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The U.S. military on Friday killed the senior ISIS leader in Libya, the Pentagon said.
Abu Nabil, an Iraqi national and longtime al-Qaeda operative, was taken out in an airstrike authorized and initiated prior to the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night, said Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook.
Government officials and insurgent sources in southern Afghanistan say at least 70 Afghan soldiers have defected to the Taliban while 85 others were killed in days of fierce fighting.
Mirza Khan Rahimi, governor of the volatile Helmand province, told reporters Saturday that the defections occurred in Sangin district, and that the soldiers joined the Taliban with their weapons and equipment.
ISIS claimed responsibility for a series of attacks that targeted six locations in Paris with gunfire and explosions, killing 128 people in one of the nation’s deadliest massacres.
In an online statement distributed by supporters, the terror group said eight militants wearing explosive belts and armed with machine guns attacked precisely selected targets in the French capital.
Some 140 people were killed in a series of unprecedented attacks around Paris on Friday, police said, according to French news agencies. French President Francois Hollande closed the country’s borders and declared a state of emergency.
People died in shootings and explosions at multiple sites, some 100 of them in a popular concert hall where patrons were taken hostage and killed, police and medical officials said.
Nigerian troops killed four suspected Boko Haram suspects and set free 61 people, mainly women and children, held by the jihadist group in the flashpoint northeastern Borno state, the army said Thursday.
In an operation, troops under air cover cleared Boko Haram camps “and in the process rescued 61 persons abducted and held captive by the Boko Haram terrorists,” the army said in a statement.