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Tuareg separatists launched attacks in the town of Gao in northern Mali on Saturday, taking advantage of the chaos left over by a 10-day old military coup.
Rebels arrived in the strategic garrison town in pick-up trucks loaded with arms. A reporter from the Reuters news agency described hearing heavy weapons fire. This new assault came after the rebels took Kidal, another key town in the north on Friday.
Fresh clashes Thursday between rival Libyan tribes killed eight people, a hospital official said, even as authorities spoke of an imminent truce in the southern desert town of Sabha.
“The situation is very bad. At least eight bodies were brought to the hospital over the past three hours,” said a doctor at the Sabha hospital, Abdel Rahman Arish, reached by telephone.
He told AFP several people were also wounded in the fighting that has raged since Monday between the Toubou tribe and Arab tribesmen from Sabha.
Syria has accepted a U.N.-sponsored peace plan, international envoy Koffi Annan said on Tuesday, even as troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad crossed into Lebanon to fight rebels who had taken refuge across the border.
Assad visited a rebel stronghold in the city of Homs that his forces had overrun after weeks of shelling and gunfire, apparently to make the point that he can now tour the streets of the once bitterly fought-over district.
The Sudanese government on Monday announced that president Omer Hassan al-Bashir’s scheduled summit with his southern counterpart Salva Kiir on 3 April has been cancelled in wake of the most serious confrontation between the armies of the two neighbouring states on Monday, since partition in July last year.
On Monday Kiir claimed that the military escalation was provoked by Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) coordinated aerial attacks on Jau and Pan Akuach followed by a ground forces assault against another area called Teshwin.
The pro-Somali government forces of Ahlu Sunna Waljam’a (ASWJ) backed by Ethiopian troops have taken full control of a strategic town in central Somalia after Al-Shabaab fighters vacated the town following no heavy battles, an official confirmed.
Heavily armed Ethiopian troops along with Ahlu Sunna soldiers chased away hundreds of al-Shabaab fighters from El-Bur town in Galgadud region, centralsomalia, and seized the town late on Monday afternoon.
Sheik Ahmed (Ilka-ase), the deputy chairman of executive council for Ahlu Sunna, told Shabelle Media by phone while he was in El-Bur that al-Shabaab fighters abandoned the town without any bloody clashes on Monday as columns of Ethiopian and Somali forces advanced.