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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).