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Kurdish peshmerga forces on Tuesday recaptured seven Christian villages in northern Iraq in clashes with Islamic State (IS) jihadists, an officer and a cleric said.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians, most of them Chaldeans, fled their homes when IS militants launched a renewed drive in the north in early August.
Powerful Al-Qaeda branches in Yemen and North Africa called Tuesday for jihadists in Iraq and Syria to unite against the common threat from a US-led coalition.
In an unprecedented joint statement, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) urged their “brothers” in Iraq and Syria to “stop killing each other and unite against the American campaign and its evil coalition that threatens us all.”
Shiite Huthi rebels clashed Monday with Yemeni army forces and loyalist tribes northeast of Sanaa as a UN envoy kept up mediation efforts, tribal sources said.
Fierce gunfights erupted when rebels attacked troops and armed tribesmen in the flashpoint Al-Ghayl district of Jawf province, tribal sources said.
The heaviest fighting in a series of truce violations in Ukraine’s restive east strained the tenuous 10-day-old cease-fire between the Kiev government and pro-Russian separatists, with both sides blaming the other on Monday for attacks that included the shelling of residential buildings.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko on Monday accused the rebels of attacking checkpoints and other positions in the east in intensified fighting over the weekend. The Ukrainian military, he said, was forced to respond.
A new armed group calling itself the ‘Soldiers of the Caliphate in Algeria’ has split from al-Qaeda’s North African branch and sworn loyalty to the group calling itself the Islamic State (IS), fighting in Syria and Iraq.
In a communique released on Sunday, a regional commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) said he broke away from the group, accusing it of “deviating from the true path.”
Syrian rebels and jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have agreed a non-aggression pact for the first time in a suburb of the capital Damascus, a monitoring group said on Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the ceasefire deal was agreed between ISIS and moderate and Islamist rebels in Hajar al-Aswad, south of the capital.
At least 100 militants from ISIL terrorist group have been killed in a series of violent clashes with government troops across Iraq.
The terrorists were killed during mop-up operations in the towns of Haditha, Barwanah and Khafajah in the west of the provincial capital city of Ramadi.
