Tuesday, June 16, 2015
The Syrian Kurdish YPG militia said on Monday that it and its allies had taken full control of the town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border, defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) fighters.
“It’s now under complete control,” YPG spokesman Redur Xelil said after a day of rapid advances in an offensive aided by U.S.-led air strikes. Tel Abyad had been important to ISIS as the nearest border town under its control to its de facto capital Raqqa.
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Monday, June 15, 2015
Leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula AQAP, Nasser Al-Wuhayshi, has been killed in a US drone strike, a Yemeni website reported on Monday.
“We obtained reliable information that Al-Wuhayshi was targeted by the drone in the city of Mukalla in Yemen’s eastern province of Hadramout this past Friday,” the Almasdar website reported.
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In what could be the first extension of the Washington-led air war against terrorists in Syria and Iraq, the US today killed seven leading members of Libya’s Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar Al-Sharia in an airstrike on a farm outside Ajdabiya.
One of the victims of the raid, which happened at 2am this morning, was the Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar, former leader of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) who was accused of organising the January 2013 attack on Algeria’s desert Im-Amenas gas processing plant, in which 39 hostages and an Algerian guard died.
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Sunday, June 14, 2015
Houthi forces and their army allies in Yemen seized the capital of a large desert province on the border with Saudi Arabia, an important victory for the group ahead of peace talks in Geneva on Monday.
The Houthis, the dominant faction in Yemen’s civil war, took control of al-Hazm, capital of the province of al-Jawf, on Sunday residents said, amid Saudi-led coalition air strikes on Houthi positions and heavy fighting with armed tribesmen.
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The breakaway region of Somaliland has put its troops based in the disputed region of Sool on high alert, raising new tensions, Horseed Media reports.
Somaliland officials provided equipment, medical and food supplies to the troops stationed near Gambara district, the main base of its forces in Sool region.
The Somaliland Chief of army Ismael Shaqale visited the troops to deliver the supplies on late hours of Saturday.
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