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20 thousand US troops will stay in Iraq for at least another three months, said Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld. We are talking about military personnel who have already spent a year in Iraq and were scheduled to return home this month. Coalition forces are now facing the most serious insurgent resistance in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Therefore, according to the command, the withdrawal of even a small part of the troops from Iraq is now impossible. The head of the Pentagon admitted that events in Iraq were unfolding according to a slightly different scenario, and the number of casualties on the American side since the beginning of April came as a complete surprise to him. In the last two weeks of clashes with radical Shiites and Sunnis alone, the Americans have lost 93 people killed. There are currently 137 thousand US troops in Iraq.
European politicians have rejected Osama Bin Laden's proposal for peace between Europe and al-Qaeda. The head of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, ruled out any negotiations with terrorists. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in Rome that negotiations with Osama bin Laden were "unthinkable." Britain "will not negotiate with militants", a senior British government official said, calling the idea "absurd".
A Palestinian woman was detained in the West Bank. The military said that there were 25 kilograms of explosives in her bag. Israelis believe that the woman wanted to blow herself up in Ariel, one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank. She was arrested at a checkpoint; the explosives were destroyed using a special robot.