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Fighting for control of the Libyan capital escalated dramatically on Monday when rebel forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar carried out an airstrike on city’s only operating airport.
The attack came amid reports that the internationally recognised government of National Accord led by Fayyez al-Sarraj had begun conscripting migrants held in detention centres to fight against Gen Haftar’s troops.
The Air Force of the western region has issued a statement saying it has carried out airstrikes on the gatherings of Khalifa Haftar’s forces in the camp of Mizda in southern Gharyan city and on the positions of Haftar’s forces in Sooq Al-Khamis area.
Earlier, a source close to Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) said that LNA captured the international airport in Tripoli.
Forces loyal to Tripoli government have recaptured the former Libyan international airport in the south of the city, Fathi Ali Bashagha told the Tripoli-based interior minister Libya al-Ahrar TV.
Eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar ordered his troops on Thursday to march on the capital Tripoli, taking his conflict with the internationally recognized government to a dangerous new level.
Haftar posted his order in a video online hours after his forces took full control of Gharyan, a town about 100 km south of the capital.
A car bomb exploded near a hotel and restaurants in Mogadishu on Thursday, killing at least 15 people in a busy area of the Somali capital targeted by Islamist militants before, rescue services said.
The afternoon explosion sent smoke billowing into the sky and destroyed two restaurants and some cars parked in the area.
More than 100 people were killed by armed men in an attack on a Fulani village in central Mali on Saturday, local officials said, as top UN officials visited the country.
Local authorities blamed the violence on Dogon hunters who are part of the Bambara, Mali’s largest ethnic group.
Somalia’s al-Shabaab stormed a government building on Saturday, detonating a suicide car bomb in the heart of the capital Mogadishu with at least 15 people, including an assistant minister, killed during the ensuing gun battle.
In the latest bombing claimed by al-Shabaab, an Islamist group which is fighting to establish its own rule in Somalia, based on a strict interpretation of sharia law, a huge explosion shook central Mogadishu and a large plume of smoke rose above a building housing Somalia’s ministries of labor and works.