World briefs

Afghans still need aid on security, U.N. says

WASHINGTON - As insurgents staged attacks Monday aimed at disrupting Afghanistan's preparations for elections, a top U.N. official said there is little time left for international security assistance if voting is to take place in September.

U.N. envoy Jean Arnault said in Kabul that security was not improving and that more forces are needed to keep the election process moving forward.

"We are now facing direct attacks with fairly heavy weapons against the office of the electoral process," Arnault said. "This is clearly an attempt at undermining the process and again it stresses how important it is for the international community to do more in order to assist this process."

The issue is likely to come to a head soon, as leaders of NATO - which now oversees the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul and which has said it would provide more troops - are to meet Sunday and Monday in Turkey.

The NATO-led international force has about 6,500 troops in Afghanistan, and the United States has about 18,000 there. Training continues in an effort to expand the Afghan National Army and the police forces.

VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia - Assailants armed with grenade- and rocket-launchers seized the Interior Ministry headquarters in Ingushetia, a Russian region bordering warring Chechnya, killing the acting minister, a ministry official said today. Attacks were also reported elsewhere in Ingushetia.

The Interior Ministry official said it was not immediately clear who the attackers were, but said some of them were shouting "Allahu akhbar" (God is great) - a frequent cry of Chechnya's separatist rebels as their insurgency increasingly comes under the influence of radical Islam.

Fighting from the 4-year-old Chechen war has occasionally spilled into Ingushetia, highlighting the Russian military's ineffectiveness against the rebels despite having heavier weapons and far superior manpower.

The attack on the ministry building in the city of Nazran began late Monday, the official said on condition of anonymity. He later said other attackers seized police buildings in Ordzhonikidzevskaya, just over the border from Chechnya, and in Karabulak.

Acting Ingush Interior Minister Abukar Koshtoyev was wounded in the first minutes of the fighting in Nazran and was taken to Vladikavkaz in neighboring North Ossetia, where he died, the ministry official said.

DAMASCUS, Syria - Police dispersed scores of protesters Monday who had gathered for a sit-in at a main square to call for the release of political prisoners.

Eleven pro-democracy and human rights groups had called the sit-in to mark what they called "Syrian Political Prisoner Day." But police quickly surrounded Arnous Square and dispersed the congregating crowd.

The protesters left peacefully.

Later, the Human Rights Association in Syria condemned the police for "violating the right to a peaceful gathering and to freedom of opinion and expression."

Protests without arrests or harsh police action have been almost unknown in Syria.

The rights group appealed to international and regional human rights groups to "interfere with the Syrian government to push it to stop such violations and release all prisoners of opinion and conscience."

Earlier, the group had issued a statement naming 2,000 people detained in Syrian prisons and called on the government to release them and "to uncover the fate of those who were subject to compulsory disappearance and to ban all forms of physical and psychological torture."

OSLO, Norway - Striking oil workers threatened Monday to escalate a labor conflict by pulling additional crew members from an offshore platform, at a time when oil prices have been rising because of escalating violence in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Norway is the world's third-largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia, and the strike was expected to reduce production, roughly 3-million barrels a day, by about 15 percent.

About 200 oil workers went on strike Friday after failing to settle a new contract during state-led mediation.

On Monday, the Federation of Oil Workers' Trade Unions said it was ordering 16 additional workers to strike at ExxonMobil's Ringhorne field by midnight Wednesday.

Union leader Terje Nustad said the group had not decided whether to escalate the strike further. He said the unions would not consider a complete stop in production, but might reduce flows at some fields "to make the companies bleed."

Contract talks failed largely because of a dispute over pensions, which employers wanted to review as part of a revision of contracts.

A major disruption of Norway's production would likely prompt the government to use its power of binding arbitration to order strikers back to work.

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