Wars in the World

Myanmar has said 30 guerilla fighters have been killed in clashes over the weekend in the restive Rakhine state.

Reports had emerged last week about clashes in the border region in northwestern Myanmar between government forces and armed militants.

“We now have 30 insurgents dead and 29 captured alive,” national police chief Zaw said in capital Naypyidaw on Monday, Radio Free Asia reported.

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Thirteen Nigerian soldiers were wounded in clashes with the Islamist militant group Boko Haram and others are missing, the army said on Tuesday.

Army spokesman Sani Usman said the clashes took place at Gashigar, a town in the northeast’s Borno state, near the border with Niger.

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Intense battles between Somali troops and al-Shabaab fighters have broken out in Afgoye, a city about 30km northwest of the capital Mogadishu, according to security sources and witnesses.

Local authorities told Reuters news agency that at least four police officers were killed on Tuesday when a suicide attacker rammed a bomb-laden car into a police station, and then fighters stormed the area.

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Iraqi government forces, with air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition, launched an offensive on Monday to drive Islamic State from the northern city of Mosul, the militants’ last major stronghold in the country.

Helicopters released flares overhead and explosions could be heard on the city’s eastern front, where Kurdish fighters moved forward to take outlying villages, a Reuters correspondent said.

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Free Syrian Army forces captured Dabiq from ISIS in northern rural Aleppo. Photo: FSA

The Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) said its forces captured Dabiq on Sunday, a town with great symbolic importance to ISIS in Syria’s north.

“Free Syrian Army forces have taken control of the strategic town of Dabiq in the northern Aleppo countryside after violent clashes with Daesh (ISIS),” the FSA said in a tweet.

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