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Some 17 Yemeni policemen were wounded in an ambush by Shiite Huthi rebels as fighting between government forces and the rebels neared the capital, officials said on Sunday.
The Houthis — also known as Ansarullah — have been pushing out of their northern mountain strongholds towards Sanaa in a suspected bid to expand their sphere of influence as Yemen is reorganised into six regions.
Islamic State of Iraq militants have seized Rawa town, along Euphrates River, almost 275 km at northwest of Baghdad.
Mayor referred it, Hussein AIi al-Aujail, adding that local army and police forces gone away when militants have taken control of the town.
ISIS militants have launched an attack on Iraq’s largest oil refinery with mortars and machine gun fire, refinery employees say. The extremist group has been gaining ground in Iraq, seizing control of territory in its mission to create an Islamic state.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) surrounded the refinery last week as it seized control of Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul. In response to the escalation in violence management at the refinery halted operations at the facility and evacuated foreign workers.
Government forces flushed opposition fighters from their last redoubts in northwestern Syria near the Turkish frontier on Sunday, capturing two villages and restoring government control over the border crossing, activists and state media said.
The military’s advances fully reversed the gains rebels had made during their three-month campaign in Latakia province, the rugged coastal region that is the ancestral heartland of President Bashar Assad. The counteroffensive’s success is the latest blow to the rebels, who have suffered a string of bitter recent setbacks in Syria’s more than three-year-old civil war.
Iraq’s armed forces attacked positions held by Sunni Muslim militants to try to halt their advance, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki deployed the air force to defend his Shiite-led government.
The army killed more than 279 “terrorists” with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and destroyed 50 of the group’s vehicles in the past 24 hours, army spokesman Qassim Ata said in a televised news conference today. “The security situation is improving” and government forces are conducting pre-emptive operations in Baghdad, which is under their control, he said.