| FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK TWITTER FLIPBOARD TELEGRAM |
Suspected Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels attacked five villages in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, killing three people and injuring one, aid agencies said.
The incident, the UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) said, occurred in Ezo and Tambura counties early this month.
The month’s first two clashes were fought between the Shan State Army (SSA) South and the Burma Army columns that have, since last month, increased their “territorial clearance and “territorial control” operations, according to the SSA commander Col Kherh Ngeun.
“We had instructed our units to avoid confrontation since last month,” he said. “But it only seems to have encouraged the BurmaArmy to increase its movements in our operational areas.”
Rebels pressed an offensive east of Damascus and in southeastern Aleppo, in an escalation that in the past three days has killed scores of fighters on both sides, a monitoring group said on yesterday.
Rebels in Eastern Ghouta east of Damascus are trying to break the army siege on opposition areas there, taking over several small villages and checkpoints, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
France said on Tuesday it would increase its force in Central African Republic (CAR) to at least 1,000 soldiers once a U.N. resolution is passed next week to try to prevent sectarian violence from destabilising the entire region.
The landlocked nation of 4.6 million people at the heart of Africa has descended into chaos since the Séléka coalition of rebels, many of them from neighbouring Chad and Sudan, ousted President François Bozizé in March.
Clashes between Libyan troops and militants in the eastern city of Benghazi on Monday killed at least nine people and wounded a dozen in another test of the country’s fledgling armed forces.
Still in training, Libya’s new military is struggling to curb Islamist militants and militias who fought in the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi but refuse to disarm and control parts of the country.