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The U.S. military says it has killed four members of the al-Shabaab extremist group with a “self-defence airstrike” outside Somalia’s capital after partner forces were attacked.
The U.S. Africa Command statement says the airstrike occurred on Saturday near Basra, a community outside the capital, Mogadishu. The statement says no civilians were involved.
Sudanese government and two armed groups in Darfur region signed Thursday a pre-negotiation agreement paving the way for the resumption of peace talks in Qatar next year.
The signing of the declaration of principles with the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation Movement-Minni Minnawi (SLM-MM) took place in Berlin after two years of informal talks facilitated by the German foreign ministry with the support of the Berghof Foundation.
The Myanmar Army and the Arakan Army (AA) have engaged in a series of clashes over the past six days or so along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, according to the ethnic armed group.
“The two sides engaged in a fierce clash from 6.30 a.m. till 2 p.m. [Wednesday], and the fighting continued sporadically [till evening],” AA information officer U Khaing Thu Kha told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday.
At least two policemen died and 48 people were injured in a rare suicide car bomb attack by a Sunni jihadist group on a police headquarters in the port city of Chabahar in southeast Iran on Thursday, state media reported.
While suicide bombings are rare in Iran, Sunni militant groups have carried out several attacks on security forces in recent years in Sistan-Baluchestan province, where Chabahar is located.
Islamic State is carrying out a rising number of kidnappings, killings and bombings in Iraq and fighting fiercely in Syria as the extremist group returns to its insurgent roots having been driven out of almost all the territory it once controlled.
A recent US defence department report said an effective clandestine Islamic State organisation “appears to be taking hold”, four years after the group controlled swaths of Syria, as much as a third of Iraq, and declared a caliphate.