The Taliban and Iran reportedly exchanged gunfire Saturday on the Islamic Republic’s border with Afghanistan, an advocacy group said, as tensions rise over water rights between the two nations.
Neither Iranian state media nor Taliban-controlled media in Afghanistan acknowledged the fighting on the border of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province and the Afghan province of Nimroz.
The advocacy group HalVash, which reports on issues in the predominately Sunni province of Sistan and Baluchestan, quoted residents in the area describing the fighting as starting Saturday morning. The group put the fighting near the Kang district of Nimroz, saying some people in the area had been evacuated.
Tunisia's national guard on Friday announced the arrest of a suspected ISIS group member in possession of explosives who was planning "four simultaneous terrorist operations" in the country.
The suspect was arrested in Tunisia's second city of Sfax on its eastern coast and was believed to have been planning the operations "in coordination with other persons outside Tunisia", national guard spokesman Houcem Eddine Jebabli told AFP.
He appeared before the counterterrorism court which remanded him in custody, Jebabli said, adding he was "a follower" of ISIS, without providing further details.
Tunisia has bolstered security measures since a May 9 attack on a synagogue on the resort island of Djerba killed five people during an annual Jewish pilgrimage.
The gunman, a police officer, killed three other officers and two worshippers, one French-Tunisian, the other Israeli-Tunisian, before being shot dead by police.
Four people linked to the gunman and suspected of involvement in the attack were later arrested, according to Tunisian media.
Officials have denounced the attack as "criminal" but refrained from referring to it as a "terrorist" operation.
The Houthi militias have once again attacked the members of the Baha'i community in the latest wave of violations against religious minorities.
On Thursday, Houthis arrested 17 people in Sanaa, including five women, after they raided their homes and confiscated property and documents.
The new aggression against members of the Baha'i community came after the militia had deported several top officials and sentenced some of them to death, including the sect's leader.
According to a statement issued by the sect, the militants stormed the annual meeting in Sanaa and arrested 17 of its participants, including the official spokesman, activist Abdullah al-Olfi.
The group also continued the trial of more than 24 of the Bahai sect, which entered Yemen in the early 1940s.
Multiple sources in the Baha'i community told Asharq Al-Awsat that after the Houthi group closed the association, they confiscated all their property and imposed severe restrictions on their practices.
They explained that the community chose a house for their annual meeting, but the Houthi intelligence raided the residence and arrested some attendees.
A Paris appeals court on Friday handed a 14-year jail term to a high-profile French terrorist convicted of terrorist offenses linked to Syria.
The court upheld the sentence against Kevin Guiavarch handed down by a lower court but was more lenient in ruling that most of the term will not be served behind bars.
His wife Salma O. was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, which she will be able to serve at home wearing an electronic bracelet because of her “rehabilitation efforts.”
“Give me back the chance you gave me by allowing me to return to work and my job as a mother,” Salma 0. asked the court before it retired to deliberate.
The sentences handed down were deemed insufficient by the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), which brought the appeal.
But the prosecutor general acknowledged that Guiavarch was “neither a fanatic nor a lunatic.”
Guiavarch, a 30-year-old convert to Islam, was one of the UN’s most wanted terrorists and had been placed on a blacklist in 2014.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
