The Arakan Army (AA) says it seized Ponnagyun Township police station near Rakhine State’s capital Sittwe on Thursday.

Ponnagyun is on the Yangon-Sittwe road about 30km north of the state capital, where the regime has tightened security.

[Read more…]

Avdiivka was on the front lines of war between Kyiv and Moscow for almost a decade. Fierce fighting raged there for months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.

The withdrawal was far less drawn out. When the Ukrainian military abandoned the town on Saturday, handing Russia its most important victory in months, it was rapid and ruthless.

[Read more…]

Two Israeli-Argentinian men taken captive by Hamas on October 7 were rescued on Monday in an early morning raid in which the Israeli military carried out airstrikes that local officials said killed around 100 people in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.

The hostages, 60-year-old Fernando Simon Marman and 70-year-old Louis Har, had spent 128 days in captivity. Both men are in relatively good condition and have since reunited with their families.

[Read more…]

Large numbers of Russian troops are attacking Avdiivka in east Ukraine from all directions, and the situation is increasingly difficult for Ukrainian troops defending the town, its mayor said on Thursday.

Russian forces have taken the initiative on the eastern front in the industrial Donbas region of Ukraine and have been trying to cut supply lines and encircle Ukrainian forces dug in at Avdiivka since October.

[Read more…]

Two bomb blasts at the election offices of a political party and an independent candidate in south-west Pakistan have killed at least 30 people and wounded dozens more, a day before parliamentary elections are to be held.

The first blast rocked the election campaign office of an independent candidate in Pishin in the troubled region of Balochistan, killing 18 people and injuring at least 30 people, local authorities said.

[Read more…]

At least 95 Myanmar border guards, some of them wounded, have fled to Bangladesh over the last few days as fighting intensifies between rebel forces in Myanmar and the junta regime, officials in Bangladesh said on Monday (Feb 5).

At least two people were killed in Bangladesh on Monday after mortar shells fired from Myanmar during clashes there landed across the border.

[Read more…]

The United States military has launched dozens of airstrikes against targets in Syria and Iraq in the first retaliation for a drone attack that killed three soldiers at a remote US base in Jordan.

“This afternoon, at my direction, US military forces struck targets at facilities in Iraq and Syria that the IRGC and affiliated militia use to attack US forces,” US President Joe Biden said in a statement on Friday, referring to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

[Read more…]