2001 – The skipper of the USS Greeneville took the stand in a Navy court and accepted sole responsibility for the Feb. 9 collision of his submarine with a Japanese trawler off Hawaii that killed nine Japanese.
2002 – US began war games with South Korea, the biggest ever.
2002 – At Fort Drum, NY, a soldier was killed and 14 were injured when 2 artillery shells fell far short of their target.
2002 – In Bosnia the US Embassy was shut down to the public due to a possible terrorist threat.
2002 – In Lima, Peru, a car bomb explosion outside the US Embassy killed 9 people. Pres. Bush was scheduled to arrive 3 days later.
2003 – (9:34 p.m., 19 March EST) the military invasion of Iraq began. The invasion of Iraq, led by U.S. army General Tommy Franks, began under the codename “Operation Iraqi Liberation”, later renamed “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, the UK codename Operation Telic, and the Australian codename Operation Falconer. Coalition forces also cooperated with Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the north. Approximately forty other governments, the “U.S.-led coalition against Iraq,” participated by providing troops, equipment, services, security, and special forces, with 248,000 soldiers from the United States, 45,000 British soldiers, 2,000 Australian soldiers and 194 Polish soldiers from Special Forces unit GROM sent to Kuwait for the invasion. The invasion force was also supported by Iraqi Kurdish militia troops, estimated to number upwards of 70,000. According to General Tommy Franks, the objectives of the invasion were, “First, end the regime of Saddam Hussein. Second, to identify, isolate and eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Third, to search for, to capture and to drive out terrorists from that country. Fourth, to collect such intelligence as we can related to terrorist networks. Fifth, to collect such intelligence as we can related to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction. Sixth, to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian support to the displaced and to many needy Iraqi citizens. Seventh, to secure Iraq’s oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people. And last, to help the Iraqi people create conditions for a transition to a representative self-government.”
2003 – Some 600 US and Romanian ground troops in Afghanistan began Operation Valiant Strike, an intensified search for Taliban, al Qaeda and loyalists to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
2003 – Norwegian police arrested Mullah Krekar, the leader of a Kurdish guerrilla group suspected of links to al-Qaida, on kidnapping charges.
2003 – Turkey’s parliament approved a motion allowing over-flights for US warplanes. Turkey announced plans to send thousands of troops into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
2004 – NATO-led forces surrounded Kosovska Mitrovica in efforts to separate ethnic Albanians and Serbs and prevent a resurgence of attacks that killed 28 people and wounded 600. Ethnic Albanians looted villages and apartments abandoned by Serb civilians. Some 110 homes and at least 16 Serb Orthodox churches were destroyed by arson.
2004 – The Pakistani military commander leading a five-day assault on armed militants holed up in mud fortresses said a “high-value” terror suspect remained inside, possibly wounded, but there was no way to know whether it was al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri.
2004 – The hunt for terrorists on Pakistan’s frontier appears to be narrowing on an Uzbek terror group that once trained in Afghanistan.
2005 – In Jordan an appeals court has overturned the conviction of a Jordanian found guilty of financing Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi’s insurgent group in Iraq. The Court of Cassation said the Oct. 31 conviction of Bilal Mansur al-Hiyari by the military State Security Court “fell short of adequate justifications and causes.”
2007 – Commercial spaceflight venture SpaceX launches the second Falcon 1 rocket into space, though failing to reach orbit.
2009 – The United States Navy’s USS Hartford and USS New Orleans collide in the Strait of Hormuz.
2014 – United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid orders an investigation into the breach by the CIA into the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s computer systems.
https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/march-20/
