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Four Papuan independence fighters were killed in an ongoing clash between security forces and a rebel group near the world’s largest gold mine in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua region, police and rebels said Monday.
The clashes, which began Feb. 29 near the Grasberg copper and gold mine in Papua province, earlier killed two security personnel and injured three others.
The monthlong fighting between Myanmar’s military and Arakan Army (AA) to the east of the Kaladan River on the border of Rakhine State’s Kyauktaw and Chin State’s Paletwa has forced nearly 20 villages to be abandoned.
“Our village was reduced to ashes. All the houses were burned down days ago and artillery shells landed on the village monastery yesterday,” the village administrator of Mont Than Pyin, U Kyaw Sein, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday.
Six government forces and five Houthi rebels were killed in clashes in the southwestern Taiz province, the Yemeni military said on Saturday.
A military statement said a senior rebel commander was among those killed in the clashes, without giving any further details.
The United States has launched a series of air raids in Iraq against several locations of an Iran-backed militia that it blamed for an earlier rocket attack that killed and wounded US and British troops.
Among the facilities attacked late on Thursday was an airport under construction in the holy city of Karbala, an Iraqi airport official confirmed.
A March 10 U.S. airstrike killed five al-Shabaab targets in Somalia without harming any civilians, U.S. Africa Command reported.
The strike was carried out near Janaale, which is located about 75 kilometers (or approximately 47 miles) southwest of Mogadishu in Somalia’s Lower Shabelle region, and was coordinated with Somalia’s federal government, the command said.