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At least 24 people have been killed and 53 wounded amid heavy fighting in the Somali city of Las Anod, after local clan elders declared their intention to cut ties with the breakaway republic of Somaliland and rejoin Somalia.
In a second day of violence, local elders said on Tuesday that electricity and water in the city had been cut off, and a health centre had been attacked with mortars.
Separatist rebels set fire to a small plane carrying six people after it landed at a remote airport in Indonesia’s restive Papua province and took its pilot, a New Zealand citizen, hostage early Tuesday, police and rebels said.
Rebel spokesperson Sebby Sambom said independence fighters from the West Papua Liberation Army, the military wing of the Free Papua Organization, stormed the plane shortly after it landed in Paro in Nduga, a mountainous district.
Ukrainian forces are bracing for an imminent large-scale attack by Russian troops as the Kremlin seeks to regain the initiative in the war and seize the rest of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have multiplied warnings in recent days about a coming Russian offensive, albeit with differing timelines. Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, said on Sunday that his country expected Russia’s invading forces to launch a new offensive in the Donbas and southern areas where it currently occupies close to 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory later this month.
Israel conducted airstrikes on the central Gaza Strip early on Thursday, according to journalists and witnesses, hours after the military said it intercepted a rocket fired from the Palestinian territory.
New rounds of rockets were fired from Gaza after these strikes, and fresh explosions could be heard from Gaza City about 3.15am local time, Agence France-Presse journalists reported.
A suicide bomber struck a crowded mosque inside a police compound in Pakistan on Monday, causing the roof to collapse and killing at least 59 people and wounding more than 150 others, officials said.
Most of the casualties were police officers. It was not clear how the bomber was able to slip into the walled compound, which houses the police headquarters in the northwestern city of Peshawar and is itself located in a high-security zone with other government buildings.