The suicide bomber stood in the middle of the dancing, clapping crowd as hundreds of Afghan children and adults celebrated a wedding in a joyous release from Kabul’s strain of war.
Then, in a flash, he detonated his explosives-filled vest, killing dozens — and Afghanistan grieved again.
Government and Russian airstrikes pounded the southern edge of a rebel stronghold in Syria’s northwest on Saturday, killing at least seven members of one family, activists and a war monitor reported.
The intense airstrikes were coupled with fierce ground clashes as the government, backed by Russia, pushed ahead with a months-old offensive seeking to chip away at territory on the periphery of the rebel enclave.
Israeli war jets struck early on Saturday facilities of militant groups in the Gaza Strip in response to earlier rockets attack from the coastal enclave into southern Israel, security sources and local media said.
The sources and the Gaza-based local media said that Israeli war jets struck a military facility that belongs to Islamic Hamas movement in eastern Gaza, and another one in central Gaza Strip.
Pakistan says three of its soldiers were killed Thursday in clashes with India across the disputed Kashmir border, known as the Line of Control (LoC), amid increasing tensions between the two nations over the Himalayan region.
A Pakistani army spokesman claimed five Indian soldiers also were killed in retaliatory fire. Major-General Asif Ghafoor said skirmishes were ongoing intermittently.
Militant Islamist group al-Shabaab struck a Somali government military base on Wednesday with car bombs and gunfire in a battle that both sides said caused multiple deaths to the other.
Witnesses said some local residents were also killed by stray crossfire during the mid-morning attack on the base in Awdheegle, 70 km (43 miles) southwest of the capital Mogadishu.