Author: AFP

The presence of North Korean soldiers alongside Russian troops in the Russian region of Kursk has not yet had a major impact on the course of the fighting, a Ukrainian military intelligence official told AFP on Tuesday. According to Kyiv, 12,000 North Korean soldiers, including “about 500 officers and three generals”, are engaged in the border region, which has been partly occupied by Ukrainian forces since August. Neither Russian nor North Korea has ever confirmed their engagement on the frontlines. “The involvement of the North Koreans in the fighting has not had a significant impact on the situation. It is…

The Israeli military said three soldiers were killed in combat in northern Gaza on Monday, where troops are engaged in a sweeping offensive against Hamas fighters. Two soldiers, both aged 21, and a third aged 22 “fell during combat” in northern Gaza, the military said, bringing its losses to 389 since it launched a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip on October 27 last year.

Lebanon’s prime minister called on the United States and France to help speed up Israeli forces’ withdrawal from his country nearly a month into a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. The United States and France, along with Lebanon, Israel and United Nations peacekeepers, make up the committee tasked with maintaining communication between the parties and ensuring ceasefire violations are identified and dealt with. As part of the truce agreement, the Lebanese army and peacekeepers will deploy in southern Lebanon as the Israeli army pulls out over a period of 60 days. “In order for the army to be able…

French President Emmanuel Macron named a new government Monday evening, putting together a team under Francois Bayrou, his fourth prime minister of the year, to drag the second-largest EU economy out of political crisis. Macron named former prime minister Elisabeth Borne education minister in a new cabinet under centrist Bayrou, the presidency said. Another former premier, Manuel Valls, returned as overseas territories minister while former interior minister Gerald Darmanin became justice minister. Both Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu and Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot kept their jobs, the presidency said. Conservative Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who has vowed to crack down on…

More than 1,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded in Russia’s war with Ukraine, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Monday. The new figure follows a report by Seoul’s spy agency to MPs last week, which said at least 100 North Korean soldiers had been killed since entering combat in December. Pyongyang has sent thousands of troops to reinforce the Russian military, including to the Kursk border region, where Ukrainian forces seized territory earlier this year. “Through various sources of information and intelligence, we assess that North Korean troops who have recently engaged in combat…

Defence Minister Israel Katz on Monday acknowledged that Israel had killed former Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran earlier this year, as he warned the military would “decapitate” the leadership of Yemen’s Huthi rebels. “We will strike hard at the Huthis… and decapitate their leadership — just as we did with Haniyeh, (Yahya) Sinwar, and (Hassan) Nasrallah in Tehran, Gaza, and Lebanon, we will do so in Hodeida and Sanaa,” Katz said, in the first public acknowledgement that Israel was behind the killing of Haniyeh in July in the Iranian capital.

Two Syrian doctors and a nurse told AFP that Bashar al-Assad’s government coerced them into providing false testimony to international investigators after a deadly 2018 chlorine attack. The three, who treated the wounded at a field hospital in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus after the April 7, 2018 attack, said they were summoned to national security headquarters. “I was told… that they knew where my family is in Damascus,” said orthopaedic surgeon Mohammed al-Hanash, giving public testimony which would have been impossible before the fall of Assad’s government on December 8. Emergency and intensive care specialist Hassan Oyoun…

Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa told Lebanese Druze leaders on Sunday that his country would not negatively interfere in Lebanon and would respect its neighbour’s sovereignty. Syria will not exert “negative interference in Lebanon at all — it respects Lebanon’s sovereignty, the unity of its territories, the independence of its decisions and its security stability,” Sharaa told visiting Druze chiefs Walid and Taymur Jumblatt.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday vowed to bring more “destruction” to Ukraine in retaliation for a drone attack on a high-rise apartment block in the central Russian city of Kazan a day earlier. “Whoever, and however much they try to destroy, they will face many times more destruction themselves and will regret what they are trying to do in our country,” Putin said in comments on the attack on Kazan — which left no casualties — during a televised government meeting.

Tehran has formally protested the arrests of two Iranians in Italy and the United States accused of transferring sensitive US technology to Iran, local media reported. US prosecutors on Monday charged Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi and Mohammad Abedininajafabadi with “conspiring to export sophisticated electronic components from the United States to Iran in violation of US export control and sanctions laws”, according to a statement from the US Department of Justice. The statement added that the illegally exported technology was used in a January drone attack that killed three US servicemen in Jordan. Iran denied any involvement in the attack, dismissing the…