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Anti-India protesters clashed with Indian government forces near a village in Kashmir where four rebels were killed in a gunbattle, as assailants fatally shot a village official elsewhere in the disputed region, officials said Monday.
Earlier Monday, Indian soldiers laid a siege around a village in Kashmir’s southern Shopian area on a tip that militants were hiding there, said Col. Rajesh Kalia, an army spokesman.
An al-Qaeda offshoot led an offensive Monday against regime forces in northwest Syria, sparking clashes that left 19 pro-government fighters and 22 jihadists dead, a war monitor said.
“Jihadist factions led by Hurras al-Deen launched an assault on two villages in Sahl al-Ghab,” a region of the central province of Hama, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. They briefly seized the villages of Al-Fatatra and Al-Manara, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.
Libya’s internationally-recognised government has promised to retake the country’s east after launching an offensive to capture the strategic city of Sirte from the eastern-based forces of renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar.
On Saturday, forces allied with the Government of National Accord (GNA) launched the offensive to seize Sirte, a key gateway to the country’s main oil fields in the east, from Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) forces which took the city in January.
Droukdel was killed on Thursday near the Algerian border, where the group has bases from which it has carried out attacks and abductions of Westerners in the sub-Saharan Sahel zone, Parly said.
“Many close associates” of Droukdel – who commanded several affiliate jihadist groups across the lawless region – were also “neutralised”, she added.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) launched a large-scale operation on Thursday against the Islamic State in Syria’s Deir al-Zor province after a recent increase in attacks by the extremist group.
The campaign, named “Deterrence of Terrorism,” is expected to last at least approximately one week.