Tagged: War

There's a tense calm at South Sudan's front line, just 10 miles from the frontier with Sudan, its neighbor to the north. South Sudanese commander Maj. Gen. Mangar Buong says his troops remain on alert and on the defensive.

There is not a civilian in sight. They all fled the area, known as Panakuach, after Sudan's recent aerial bombardments and escalating concerns about a full-scale war.

South Sudan's soldiers sing morale-boosting tunes to rally the forces and keep their spirits up. They've dug trenches in the black earth, which is littered with bullet casings and remnants of what they say are bombs dropped by Sudan's air force.

When President Obama travels to Colombia this weekend for the Summit of the Americas, he'll be stepping into a vigorous debate about the drug war that could be awkward for the United States.

Some Latin American leaders, who also happen to be strong U.S. allies, say the American-sponsored war on drugs is failing and that new options need to be considered.

One proposal they want to discuss is legalizing some drugs — a move the U.S. strongly opposes.

Over the past four decades, the drug war has become increasingly bloody, and violence is now numbingly common across much of Central America and northern Mexico.

April 6 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo. It was the longest siege of a capital city in modern history, and produced the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II.

Over three-and-a-half years of war, 100,000 people were killed, and half of Bosnia's population of 4.4 million — made up of a plurality of Muslims — fled their homes.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli covered the war and reports that today, despite the intervention of the international community, ethnic division is deeply entrenched in what some analysts describe as a failed state.

Even Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, has its Occupy movement, consisting of dozens of tents outside the government building.

Nearly four months after Pakistan closed the main supply lines for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the shutdown is creating hardship for Pakistani truckers and is forcing the U.S. to turn to costly and less-efficient alternatives.

The Pakistani move came after an errant U.S. airstrike left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead along the Afghan frontier back in November.

Shortly after that episode, the Shirin Jinnah terminal in the southern port city of Karachi ground to a halt. Normally it's a busy place, with oil tankers rumbling through the facility day and night. But these days, row upon row of oil tankers, some 5,000 of them, sit idle.

In a nondescript apartment room in Turkey, just across the border from Syria, clouds of cigarette smoke drift toward the ceiling as Syrian opposition activists ponder how to keep people and supplies moving across the border.

Abu Jafaar is the alias of a Syrian smuggler who has been dodging Syrian army patrols for the past several months.

He says the smugglers are still getting back and forth, but the Syrian army has begun occupying entire villages to block their path. They have to be very careful when villagers rise up and protest, because that attracts the security forces.

Syrian civilians fleeing the army's assault on rebel-held neighborhoods are also crossing the border, into Turkey and Lebanon, with tales of horrific damage and brutal killings.

All wars bring innovations — in weapons, and also in ways to repair the damage done. Penicillin is one of the more famous examples: It came into use as a treatment for troops in World War II.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought their own breakthroughs, none more dramatic than the prosthetics that come close to giving back what has been lost. And big advances in treating grievous injuries have meant many more troops coming home alive.

There are enough wounded soldiers who want to stay in uniform that the military is finding ways to accommodate the disabled — and that has led to a grand experiment called the Wounded Warrior Home at the Army's Fort Belvoir in Virginia.