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The Iraqi army and volunteer militia fighters, who are mostly Shi’ite, launched an assault today to retake the city of Baiji in northern Iraq from Islamic State militants, an Iraqi military spokesman said. Baiji is near the country’s largest oil refinery and is only 150 km away from Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city which fell to the hardline Sunni militants of Islamic State in June 2014.
The city has since changed hands several times in fierce clashes.
Thirteen Houthi militants and forces loyal to deposed Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh were killed and 27 others injured in clashes with fighters of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and airstrikes waged by Arab coalition aircraft on their positions in the southern Yemeni governorate of Taiz.
A PRC source in the governorate said coalition aircraft waged a number of airstrikes targeting positions and groupings of Houthi militants and Saleh forces in Al Suweida’a , Al-Oshaqa areas, Al Gheel in Al Wazi’iya districts, west of the city and Al Jund and Sharman areas in eastern Taiz.
Two Hezbollah commanders have been killed fighting alongside government forces against rebels in Syria’s Idlib province, reports indicate.
Hasan Hossain al-Haj, a senior commander in the Lebanese militant group, was killed Saturday amid a Syrian military offensive across the country. The Daily Star reports a second unidentified Hezbollah commander was killed Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made waves of late with his military offensive in Syria, and now he has on-the-ground backing of the Cuban variety. One of the world’s leading centers for research on Cuba has released breaking details of the Castro regime’s presence in the war-torn Middle Eastern nation.
The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) at the University of Miami shared via email on October 13, 2015, that General Leopoldo Cintra Frías, head of the Cuban Armed Forces, had already landed in Syria. He is, they write, “leading a group of Cuban military personnel … in support of Syria’s dictator Assad” and, in Cold War fashion, the Russian contingent.
Iraqi security forces said on October 11 that they bombed the convoy of Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an air strike near the country’s border with Syria, though his fate remained unknown.
“Iraqi air forces have bombed the convoy of the terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi while he was heading to Karabila to attend a meeting with Daesh (IS) commanders,” Iraq’s security forces said in a joint statement.