Taliban insurgents, seeking to force the NATO-led coalition out of Afghanistan and bring in Islamic law, captured a key district in the northern province of Baghlan after days of fighting, officials said on Monday.

Fighting has escalated in Afghanistan as the Taliban insurgency spreads from its traditional strongholds in the south and east of the country to once peaceful regions in the north. Despite air support from U.S. and Afghan warplanes, government troops are struggling against the resilient Taliban, with senior government officials saying the insurgents are becoming better trained and equipped.

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Dozens of people have been killed in a violent clash between a pro-government militia group and a separatist umbrella organization in northern Mali, a local source told Anadolu Agency Friday.

The clashes started on Tuesday in Kidal between fighters of the pro-government group, GATIA, and armed members of the separatist Coordination of Movements of Azawad (CMA), Fahad Ag Almahmoud, GATIA secretary-general, told Anadolu Agency.

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Kurdish Peshmerga forces succeeded in regaining control of 11 villages southeast of Mosul and killed at least 120 militants of so-called Islamic State (IS), part of operations to drive IS out of Mosul and other areas in northern Iraq. More than 120 IS terrorists were killed in the Peshmerga offensive today, Mansour Barzani, commander of Kurdish special forces, said in statements to the press.

The offensive, supervised by president of Iraq’s Kurdistan region Masoud Barzani, would continue as long as IS was there, he said.

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At least 42 civilians have been killed in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a local official said Sunday, in what the government described as a massacre in revenge for military operations in the area.

Three days of national mourning have been declared following Saturday night’s mass killing, the latest in a series of massacres that have left more than 600 people dead in and around the troubled town of Beni since 2014.

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Saudi-led coalition jets on Thursday pounded Shiite rebel positions in and around Sanaa for a third consecutive day, as shelling from Yemen killed a woman in Saudi Arabia.

The coalition has been fighting the Houthi rebels since March 2015, after they overran the capital and drove south forcing internationally recognised President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi to flee the country.

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Syria Democratic Forces, with air support from the US-led coalition, have taken near complete control of Manbij, the group announced. Islamic State fighters had held the northern Syrian city near the Turkish border since 2014.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of Kurdish and Arab fighters, had fought since June to drive Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) out of Manbij, a key city on the supply route behind the jihadist group stronghold of Raqqa and the Turkish border.

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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Thursday put the military on highest state of alert along the frontier with Crimea after Russia accused Kiev of making attempted incursions into the annexed region.

Moscow’s FSB security service said Wednesday it had thwarted “terrorist attacks” by Ukraine’s military on the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in March 2014.

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