At least 42 people including 30 Islamist militants were killed in Yemen on Monday night and Tuesday, officials and residents said, as the government pressed ahead with a new US-backed offensive against insurgents in the south.

The Islamist rebellion is of serious concern to the United States and to Yemen’s much bigger neighbour Saudi Arabia, which both fear that instability could give al Qaeda’s Arabian wing, already active in Yemen, a bigger foothold near oil shipping routes through the Red Sea.

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Fighting with assault rifles and grenades between opponents and supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad escalated in the northern city of Tripoli Monday, killing five people and wounding at least 10, security sources said.

The sources said four men died in the mainly pro-Assad neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen, while a fifth person was killed near Bab al-Tabbaneh, a mainly by anti-Assad district of the port city. Tension and fear had gripped Tripoli earlier Monday after both political and security efforts failed to maintain a cease-fire along the demarcation lines between the rival neighborhoods.

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Twenty-three Syrian soldiers were killed in the town of Rastan today in heavy clashes with rebels who destroyed three armoured personnel carriers, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Earlier, opposition sources said nine people, including a local rebel commander, were killed in heavy army shelling of Rastan.

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Uganda has captured one of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s top five rebels, bringing it a step closer to catching Joseph Kony, the LRA leader accused of war crimes, the military said on Sunday.

Uganda People’s Defence Forces said Caesar Achellam, a major general in Kony’s outfit of about 200 fighters, had been captured in an ambush on Saturday along the banks of the River Mbou in neighbouring Central African Republic.

They said Achellam had been armed with just an AK-47 rifle and eight rounds of ammunition. He was being held with his wife, a young daughter and a helper.

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Al-Shabaab Islamic militia fighters, aligned with al-Qaeda, have arrived in Somalia’s Mudug and Galmudug regions after fleeing their strongholds in the south due to pressure from the allied forces of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, according to to sources who spoke to Somalia Report.

While it was known that the fighters had moved recently to Mudug region, Galmudug officials today confirmed al-Shabaab fighters arrived in their territory last night.

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A video posted online in the name of a shadowy militant group late Friday claimed responsibility for twin suicide bombings in the Syrian capital this week that killed 55 people.

In the video, a group calling itself the Al-Nusra Front says the bombing was in response to attacks on residential areas by the regime of President Bashar Assad.

“We fulfilled our promise to respond with strikes and explosions,” a distorted voice says, reading black text that rolls across a white screen while Islamic chanting plays in the background.

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The commander of the Burmese Army’s Northern Regional Military Command, Brig-Gen Zeyar Aung, told people in Pangwa, Kachin State, not to worry about the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) causing problems because his troops will wipe them out.

He made the statement at a meeting in Pangwa with the public, local militia troops and troops formerly of the New Democratic Army-Kachin (NDA-K) who were absorbed into the Burmese Army’s Border Guard Force in 2010.

La Nan, a spokesperson for the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political wing of the KIA, said: “We heard what he said at the meeting about the government troops wiping out our troops.

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