The ambitious offensive, named Operation Mountain Thrust, aims to cripple the strengthening insurgency before Nato takes command of southern Afghanistan next month.

The heaviest combat is expected in the lawless mountains spanning western Uruzgan province and north-eastern Helmand, where 3,300 British troops are deploying and Britain suffered its first combat fatality last weekend.

Less intensive operations will target pockets of Kandahar and Zabul provinces. US military officials announcing the operation this morning said reconstruction activities would follow.

"This is not just about killing or capturing extremists," US spokesman Tom Collins told reporters in Kabul. "We are going to go into these areas, take out the security threat and establish conditions where government forces, government institutions [and] humanitarian organisations can move in … and begin the real work that needs to be done."

The British troops will fight alongside 2,300 Americans, 2,200 Canadians and about 3,500 Afghans.

On Wednesday, the US military announced that an American soldier had been killed and two others wounded when their patrol was ambushed in Sangin district of Helmand. Another coalition soldier, whose nationality was not disclosed, died in eastern Kunar province.

Dilbar Jan Arman, the governor of Zabul, one of the four targeted provinces, said US forces and local leaders had been planning the operation for the past two months. "We will search for the Taliban wherever they are. We seek to disrupt their underground networks. We hope it will be a success," he told the Guardian in the provincial capital, Qalat.

As he spoke, US Black Hawk helicopters circled the town centre and an American armoured convoy rumbled through the streets, but there were no other signs of military activity.

The 11,000-strong multinational operation is the broadest and most ambitious strike against the Taliban since 2001. The previous largest offensive involved 2,500 American troops and was confined to Kunar province.

Benjamin Freakley, the US major general commanding operations in Afghanistan, said the troops would attack Taliban safe havens across the four provinces simultaneously.

"They'll be in one area, they'll move out of that area, they'll conduct an attack in another area, then move back to a safe haven," he told the Associated Press. "This is our approach to put simultaneous pressure on the enemy's networks, to cause their leaders to make mistakes, and to attack those leaders."

A dramatic surge in fighting since mid-May has killed about 550 people, according to US and Afghan military figures. The Taliban has suffered the vast majority of casualties under US and British bombs; at least 11 coalition soldiers have also died.

Information about civilian deaths is notoriously difficult to obtain due to the inaccessibility of battle sites, but local human rights groups have reported dozens of casualties.

Afghan officials in Qalat welcomed the coming offensive against the Taliban, who reportedly killed at least three people in a recent ambush on a police checkpoint. But many officials also blamed Pakistan for allowing the insurgents to shelter, train and rearm in the lawless tribal areas that run along the Afghan border.

"The Taliban is a disease, like typhoid," said Muhammad Hanif, Zabul's director of education. "And the ISI [Pakistan's intelligence agency] is the germ that causes it."

Pakistani officials have repeatedly and angrily denied any collusion with the Taliban, saying it is impossible to control the 900-mile, largely unpatrolled border.

Dr Sutter said one of the main reasons the US would remain a strong security presence in Asia was that Asian governments were wary of each other. "The countries do not trust each other," he said in a speech organised by the Australian-American Association and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

"At the end of the day, the United States does not want anybody's territory."

He said US lobby groups were promoting a panic over issues such as the trade deficit and intellectual property rights. But the Bush Administration would be unlikely to move towards protectionism. "I don't think there will be a big change in policy as big business is intertwined with China," he said.

The veteran foreign policy analyst who specialises in Asian affairs said concern over China's growing power in Asia had some parallels with the unsubstantiated fears of Japanese dominance in the 1980s and the Soviet Union years earlier.

China was now attempting to allay foreign concerns about its growth and had steered away from taking any significant risks in diplomacy.

"They don't do anything hard," he said, with the exceptions of the flashpoint issues of Taiwan, the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong and more recently Japan.

Dr Sutter advised Australia to steer the middle course in its relationship with China.

