Two days into the UN-brokered truce opposition activists have reported a return to heavy shelling in major cities.

The fighting further undermines the ceasefire intended to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha religious holiday. There are claims from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that eight people have been killed on Saturday and nearly 150 on Friday.

Morhaf Selatt is the Commander of the Binnish Martyrs Battalion. He said the government troops action started early. “We woke up assuming there was a truce. Today is Eid. But since five in the morning they began shelling us. It was heavy fire which proves that for them there is no ceasefire. We were sleeping and some our men are wounded during this supposed truce that we committed to and which they never did at all.”

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Two park rangers and a soldier were killed in a firefight with armed militia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebels have transformed Africa’s oldest national park into a war zone, officials said on Friday.

Congo’s rugged eastern borderlands are among the world’s most bio-diverse areas and are home to one of the last remaining populations of mountain gorillas. But they have also been at the center of nearly two decades of armed conflict, which have left millions dead.

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One of four Italian soldiers wounded in a firefight with Afghan insurgents Thursday has died in hospital, taking Italy’s death toll in the eight-year NATO-led ISAF mission to 52.

Alpine Brigade Corporal Tiziano Chierotti, 24, from the northwestern costal town of Sanremo, had surgery on abdominal wounds but “nothing could be done,” military sources said in Rome.

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Forces from the national army together with allied brigades have taken control of Bani Walid, the last pro-Qaddafi stronghold in Libya.

The announcement was made today by Chief of Staff General Yusuf Mangoush, following reports that the army and allied brigades had succeeded in entering and holding the centre of the town early this morning.

Sporadic fighting was reported between the opposing forces today, but only in certain small pockets of the hilltop town.

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Police and federal security service (FSB) operatives on Wednesday killed two militants in Russia’s predominantly Islamic republic of Tatarstan, as the radical Islamist insurgency shows signs of spreading from the North Caucasus to central Russia.

“The gunmen were killed in the police assault on the building,” spokesman for the Russian Investigative committee, Vladimir Markin, said. “They were suspects in the recent attacks on Muslim leaders in Tatarstan.”

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Rebel shelling killed two children in the capital of Sudan’s South Kordofan state on Tuesday, the army said, in what insurgents called retaliation for government air raids on villages.

The attack, confirmed by witnesses, was the second this month by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) against Kadugli, after seven women and children were reportedly killed in an unprecedented barrage on October 8.

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Heavy clashes have erupted in the conflict-ridden Somali regional state on Sunday night between Ethiopian forces and the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF).

Eyewitnesses in Wacays-Godle in Degehbur zone told media in the neighbouring Somalia the Ethiopians imposed a 24-hour curfew in the restive district following renewed clashes.

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