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Government officials and insurgent sources in southern Afghanistan say at least 70 Afghan soldiers have defected to the Taliban while 85 others were killed in days of fierce fighting.
Mirza Khan Rahimi, governor of the volatile Helmand province, told reporters Saturday that the defections occurred in Sangin district, and that the soldiers joined the Taliban with their weapons and equipment.
ISIS claimed responsibility for a series of attacks that targeted six locations in Paris with gunfire and explosions, killing 128 people in one of the nation’s deadliest massacres.
In an online statement distributed by supporters, the terror group said eight militants wearing explosive belts and armed with machine guns attacked precisely selected targets in the French capital.
Some 140 people were killed in a series of unprecedented attacks around Paris on Friday, police said, according to French news agencies. French President Francois Hollande closed the country’s borders and declared a state of emergency.
People died in shootings and explosions at multiple sites, some 100 of them in a popular concert hall where patrons were taken hostage and killed, police and medical officials said.
Nigerian troops killed four suspected Boko Haram suspects and set free 61 people, mainly women and children, held by the jihadist group in the flashpoint northeastern Borno state, the army said Thursday.
In an operation, troops under air cover cleared Boko Haram camps “and in the process rescued 61 persons abducted and held captive by the Boko Haram terrorists,” the army said in a statement.
Iraqi autonomous Kurdish region’s peshmerga forces and fighters from the Yazidi minority, a local Kurdish-speaking community which ISIS had targeted in the area, enter the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, in the Nineveh Province, on November 13, 2015. AFP PHOTO / SAFIN HAMED
Kurdish forces backed by U.S. airstrikes seized the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar from ISIS on Friday, a Reuters witness said, in one of the most significant counter-attacks since the militants swept through the north last year.
“ISIL defeated and on the run,” the Kurdistan regional security council said in a tweet, using another name for ISIS. It said Kurdish peshmerga forces, which led the operation, had secured Sinjar’s wheat silo, cement factory, hospital and several other public buildings.