China says 2,500 wartime Japanese chemical weapons destroyed
China’s military said Jan. 17 that more than 2,500 abandoned Japanese wartime chemical weapons collected from northern China, including Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, have been destroyed in a four-year disposal process.
Japan and China have been working together on the biggest chemical weapon cleanup effort in history, a decades-long, diplomatically sensitive project that is seen in China as a reminder of the wartime atrocities it suffered during Japan’s 1937 invasion and subsequent occupation.
Under the terms of a 1997 treaty, Tokyo is responsible for cleaning up hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons left behind by its occupation troops at the end of World War II. China says thousands of Chinese have been killed or hurt since the end of the war in 1945 by accidents related to the buried weapons.
China’s ministry of defense said Tuesday that the weapons’ disposal at a facility in Shijiazhuang city in Hebei province, neighboring Beijing, had finished in a “safe, orderly and smooth manner.” The weapons are generally burned in specially designed furnaces.
The remaining pieces of Japanese chemical weapons are difficult to find and destroy because they were scattered widely, the ministry said. It urged Japan to “increase manpower and resources” to finish the job.
China has repeatedly urged Japan to speed up the project, which was initially scheduled to be completed in 2007 but has hit delays.
China estimates that Japanese troops left behind more than 2 million chemical weapons, mostly in the northeastern region of Manchuria. The cleanup of the biggest cache — a site with nearly 700,000 chemical bombs at Haerbaling in Jilin province — is scheduled to be finished in 2022.
The Japanese government said in 2015 that it finished destroying another cache at a facility in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. AP
UN: Iraq’s battle for Mosul has made over 148,000 homeless
The United Nations says the massive Iraqi military operation to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State group has made more than 148,000 people homeless.
The U.N. said in a statement released Jan. 16 that nearly 12,500 people were forced to flee their homes just over the past week.
The statement also says that the fighting over Iraq’s second-largest city continues to inflict relatively high civilian casualties, with more than 1,500 wounded taken hospitals in the nearby city of Irbil for trauma care.
IS fighters have repeatedly targeted civilians trying to flee neighborhoods still under militant control.
More than a million people were estimated to still be living in Mosul in October, when Iraqi forces launched the operation to retake the country’s second largest city from IS. AP
Cambodia cancels military exercise with U.S.
Cambodia has informed the United States that it is canceling an annual joint military exercise this year, even though planning for the event had already begun.
Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Chhum Socheath said Jan. 16 the Angkor Sentinel exercise had to be postponed because Cambodian forces would be unable to fully participate as a result of two important events: local elections in June and a six-month campaign to eradicate drug-related crime.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Jay Raman confirmed in an e-mail that the exercises for 2017 and 2018 have been canceled. He said military exchanges and training programs are not affected.
Southeast Asian nations, even traditional allies of the United States such as the Philippines, have recently drawn closer to China as Beijing flexes its diplomatic and military muscle in the region. AP
Air Force agency reports $8.1 billion in foreign military sales
An agency at Ohio’s largest military base has handled $8.1 billion in foreign military sales in fiscal year 2016.
The Dayton Daily News reports the amount is a drop of more than half from the prior year. Air Force Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate sales reached $19 billion in fiscal year 2015.
Gen. Gregory Gutterman expects the Wright-Patterson-headquartered agency to see a “spike” in future sales with the roll out of items that include a new Boeing KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueling tanker.
According to the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, upcoming deals include a $21.1 billion expected agreement with Qatar to purchase 72 of Boeing’s F-15 Eagle strike fighter jets and a $1.9 billion deal with Japan to buy four aerial tankers. AP