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Myanmar has reached a preliminary ceasefire agreement with ethnic Kachin rebels, the last major armed group to agree to stop fighting after decades of civil war.
Min Zaw Oo, negotiator and director of the EU-funded Myanmar Peace Center, said Kachin and Myanmar government representatives had signed a seven-point plan which included the halting of hostilities.
“I think we have achieved a breakthrough,” he said.
Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah appears to be shrugging off a 24-hour ultimatum set on Tuesday by a Free Syrian Army (FSA) official to end the group’s involvement in the Syrian conflict.
Syrian elite forces and extra fighters from Hezbollah have been sent to reinforce government troops battling rebels in the strategic border town of Qusair, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.
Government fighter jets early Wednesday bombed rebel zones of the town as regime forces readied to launch a major assault, according to the watchdog.
Myanmar’s most heavily-armed and powerful rebel group has said it is looking to carve out a legitimate state, as experts say it is flexing its muscles amid tense relations with the government.
The United Wa State Army, which commands an estimated 30,000 troops, holds sway over a remote mountainous area on the northeast border with China that is believed to be awash with drugs and has long been aloof from central Myanmar control.
Shielded from the reach of the previous junta by its close links to Beijing and formidable military might, observers say the group is using political openings under a new government to push for greater official acknowledgement.
Still reeling from a bloody encounter with the Abu Sayyaf group in the south that claimed the lives of seven Marine soldiers over the weekend, the government’s law enforcers suffered another major blow Monday with the killing of eight Special Action Force (SAF) policemen in a guerrilla ambush in the northern province of Cagayan.
Seven other members of the Philippine National Police’s elite SAF team were wounded in an ambush by communist New People’s Army (NPA) rebels early Monday.
Just two days earlier, on Saturday, seven Philippine Marines were killed in a clash with Abu Sayyaf bandits in Patikul town in Sulu. Officials are still trying to determine if the incident was an “operational miscalculation” or a close encounter.
A heavily-armed gang of nearly 300 Maoist rebels killed at least 24 people in an attack on a convoy of local Congress party leaders and supporters in central India, police said Sunday.
The land mine and gun attack on Saturday was the deadliest in three years, and the latest in a long-simmering conflict that pits the insurgents against authorities in the forests of mainly central and eastern India.
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, who rushed to the Chhattisgarh state capital Raipur along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the ambush, condemned what she called a “cowardly act” by the Maoists.
