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Syrians paint a mural on the remains of a building to mark 10 years of the Syrian war, in the opposition-held town of Binnish in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, March 11, 2021. (AFP)
The overall death toll for Syria’s civil war has reached 388,652 since it began a decade ago this month, a war monitor said Sunday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the figures include almost 117,388 civilians, among them more than 22,000 children.
The Saudi-led military coalition battling Yemen’s Houthi movement has said it conducted air raids on Houthi military targets in Sanaa and other regions after the group launched armed drones towards Saudi Arabia.
“The military operation targets Houthi military capabilities in Sanaa and a number of other provinces,” the coalition said in a statement carried by Saudi state media on Sunday.
Fierce fighting between Yemeni pro-government forces and Iran-backed Houthi rebels has killed at least 90 combatants on both sides in the past 24 hours, government military sources said Saturday.
The Shiite rebels launched an offensive last month to seize Marib, the last stronghold in northern Yemen of pro-government forces who are backed by a Saudi-led military coalition.
At least 10 rockets slammed into a base housing U.S. and other coalition troops in western Iraq on Wednesday, military officials said. It was not known if there were any casualties, but the Iraqi military said there were no significant losses.
It was the first such attack since the U.S. struck Iran-aligned militia targets along the Iraq-Syria border last week, killing one militiaman and stoking fears of another cycle of tit-for-tat attacks as happened last year. Those attacks culminated in the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani in Baghdad.
The United States has put its forces in Iraq on higher alert following a US airstrike targeting Iranian-backed militias in Syria, a coalition spokesperson confirmed to Rudaw on Saturday.
“We’ve had a temporary increase in the force protection posture of the forces deployed to the region to ensure appropriate force protection,” coalition spokesperson Colonel Wayne Marotto confirmed to Rudaw’s Rekar Aziz in a text message on Saturday.