WAR UPDATES

IRAQ

> Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman said Monday the U.S. military has advised Iraqi authorities it will have to shut down security operations, infrastructure improvements and assistance to ministries if the year ends without a new security agreement or a renewed U.N. mandate for American forces. Iraqi politicians are considering a draft agreement that would keep U.S. troops in Iraq through 2011, but key Shiite politicians say the pact cannot win approval in its current form.

> U.S. forces fought off an attack in the early hours of the morning Monday against a military base, killing five of the assailants, in a Baghdad neighborhood that once was a notorious Shiite militia stronghold. Hours later, a roadside bomb exploded in the same district, tearing through a minibus and killing three civilians and wounding six others, Iraqi police said.

> A rash of so-called “sticky bomb” attacks, in which militants target individuals by attaching explosives to their vehicles, killed at least three people. The first struck a car carrying a doctor and his friend as they left his Baghdad clinic, killing the two men and wounding seven other people. Another bomb hidden under the car of a director-general in the Trade Ministry exploded in the garage of a hospital he was visiting in the capital, seriously wounding the official and a civilian, and in northern Iraq, a bomb stuck to a car in Tuz Khormato exploded, killing an Iraqi soldier who was driving.

AFGHANISTAN

> Insurgents shot down a U.S. helicopter after exchanging fire with its crew in Wardak province in central Afghanistan on Monday. The crew of the helicopter was rescued and at least four militants were killed in the exchange.

> A suicide bomber wearing a police uniform blew himself up inside a police station in Baghlan province in northern Afghanistan, killing two American soldiers and wounding five other people. The bomber entered the station in Pul-e-Khumri, the provincial capital, while Afghan officials were meeting with U.S. troops advising a police training program, police said.

> The number of Afghans who think they are more prosperous today than under the Taliban regime has dropped significantly over the past two years, a U.S.-funded survey released today said. More than half the Afghans surveyed in 2006 believed they were more prosperous than at any time under the hard-line Islamic regime’s rule in the late 1990s. But only 36 percent of 6,600 Afghans surveyed this year felt the same way. The results mirror the deteriorating security and economic situation in the country, caused by the Taliban-led insurgency but also a global rise in food prices that has had a severe impact on vulnerable Afghans.

PAKISTAN

> A suspected U.S. missile strike killed up to 20 people in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, officials said, the latest salvo in an intensifying assault on militant hideouts near the Afghan border. The strike hit a house in Mandata Raghzai village in the South Waziristan region that reportedly belonged to a lieutenant of a local Taliban chief.

> Elsewhere in the frontier zone, a car bomb killed two people in a parking lot near government buildings and the Iranian consulate in Quetta, and a suicide attacker demolished a checkpoint in the Mohmand tribal region, injuring eight police and troops.