| FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK TWITTER FLIPBOARD TELEGRAM |
An Afghan insurgent group led by the son of late anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud claimed Saturday to have seized three northern districts from the extremist group, after announcing a wide military offensive.
The National Resistance Front (NRF), led by Ahmad Massoud, said the action in the Panjshir Valley was its first armed offensive against Taliban forces since they stormed back to power.
Fighting continues to rage in southern Ukraine. Here, Russian forces hold the port city of Kherson and they claim to control the whole administrative region, of which Kherson is the capital. But in fact they don’t: Ukrainian counterattacks in March brought a small part of that region back under Kyiv’s control. FRANCE 24 reports from the Ukrainian-held part of the Kherson region.
Ukrainian soldiers returned to the scene of a battle they won to find eviedence of looting. “We’re now standing at a former Russian checkpoint, which was destroyed on the 28th of March,” said the Ukrainian army’s Oksana Kozyrenko.
Islamic State on Sunday claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that killed an officer and 10 Egyptian soldiers in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, the group said on its Telegram channel.
Complaining that the West is “stuffing Ukraine with weapons,” Russia bombarded railroad stations and other supply-line points across the country.
It comes as the European Union moved to further punish Moscow for the war Wednesday by proposing a ban on oil imports, a crucial source of revenue.
Thousands of people have fled from the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar and surrounding areas due to clashes between Iraq’s army and the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), a Yazidi militia with ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The Iraqi military launched an operation to clear the area of YBS forces on Sunday, but heavy fighting continued into Monday, Al Jazeera reported.