 | Wars in the World |
Daily News on Wars in the World and on New States
| FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK X FLIPBOARD TELEGRAM |
A sharp escalation in fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has left 15 soldiers dead and prompted Russia to issue an urgent call for calm.
Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said Saturday that 12 of its troops have been killed in the past four days, including four overnight. Nagorno-Karabakh’s armed forces said one of its soldiers was killed early Saturday, the third in recent days.
With the sound of artillery fire in the distance, dozens of international investigators arrived Friday at the zone where a Malaysia Airlines plane crashed in eastern Ukraine and began preparations to comb the rural area for remains of as many as 80 victims and jet debris.
Several hours before they arrived, at least 10 Ukrainian soldiers were killed when their convoy was ambushed by pro-Russian separatist rebels in a town close to the wreckage site. Thirteen more soldiers were unaccounted for after the attack, officials said, and the bodies of four more people were being examined to determine whether they were soldiers or rebels.
A Ukrainian security spokesman says government forces advanced to the outskirts of a key town in an effort to go after pro-Russian separatists in one of their main strongholds.
National security spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Ukrainian forces were outside Horlikva north of the main regional center of Donetsk.
Three Turkish soldiers and six militants of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), were killed during a clash on the Turkish-Syrian border, the Turkish army has said.
In a written statement released on Tuesday, the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) stated that Turkish soldiers conducting patrol duty near the town of Ceylanpınar, in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, realized a group of 10 or 15 people was attempting to illegally cross over to the Turkish side from Syria late on Monday. After ignoring the warnings from troops to stop, the armed group opened fire on the soldiers and the troops on the border retaliated, the TSK said.
Rebels in eastern Ukraine tell TIME’s Simon Shuster they lack the firepower to have shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Their recent record of surface-to-air attacks suggests otherwise.
The pro-Russia separatist leader was not in a mood to discuss the downing of a passenger plane over eastern Ukraine on Thursday. He had heard about it on the news – 280 passengers and 15 crew on a Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur – possibly shot out of the sky with a missile or some other projectile over the war-ravaged region of Donetsk.