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At least 45 rebels fighters from four different brigades were killed today in a series of clashes in Homs, with the biggest toll coming during an ambush in a government-held district.
“They were killed as they tried to launch an operation to end the siege of Homs,” noted the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The city remains divided between rebel and government-held areas, and activists have complained the rebel-held areas are struggling to get access to food.
Videos posted online and reports from activists in the city said the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) fled, leaving behind hundreds of prisoners, including some who had been killed as they left.
Yusuf, a “citizen journalist” in the city, told The Daily Telegraph that 300 activists, journalists and members of other rebel groups had been freed from a makeshift jail in a former children’s hospital. Some recorded harrowing accounts of their treatment in videos posted online.
South Sudan’s army claimed on Tuesday that David Yau Yau, who has been leading a rebellion out of Pibor county in Jonglei state since April 2012, has agreed to cease hostilities against government forces.
Yau Yau’s rebel group in eastern part of Jonglei is constituted from his Murle ethnic group. He originally rebelled in 2011 after he failed to become a local legislator during the 2010 elections.
A government airstrike killed 25 al-Qaeda-linked militants in a besieged province west of Baghdad amid fierce clashes Tuesday between Iraqi special forces and insurgents battling for control of the key cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, Iraqi officials said.
The al-Qaeda gains in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar — once bloody battlegrounds for U.S. troops — pose the most serious challenge to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government since the departure of American forces in late 2011.
Rival Islamist rebel groups clashed in the Syrian city of Raqqa on Monday, residents said, as local fighters tried to drive out a foreign-led al-Qaeda affiliate that has also seized towns across the border in Iraq.
Activists opposed to President Bashar al-Assad said dozens of Syrian members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had switched sides, joining other Sunni Islamist factions which have taken advantage of a local backlash against the ISIL and the foreign al Qaeda jihadists prominent among its leaders.
News reports from Bosaaso suggest that At least 5 Puntland soldiers have been killed and more others wounded in Laad, 30 KM southern Bosaso, the capital of Bari region, reports said.
Local residents told Shabelle Media in Mogadishu that unidentified men armed with K47s and machine guns attacked on Puntland forces in south of Bosaso, killing five soldiers, injuring others.
An al-Qaeda affiliate rebel group pulled out from strategic areas of northern Syria near the Turkish border on Sunday after coming under heavy fire from other Islamist brigades, opposition activists said.
Fighting erupted in the last few days between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an al-Qaeda division led by foreign jihadists, and other home-grown Islamist groups, including the al-Nusra Front, another al-Qaeda affiliate. The clash was a culmination of tensions over territory and spheres of influence in the region near a long border with Turkey.