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Rebel rocket fire killed at least 34 civilians in Aleppo in one of the bloodiest days of the conflict for government-held areas of Syria’s second city, a monitoring group said on Tuesday.
Twelve children were among the dead as Islamist rebel factions pounded western neighbourhoods of the city with more than 300 rockets on Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Right said.
Control of the city is divided between rebels in the east, and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the west.
The Syrian Kurdish YPG militia said on Monday that it and its allies had taken full control of the town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border, defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) fighters.
“It’s now under complete control,” YPG spokesman Redur Xelil said after a day of rapid advances in an offensive aided by U.S.-led air strikes. Tel Abyad had been important to ISIS as the nearest border town under its control to its de facto capital Raqqa.
Leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula AQAP, Nasser Al-Wuhayshi, has been killed in a US drone strike, a Yemeni website reported on Monday.
“We obtained reliable information that Al-Wuhayshi was targeted by the drone in the city of Mukalla in Yemen’s eastern province of Hadramout this past Friday,” the Almasdar website reported.
Houthi forces and their army allies in Yemen seized the capital of a large desert province on the border with Saudi Arabia, an important victory for the group ahead of peace talks in Geneva on Monday.
The Houthis, the dominant faction in Yemen’s civil war, took control of al-Hazm, capital of the province of al-Jawf, on Sunday residents said, amid Saudi-led coalition air strikes on Houthi positions and heavy fighting with armed tribesmen.
The Syrian Kurdish YPG militia has announced that it has begun advancing towards an Islamic State-held town at the Turkish border on Saturday, penetrating deeper into the jihadists’ stronghold of Raqqa province in a campaign backed by U.S.-led air strikes.
A militia spokesman told the press that the YPG and smaller Syrian Arab rebel groups fighting alongside it had begun the move towards Tel Abyad after they encircled the Islamic State-held town of Suluk 20 km (12 miles) to the southeast.