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Libyan forces have recaptured a main district in Benghazi from militants, a significant win in a long-running battle for control of the eastern city, a senior army officer said Wednesday.
“The area of Ganfouda has been completely liberated from terrorists,” Jamal al-Zahawi of the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) told broadcaster Libya Channel.
Islamist militants detonated a car bomb at the entrance of a hotel in the Somali capital Mogadishu and opened fire inside the lobby, killing at least 28 people, according to government officials and medical workers.
The attack began on Wednesday morning when the militants rammed a car into the gate of Dayah Hotel, located near the Somali parliament, and proceeded to storm inside and exchange gunfire with security guards. AFP reports that a second blast went off shortly thereafter, injuring at least four journalists who had arrived to report on the attack.
A mortar attack in restive northern Mali has killed one United Nations peacekeeper and seriously wounded two others in their camp near the Algerian border, the UN said Tuesday.
The statement from the UN peacekeeping force Minusma on Monday’s attack at the Aguelhok camp did not provide nationalities, but most of the UN troops there are from Chad.
Working under a UN mission, Kenyan soldiers Tuesday killed seven al-Shabaab militants in a southern region of Somalia, near Kenya’s border, also liberating a mosque and police station from militant control, said a military official.
Kenya military spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Njuguna said in a media statement that the dawn attack was planned and executed by Kenyan soldiers under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).
Iraqi forces have captured all of eastern Mosul, dislodging Islamic State militants from the last district they held east of the Tigris river, 100 days after the start of the U.S.-backed campaign, the Defense Ministry said on Monday.
Mosul is Islamic State’s last major city stronghold in Iraq.