"Australia has interests and they should be laid out," he said. "Australia ... doesn't want trouble over the Taiwan issue."

Dr Sutter's address was part of "The World According To Bush" series sponsored by The Age

Zigui county police had called Mr Fu in to discuss the interview broadcast by German public television station Das Erste last month in which Mr Fu talked about being threatened and beaten for complaining about the Government's failure to pay compensation for the forced relocation of people displaced by the huge dam.

In a letter to China's ambassador to Germany, ARD chairman Jobst Plog said: "It is beyond doubt that the attack was an attack of revenge, among other things, for his comment on German television." Professor Plog called on the Chinese Government to ensure that Mr Fu receives proper medical treatment and is protected from any more violence and intimidation, saying such incidents threatened to mar international coverage of the 2008 Olympics.

Professor Plog's letter, released publicly yesterday, said Mr Fu was under police surveillance in hospital in Yichang city but his family was barred from contacting him. German media have reported that the German Foreign Ministry has demanded an explanation from the Chinese Government through its Beijing embassy.

Human Rights in China said the attack highlights the risks that activists faced when they spoke to the media. The group said Mr Fu was struck from behind, the blow breaking his neck and leaving him paralysed from the neck down but able to speak.

There has been a disturbing rise in the use of hired thugs to intimidate activists. This year four men were executed after being convicted of carrying out an attack on six villagers in Hebei province who had been protesting against the seizure of their land for a power plant. The people who hired them have not been arrested.

The gas ball is about three million light years across, or about five thousand million times the size of our solar system. It appears from our perspective as a circular X-ray glow with a comet-like tail nearly half the size of the moon.

"The size and velocity of this gas ball is truly fantastic," said Dr Alexis Finoguenov, adjunct assistant professor of physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and an associated scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. "This is likely a massive building block being delivered to one of the largest assembly of galaxies we know."


The gas ball is in a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266, millions of light years from Earth, thus posing absolutely no danger to our solar system. Abell 3266 contains hundreds of galaxies and great amounts of hot gas that is nearly a hundred million degrees. Both the cluster gas and the giant gas ball are held together by the gravitational attraction of unseen dark matter.

"What interests astronomers is not just the size of the gas ball but the role it plays in the formation and evolution of structure in the universe," said Dr Francesco Miniati, who worked on this data at UMBC while visiting from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.

Abell cluster 3266 is part of the Horologium-Reticulum super-cluster and is one of the most massive galaxy clusters in the southern sky. It is still actively growing in size, as indicated by the gas ball, and will become one of the largest mass concentrations in the nearby universe.


Using XMM-Newton data, the science team produced an entropy map (entropy is a thermodynamical property that provides a measure of disorder). The map allows for the separation of the cold and dense gas of the comet from the hotter and more rarefied gas of the cluster. This is based on X-ray spectra. The data show with remarkable detail the process of gas being stripped from the comet's core and forming a large tail containing lumps of colder and denser gas. The researchers estimate that a sun's worth of mass is lost every hour.

"In Abell 3266 we are seeing structure formation in action," said Prof. Mark Henriksen (UMBC), co-author of the results. "Dark matter is the gravitational glue holding the gas ball together. But as it races through the galaxy cluster, a tug-of-war ensues where the galaxy cluster eventually wins, stripping off and dispersing gas that perhaps one day will seed star and galaxy growth within the cluster."


Note to editors

The findings, resulting from a research effort led by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, appear in the 1 June 2006 issue of the Astrophysical Journal (volume 643, page 790).

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray mission was launched in December 1999. With its powerful mirrors, it is helping to solve many mysteries about the most energetic phenomena taking place in the Universe.


For more information

Alexis Finoguenov, UMBC Dept. of Physics (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Max Planck Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany)
E-mail: alexis @ mpe.mpg.de

Mark Henriksen, UMBC Dept. of Physics (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
E-mail: henrikse @ umbc.edu

Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist
E-mail: norbert.schartel @ sciops.esa.int