US defence chief arrives in Saudi

A suicide bomber on a bicycle killed nine people outside the defence ministry in central Kabul on Saturday during a visit to the Afghan capital by new US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was holding talks in Riyadh on Wednesday with Saudi King Abdullah, with both sides concerned by Iranian intentions in the region and spiralling unrest in Yemen."Iran will be a major focus of their conversations, both in terms of the regional threat they pose but also lately in the role they've been playing in trying to exploit the unrest in the region to their advantage," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said ahead of the meeting.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates flew into Kabul on Tuesday for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and commanders about Washington's new strategy to send 30,000 extra troops to fight the Taliban.It is the first official US visit since President Barack Obama last week announced he would boost the the US deployment in Afghanistan to 100,000 to counter an increasingly virulent Taliban insurgency.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates flew into Kabul on Tuesday for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and commanders about Washington's new strategy to send 30,000 extra troops to fight the Taliban.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates arrived on Sunday in Oman where he is due to meet Sultan Qaboos before heading out to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast.Gates wants to get a first-hand look at the carrier and its crew, which run combat flights in support of the US-led war in Afghanistan, his press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters.The carrier is deployed in the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet's area of responsibility.

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates arrived in Riyadh on Wednesday to meet with Saudi King Abdullah, as the Arabian Peninsula is shaken by spiralling unrest in Yemen.

Two NATO troops were killed in an attack on Wednesday in the Taliban's heartland in southern Afghanistan, where US Defence Secretary Robert Gates met commanders as part of a review of the nine-year war.NATO's International Security Assistance Force gave no details of the attack and did not reveal the soldiers' nationalities in line with its policy.The deaths took to 682 the number of foreign troops killed in 2010, according to an AFP tally based on the independent icasualties.org website.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday held talks with commanders on a major ongoing offensive in southern Afghanistan and plans to move against the Taliban in Kandahar.Gates flew into Kandahar Air Base from Kabul, where he called an operation in the Marjah area of Helmand "only one of many battles still to come in a much longer campaign focused on protecting the people of Afghanistan."