday, ending nearly three decades of outlawed jungle warfare. Ramon Isaza was joined by 990 fighters from his Medio Magdalena bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, handing over 754 weapons, 15 vehicles and abundant munitions.

NORTHERN IRELAND * Outlawed paramilitary groups on both sides of Northern Ireland's religious divide are raising millions of dollars a year through armed robbery, protection rackets, drug trafficking, and smuggling fuel, alcohol and cigarettes, Britain's House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee said in a report. The panel said that the Irish Republican Army collects $7.

Twin suicide bombings Friday that killed at least 80 paramilitary recruits in northwest Pakistan, in an attack that Taliban militants said was to avenge the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. commandos, could trigger new doubts among Pakistanis about the value of Islamabad's already rocky relationship with Washington. The bombers targeted Frontier Constabulary recruits who had just completed six months of training and were boarding vans outside the training center's main gate to go on a 10-day leave, police and survivors said.

Two bomb blasts outside a Pakistani paramilitary base killed 80 people near the city of Charsadda on Friday in what appeared to be the first major militant attack in the country since the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Taliban took responsibility for the bombings in a phone call to Associated Press. "We have done this to avenge the Abbottabad incident," the group told AP, while warning that it was also planning attacks on Americans living inside Pakistan.

During the decadelong rule of Laurent Gbagbo, his subjects in Ivory Coast learned to pay attention not to his words but to his deeds. His favorite theme was national pride, the belief that Ivorians stood out among their West African neighbors and controlled their own destiny. But behind the positive rhetoric was a dark and sometimes threatening brand of patriotism that raised an unspoken question: Who truly belongs in Ivory Coast? The last decade has been marked by boiling nationalism and xenophobic violence, with killings and harassment of northerners and Ivorians of foreign descent.

In military terms, it might be called a disproportionate preemptive strike, one that underscored how nervous the Chinese government is about pro-democracy demonstrations taking place thousands of miles away in the Middle East. The merest whiff of protests in Beijing and elsewhere in support of the so-called jasmine revolution brought out a massive showing of paramilitary, uniformed and undercover police Sunday. The calls for demonstrations in 13 Chinese cities apparently originated on a Chinese-language U.S.-based website called Boxun.

Ending a years-long manhunt, troops in Colombia have found the corpse of Pedro "the Knife" Guerrero, one of the country's top right-wing paramilitary leaders and drug traffickers, President Juan Manuel Santos said Wednesday. Guerrero, whose nickname refers to the weapon he favored while terrifying peasants he suspected of aiding leftist rebels, was believed to have been mortally wounded in a gun battle Christmas morning when 120 helicopter-borne commandos of the special Junglas anti-narcotics police force raided his camp near the remote town of Mapiripan in Meta state.

Gunmen believed to be Maoist rebels killed at least 26 paramilitary personnel on Tuesday in a roadside ambush in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh, authorities said. The gunfight, which lasted for about three hours, occurred about 3 p.m. in the state's heavily forested Bastar region as the 63-member Central Reserve Police Force patrol was returning from a "road-opening mission" in preparation for a threatened two-day rebel strike expected to start Wednesday. Maoist rebels, who control a large swath of Indian territory, often erect roadblocks in jungle areas they control, which the government tries to raze to reassert its authority.

Five men and a woman were arraigned in federal court Monday on charges stemming from allegations that the group ran illegal paramilitary operations in wilderness areas in the state, including stockpiling weapons and constructing a large underground bunker in Angeles National Forest. Of the six, two were held without bail: Peter Thomas Clark, 34, of Culver City, and John Delacruz, 30, of Los Angeles.

Suspected members of Colombia's largest paramilitary group killed two police officers and wounded another, authorities said. If that is true, the attack in southwestern Colombia would have violated a nearly 4-week-old cease-fire declared by the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, a coalition of groups throughout Colombia. It was not immediately clear how the alleged killings would affect government plans to negotiate with paramilitary leaders.

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Peshawar, Pakistan -- Officials in Pakistan's volatile tribal belt are investigating a recent airstrike by Pakistani military jets that villagers say killed at least 50 civilians in the Khyber region along the Afghan border. The airstrike occurred Saturday in the Tirah Valley, a swath of dense woods that Taliban militants have been fleeing to as Pakistani troops have stepped up pressure on the insurgent group's strongholds in surrounding tribal areas.

Maoist rebels in eastern India killed at least 76 paramilitary troops Tuesday, authorities said, underscoring the continued strength of an insurgency that India has tried for decades to wipe out. The dawn attack in Chhattisgarh state was among the deadliest by the guerrillas in memory. S.R. Kalluri, a deputy police inspector in densely forested Dantewada district, where the attack occurred, told local reporters that the troops were on an extended patrol and stopped to rest Monday night.