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The Afghan Taliban have announced that they will launch a “spring offensive” from May 12, with attacks across the country at a time when foreign troops were devising an exit strategy.
The announcement this year comes just weeks ahead of the presidential election runoff as no candidate secured 50 percent plus one vote in the April 5 polls. The second round is expected in mid-June.
Iraqi forces launched an operation Friday to retake areas near the militant-held city of Fallujah in preparation for an eventual assault, a senior officer said, as violence killed 11 people.
Antigovernment fighters have held Fallujah, just a short drive from Baghdad, and shifting parts of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi, farther west, since early January.
An ethnic Palaung rebel group claimed to have ambushed a Burma Army convoy in northern Shan State’s Kunlong Township on Wednesday, killing at least three soldiers and destroying two trucks.
“We fired seven RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. Two trucks were destroyed and burned. I only could see three bodies of soldiers fell out of the trucks. We do not know the exact number of deaths and injured,” said Mai Aie Kyaw, a spokesperson for the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA).
Yemeni government forces captured al-Qaeda’s main stronghold in the southern part of the country on Tuesday after insurgents blew up the local government compound there and fled, the Defense Ministry said.
The mountainous al-Mahfad area of Abyan province, along with Azzan in the adjacent province of Shabwa, has been the militants’ main stronghold in Yemen since 2012. In that year, the Yemeni army, with U.S. help, drove the fighters from towns they had seized during a chaotic national uprising in 2011.
The foreign-backed militants operating in Syria’s Old City of Homs began withdrawing from the area.
The militants are leaving the old city under an agreement reached on Sunday between the Syrian government and the militants.
About 30 Syrian government fighters were killed when opposition forces set off a bomb in a tunnel beneath a checkpoint in a northwestern province, activists said on Tuesday.
Videos and images posted by opposition supporters online showed a massive plume of smoke and earth shooting into the air near a small town as men shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest).
Christian “anti-balaka” militiamen — former members of the Central African Armed Forces (FACA)
At least 28 people have been killed in Central African Republic during several days of fighting between Muslim and Christian militias in a town in the center of the war-torn country, a priest and a former member of parliament told Reuters on Monday.
The fighting in Mala, around 300 km (190 miles) north of the capital Bangui, between former Seleka rebels and the Christian militia known as the “anti-Balaka”, is the latest in months of tit-for-tat inter-communal violence that has killed thousands and displaced over 1 million people.