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Syrian rebel fighters repelled Monday advances by the radical group of Islamic State (IS/ISIS) in villages of the northern countryside of Aleppo, near the Syrian border with Turkey, media sources reported.
“Fierce clashes took place between rebel factions and IS militants in the vicinity of Azaz and Marea north of Aleppo on Monday,” media activist Ahmed Salloum told ARA News.
Local officials in Eastern Ukraine have accused pro-Russian separatists of shelling a village on the outskirts of the key government stronghold of Mariupol overnight.
Heavy blasts between Sunday night and Monday morning damaged 52 homes in Sartana, only 16 kilometres (10 miles) outside Mariupol, local government representative Stepan Mahsma said on his Facebook account. The shelling hit five homes, killing two civilians and wounding six.
At least 82 civilians, including children, were killed on Sunday in Syrian army airstrikes on a busy market in a rebel-held town near Damascus, a monitoring group reported.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the strikes on the town of Douma on the eastern outskirts of the capital also wounded 250, dozens of them seriously.
Pakistan’s Punjab province Home Minister Shuja Khanzada was among 12 people killed on Sunday in a suicide bomb attack which destroyed his office in Attock city, authorities said.
Khanzada, a retired colonel of the Pakistan Army, succumbed to serious injuries he suffered after being buried under the rubble of the building, Punjab chief minister’s advisor Syeed Ilahi told Geo TV.
Rival armed groups in northern Mali said on Saturday they briefly exchanged fire in an apparent breach of a peace accord they signed with the government in June.
An exchange of gunfire took place south of Kidal, the stronghold of secular Tuareg rebels leading a coalition known as the Coordination of Azawad Movements, or CMA.