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Iraqi government forces have recaptured a university campus on the outskirts of Ramadi from the Islamic State group, seizing a key position for any offensive to retake the city, officials said on Sunday.
Iraqi forces had recaptured parts of Anbar University in May, shortly after losing the provincial capital to the jihadists, but later pulled back.
Saudi-led coalition airstrikes killed more than 120 civilians and wounded more than 150 after shelling a residential area in the Yemeni province of Taiz on Friday evening, security officials, medical officials and witnesses said.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters, said that most of the houses in the area were leveled and a fire broke out in the port city of Mokha. Most of the corpses, including children, women and elderly people, were charred by the flames, they said.
Turkish jets struck camps belonging to Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, authorities said Saturday, the first strikes since a peace deal was announced in 2013, and again bombed Islamic State positions in Syria.
The strikes in Iraq targeted the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, whose affiliates have been effective in battling the Islamic State group. The strikes further complicate the U.S.-led war against the extremists, which has relied on Kurdish ground forces making gains in Iraq and Syria.
Syrian activists say rebels have launched an offensive to capture government-held neighborhoods in the southern city of Daraa.
Ahmad al-Masalmeh, an opposition activist in Daraa, says the offensive is led by the Southern Front, a coalition of several dozen moderate rebel groups.
Turkey has scrambled fighter jets to the Syrian border after one soldier was killed and two wounded in cross-border clashes which appeared to signal the first armed confrontation between the country’s forces and the terror group Islamic State.
Turkey’s military said in a statement that a border unit came under fire at 1.30pm by five Isis militants using a rocket launcher and Kalashnikov rifles. The armed forces said the unit seized the weapons and fired on the attackers, killing one and destroying three Isis vehicles.