Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists were locked in fierce fighting in the east of Ukraine on Thursday and a rebel commander acknowledged big losses among separatists heavily outgunned by government forces.

Even as President Petro Poroshenko and his team prepared to unveil their blueprint for ending more than two months of rebellion, government forces, using artillery and heavy armor, said they were tightening the noose on separatists near Krasny Liman, north of the main regional hub of Donetsk.

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ISIS militants have launched an attack on Iraq’s largest oil refinery with mortars and machine gun fire, refinery employees say. The extremist group has been gaining ground in Iraq, seizing control of territory in its mission to create an Islamic state.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) surrounded the refinery last week as it seized control of Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul. In response to the escalation in violence management at the refinery halted operations at the facility and evacuated foreign workers.

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KNLA soldiers on the Salween River, heading to frontline areas in northern Karen State. (Photo: Saw Yan Naing / The Irrawaddy)

Burmese troops have attacked a group of ethnic Karen soldiers in the country’s southeast, leaving one man dead and raising concerns about the government’s commitment to a nationwide ceasefire, Karen sources say.

The alleged attack on the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) at an outpost in Tenasserim Division comes as the government army continues a much more publicized offensive in the country’s far north against the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

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The Pakistan army today launched an all-out offensive using jets and tanks in the restive North Waziristan, killing nearly 184 Taliban fighters including foreigners, while six soldiers were killed in an IED blast, the first military casualties in the operation.

“Air force jets targeted six hideouts of the militants in Shawal area. In these precise strikes 27 terrorists were killed. There is no civil population in the area,” military spokesman Major General Asim Saleem Bajwa said.

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Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al Shebab militants on Monday said they carried out an attack on a town on Kenya’s coast 50 dead, and warned tourists and foreigners to stay away from Kenya.

A statement from the group said the attack was revenge for the “Kenyan government’s brutal oppression of Muslims in Kenya through coercion, intimidation and extrajudicial killings of Muslim scholars.”

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Government forces flushed opposition fighters from their last redoubts in northwestern Syria near the Turkish frontier on Sunday, capturing two villages and restoring government control over the border crossing, activists and state media said.

The military’s advances fully reversed the gains rebels had made during their three-month campaign in Latakia province, the rugged coastal region that is the ancestral heartland of President Bashar Assad. The counteroffensive’s success is the latest blow to the rebels, who have suffered a string of bitter recent setbacks in Syria’s more than three-year-old civil war.

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Iraq’s armed forces attacked positions held by Sunni Muslim militants to try to halt their advance, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki deployed the air force to defend his Shiite-led government.

The army killed more than 279 “terrorists” with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and destroyed 50 of the group’s vehicles in the past 24 hours, army spokesman Qassim Ata said in a televised news conference today. “The security situation is improving” and government forces are conducting pre-emptive operations in Baghdad, which is under their control, he said.

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