Weekly News Wrap: Monday, October 26, 2015

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Africa

• At least 55 people have died and almost 100 were wounded after suicide bombings struck two mosques in different cities in northeast Nigeria, officials said.
• A senior al Shabaab commander and about 20 of his followers have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, the first move of its kind to emerge in the Somali militant group.
• Cameroonian soldiers drove Boko Haram insurgents back across the country’s northern border into Nigeria on Friday, a day after the Islamist militants killed at least eight people in an attack in the remote region that aid groups say is becoming a war zone.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Kremlin wanted Syria to prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections, as Moscow intensified its drive to convert its increased clout with Damascus into a political settlement.
• Syrian government and Russian jets have been heavily bombarding towns in Idlib province, as fighting rages between regime forces and opposition fighters in several other provinces, Al Jazeera has learned.
• Islamic State fighters took control of a section of road southeast of Aleppo on Friday, threatening the Syrian army’s only supply route into the city, a group that monitors the civil war said.

Asia

• A preliminary NATO report into a U.S. air strike on a hospital in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz on Oct. 3, originally expected to be released within a few days, has been delayed while investigations continue, officials said.
• Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Friday he had told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that Pakistan was prepared to help revive stalled Afghan peace talks but could not bring the Taliban to the negotiating table “and be asked to kill them at the same time.”

Europe

• Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged the 2003 invasion of Iraq played a part in the rise of the Islamic State militant group, and apologized for some mistakes in planning the war, in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
• European leaders agreed to cooperate to manage migrants crossing the Balkans but offered no quick fix to a crisis that threatens to take more lives as winter sets in and to set Europe’s nations against one another.

Americas

• US researchers investigating the CIA’s knowledge of atrocities in El Salvador have had their offices broken into and files stolen.
• The presence of Russian submarines and spy ships near undersea cables carrying most global Internet communications has U.S. officials concerned that Russia could be planning to sever the lines in periods of conflict, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
• This week, the contents of CIA Director John Brennan’s hacked personal email account were plastered about the internet – apparently the work of a high school student who was irked by US policy towards Palestinians.
• Do drone strikes create more terrorists than they kill? Journalist Glenn Greenwald debates Professor Christine Fair on the effectiveness of the US drone programme.
• A U.S.-backed military operation that freed 70 hostages who had been held by Islamic State in Iraq produced a cache of intelligence, and U.S. forces supporting Iraqi troops are likely to undertake more raids in the future, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday.

UN/World

• Venezuela complained on Friday that the United Nations Security Council was not respecting the views of its non-permanent members, after abstaining on a vote for at least the seventh time this year and saying it was shut out of negotiations.
• The United Nations envoy to Yemen was arranging face-to-face negotiations between the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels but warned that a “disastrous humanitarian situation” has left most of the country in dire need.