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Turkey’s armed forces said on Monday some 145-160 Kurdish guerrillas were killed in the military’s air and artillery strikes in northern Iraq this month, raising the toll from between 90 and 100 rebels.
The attacks, the first in more than a year on suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebel bases in Iraq, were launched after PKK assaults in Turkey killed more than 40 security force personnel over the previous month.
At least 24 people are dead, including an Iraqi lawmaker, and dozens more wounded in a suicide bomb attack on Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque.
Officials say the bomber blew himself inside the Um al-Qura mosque during prayers on August 28.
Parliamentarian Khalid al-Fahdawi was among those killed.
A senior al-Qaeda operative and possibly the number two of the terror network, Atiyah Abdur Rahman, has reportedly been killed in a drone attack in North Waziristan on August 22.
Pakistani security officials and tribal sources in North Waziristan, however, did not have any information about the al-Qaeda leader and his presence in Pakistan.
A municipal guard and a repentant were killed, while two soldiers were injured in three separate terror attacks perpetuated by armed men, likely belonging to AQIM, in the last two days, in Boumerdes province.
The municipal guard serving at Sidi Daoud municipality, in Boumerdes, was surprised by a group of armed men who shot him dead near his house, and then disappeared in the nature.
A bomb blast at the United Nations building in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, has killed at least 16 people.
Witnesses report seeing a vehicle force its way past security and explode once it reached the four-story building on Friday morning.
Rescuers raced to pull bodies and survivors from the rubble at the compound.
In Tripoli, Libyan rebels are continuing to battle Gadhafi loyalists in parts of the city.
The Abu Salim district just south of Gadhafi’s former compound has been the focus of the heaviest fighting, and there is speculation that Gadhafi - or one or more of his sons - may be holding out in the district.
Libyan rebels advancing towards Sirte, the hometown of Moamer Kadhafi, were blocked Wednesday in the town of Bin Jawad as loyalists kept a stiff resistance, an insurgent commander said.
After taking Ras Lanuf, 150 kilometres (93 miles) west of Sirte, the rebels had advanced up to Bin Jawad, but were stuck there as they came under heavy artillery, rebel commander Fawzi Bukatif told AFP.
“Kadhafi’s forces are still fighting, we are surprised. We thought they would surrender with the fall of Tripoli,” Bukatif said in the nearby coastal town of Zuwaytina which also houses an oil exporting port.