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Renewed fighting between government troops and ethnic Karen rebels in eastern Burma led to a temporary shutdown of the new Asia Highway on Thursday morning.
Clashes erupted around 5:30am between the Burma Army and the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA), a splinter group born of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), the southeastern ethnic state’s dominant rebel force.
Fighters loyal to Islamic State have seized substantial territory in Afghanistan for the first time, witnesses and officials said, wresting areas in the east from rival Taliban insurgents in a new threat to stability.
Witnesses who fled fighting in Nangarhar province told Reuters that hundreds of insurgents pledging allegiance to Islamic State pushed out the Taliban, scorching opium poppy fields that help to fund the Taliban’s campaign to overthrow the Afghan government.
Pakistani air strikes on Sunday killed 23 militants including foreigners in the country’s restive tribal regions near the Afghan border, the military said, part of a massive ongoing operation against the Taliban.
The strikes took place in areas close to the border with Afghanistan in Khyber and North Waziristan tribal districts.
“(A) huge ammunition dump was also blown up during the strikes in Khyber,” the military said in a statement, without giving the identity of those killed or who they fought for.
A suicide bomber and several gunmen staged a brazen attack on the Afghan parliament on June 22, killing two civilians in an assault claimed by the Taliban, while in the north a second district in two days fell to the militants.
Police said later that the attackers had been killed and all lawmakers were safe, but the large-scale assault on parliament and the loss of ground in the north underscored the challenges posed by Taliban militants following the departure of most foreign forces at the end of last year.
Members of the biggest Muslim rebel group in the Philippines began to lay down their arms on Tuesday in a process policy makers hope will bring to an end more than four decades of violence in the country’s second-biggest island.
President Benigno Aquino and members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front attended a ceremony in Mindanao ahead of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The turnover of weapons is part of a peace agreement signed in March 2014 by the Aquino government with the secessionist group.