Turkey has launched ground and air attacks on Syrian troops after eight military personnel were shelled and killed in the north of the war-torn country, jeopardizing the Turkish leader President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fragile security pact with Syria’s main ally, Russia.

“Those who test the determination of Turkey with such cowardly attacks will understand they are making a grave mistake,” Mr. Erdogan told Turkish television in Istanbul before flying out on a scheduled visit to Ukraine.

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The Israeli army attacked several Hamas targets in the northern Gaza Strip early Saturday, in response to two Gaza rockets which were fired at Israel on Friday evening.

Among the targets attacked were weapons storage facilities and an underground infrastructure used by Hamas, said the IDF.

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Turkey is continuing its push into Kurdish areas of Iraq, now targeting Sinjar, which will be key to controlling the Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish border triangle.

The Turkish air force targeted the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), a Yazidi militia, Jan. 15 in Iraq’s Ninevah province.

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Syrian state media said militants launched a major attack on government forces in Idlib on Thursday that Russia’s defense ministry said killed up to 40 Syrian soldiers, though the account was disputed by a rebel official and war monitor.

Idlib is the last rebel-held swathe of territory in the country and hundreds of thousands of people in the area have fled in recent weeks amid heavy air strikes by Russian and Syrian forces.

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Yemen’s president told the military it needs to be on high alert and ready for battle after Iran-backed Houthi militia killed at least 70 soldiers and wounded 150 more in a missile and drone attack on a training camp in Yemen on Saturday, in one of the deadliest attacks of the five-year-old civil war.

The attack “confirms without doubt that the Houthis have no desire for peace”, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi said, in a statement on Yemen’s state news agency SABA.

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