ANKARA (AP) – Turkey will not contribute combat troops to the NATO force in Afghanistan, Turkey’s military chief was quoted as saying yesterday. Turkey has NATO’s second-largest military after the US, but keeps just 1,200 soldiers in Afghanistan, to provide humanitarian assistance and help with the reconstruction of the country. The troops are based around the relatively safer Kabul area, and along with several other allies Turkey is refusing to deploy more soldiers to Afghanistan’s dangerous south and east. “Just one month after my appointment (in 2006), I said that not a single soldier would be sent to Afghanistan within the scope of the fight against terrorism, and my views have not changed,” the Milliyet newspaper quoted General Yasar Buyukanit as saying yesterday.

SARAJEVO (AP) – Officials say two workers have died and a third has been seriously injured while clearing mines in northern Bosnia. Police in the nearby city of Tuzla say the accident occurred yesterday morning, and doctors are fighting for the life of the third de-miner. Fields of land mines, left over from the 1992-95 Bosnian war, jeopardize the safety of 900,000 people in Bosnia – the most mine-infested country in Europe – according to Prime Minister Nikola Spiric. Spiric launched a campaign yesterday to raise donations.

Turkish authorities have quarantined a northwestern village close to the border with Greece after bird flu was detected among chickens, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The measure was adopted after samples from a chicken from the village of Esetce, near the town of Ipsala, tested positive for the virus, district Governor Aylin Kirci Duman told the news agency. It was not immediately clear whether the virus was the deadly H5N1 strain that can kill humans. (AFP)

The war crimes trial of a former head of Serbian intelligence has been postponed until April while he undergoes diagnosis for possible depression, the court in The Hague ruled yesterday. Charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, Jovica Stanisic, 57, was the head of state security at the Serb Interior Ministry from 1991 to 1998. He has frequently tried to have his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) stopped on medical grounds. Stanisic “suffers from osteoporosis, an intestinal problem, kidney stones and also from a deep depression,” ICTY spokeswoman Victoria Enault said yesterday. (AFP)