Politics

  BEIRUT / AP IS militants entered a Syrian opposition stronghold in the country’s north on Saturday, clashing with rebels on the edges of the town as the extremist group built on its most significant advance near the Turkish border in two years, Syrian opposition groups and IS media said. More than 160,000 civilians are trapped in the fighting, which ...

  Istanbul / AFP Two rockets fired on Saturday from inside Syria landed near the international airport of Gaziantep, a major Turkish border city, although nobody was hurt, the Turkish news agency Dogan reported. One of the projectiles landed in a residential complex for employees of Oguzeli airport, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) outside the city and another came down ...

  ANKARA / AP Turkey’s state-run news agency says US-led coalition airstrikes and Turkish artillery fire against the IS group in Syria have killed 104 militants. Anadolu Agency said on Saturday said the strikes came late Friday, hours after rockets fired from Syria hit a southern Turkish town and wounded five people. It said the airstrikes and artillery fire also ...

  Aden / AFP Yemeni authorities on Saturday arrested seven IS group suspects, including one ‘Westerner’, in second city Aden, a police officer said. The arrests are part of a government offensive against IS and Al-Qaeda, which have claimed a wave of deadly attacks in recent months in Yemen’s south and southeast. Among these were twin bombings claimed by IS ...

  Paris / AFP French President Francois Hollande will underline the need for European unity at a ceremony Sunday in Verdun to honour those killed in one of the bloodiest battles of World War I 100 years ago. To mark the centenary, Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will lay wreaths at cemeteries holding the dead of both sides in ...

  Kuala Lumpur / AFP Malaysia on Saturday received 68 Syrian refugees including 31 children out of a total of 3,000 it hopes to allow into the predominantly Muslim country with hundreds more expected soon. Last December, the Southeast Asian country accepted the first batch of 11 Syrian migrants who had relatives in Malaysia. Deputy Prime Minister Zahid Hamidi said ...

  Tehran /AFP Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged newly-elected lawmakers on Saturday to resist “schemes” from the West as parliamentarians met in Tehran for the first time since elections finished in April. “The turbulent state of the region and the world and the international adventurism of oppressors and their vassals have confronted the Islamic Iran with conditions more ...

  Beirut / AFP US-backed Syrian fighters and Iraqi forces on Thursday pursued twin assaults against the IS group, but experts warned the battles will be drawn out. The offensives on key regions of IS-held territory are the two most significant ground efforts against the extremists since they formed a self-styled “caliphate” in 2014. In Syria, an alliance backed by ...

  Paris / AFP France and Egypt will hire two private firms to help in the hunt for the black boxes from the EgyptAir plane that crashed last week on route from from Paris to Cairo, the French foreign ministry has said. ‘We are in talks with two private companies… in coordination with the Egyptian authorities,’ a ministry spokesman said, ...

  BAGHDAD / AP Iraq’s prime minister appealed on Thursday to Iraqis to postpone weekly Friday protests so that security forces can focus on a key military operation aimed at retaking the city of Fallujah from the IS group. For months, anti-government protesters, mainly followers of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr, have been holding protests every Friday outside Baghdad’s heavily ...