Politics

  Beirut / AFP Lebanon’s Michel Aoun, a former general backed by the powerful Hezbollah movement as well as longtime rivals, was elected president on Monday ending a political vacuum of more than two years. The deeply divided parliament took four rounds of voting to elect Aoun, whose supporters flooded streets and squares across the country to celebrate his victory. ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran’s foreign ministry has rejected accusations from the United States that it has been shipping arms to the Shiite Huthi rebels in Yemen, according to media reports on Monday. A US admiral said on Thursday that warships from the US Navy and allied nations had intercepted four weapons shipments from Iran to the Arabian Peninsula country ...

  Bangui / AFP The Central African Republic’s capital was rocked by deadly overnight clashes as France’s defence minister was due on Monday to formally end a military operation there, hailing it as a “success”. Local sources said about 10 people had been killed in a settling of scores between armed groups Sunday night in Bangui’s restive Muslim PK5 neighbourhood. The ...

  Lagos / AFP Human Rights Watch on Monday accused Nigerian officials of sexually exploiting women and girls living in camps for victims of Boko Haram in the restive northeast. HRW said it had in July documented 43 cases of women and girls in seven internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camps in Maiduguri, the epicentre of the seven-year Islamist insurgency, who had ...

  Qayyarah / AFP Iraqi paramilitary forces battled the IS group southwest of Mosul on Sunday, the second day of an operation to cut extremist supply lines between the city and neighbouring Syria. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been advancing on Mosul from the north, east and south after the launch on October 17 of ...

  Istanbul / AFP Turkish authorities have fired over 10,000 additional civil servants as the government presses a crackdown over the failed July coup, the official gazette said. A total of 10,131 government employees were removed, mainly from the education, justice and health ministries, according to announcements published late on Saturday. The government also announced the closure of 15 pro-Kurdish and ...

  Frankfurt / AFP The IS extremist group claimed responsibility for a knife attack in Hamburg on October 16 that left a teenager dead, IS-affiliated news agency Amaq reported. “A soldier of the IS stabbed two individuals in Hamburg city on the 16th of this month,” the release said, in response to “calls to target the citizens of coalition countries” that ...

  Beirut / AFP French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian heads to the Central African Republic on Sunday to formally end Operation Sangaris, begun three years ago to halt mass killings there but which failed to disarm militias terrorising the population. The formal end to the French mission comes as a fresh wave of bloodshed shook the troubled nation, spearheaded ...

  Washington / AFP The death rate among Afghan security forces is surging far above last year’s levels, a US government watchdog said Sunday, and slew of social gains in the war-torn nation is also eroding. Afghan forces are nearing the end of their second year providing security across their war-torn country, after NATO moved into an advisory and training ...

  Didymoteicho / AFP “I want to go back to Syria. There is war in my country, but we’ve been living for seven months in Greece like prisoners.” Adan, from Aleppo, has abandoned his dream of building a new life in Europe, like thousands of other Syrians trapped in Greece. He’s just arrived at the station in Didymoteicho, a village near ...