Eight women and a child were killed in an overnight air raid on a funeral reception near Sanaa, medics in the Yemeni capital said.

At least 10 more women were wounded, according to medics.

Huthi rebels in Sanaa accused a Saudi-backed coalition of carrying out the strike. A coalition spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

At least 12 Saudi soldiers have died on the southern border since early February, according to an unusual series of official reports released as the country fights Yemeni rebels, like reported by jordantimes.com .

In separate dispatches since February 5, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) has carried photographs of funerals for the “martyrs” it said died “defending the southern borders.”

 The most recent report, published late on Monday, named Jaber Haroubi as the latest soldier to be killed.

SPA also quoted the father of another military casualty, Mohammed Al Manjahi, as saying he was proud of his son.

A Saudi-led coalition began air strikes over Yemen in March 2015 to support the internationally recognised government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in the fight against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

The Houthis, allied with former members of the security forces loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, have carried out retaliatory rocket strikes and engaged in firefights along the border.

They have also launched ballistic missiles further into the kingdom.

An earlier AFP tally of reports by the Saudi interior ministry and civil defence department found that at least 115 civilians and soldiers had been killed on the southern border since coalition operations began.

That total has now reached at least 127.

A Western diplomat told AFP last week that more than 100 members of the Saudi armed forces had likely been killed since the coalition intervened nearly two years ago.

The coalition’s spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment on the tally.

Villages mourn 

Official media have previously reported on funerals for dead troops.

But this month’s series of dispatches, including photographs of slain soldiers’ families bearing coffins, is unusual.

SPA said the Director of the Border Guards Awad Al Balwi last Wednesday paid tribute to two of his men killed in the Jazan region on the frontier.

“They were among the best,” SPA said he told the dead men’s families while conveying condolences in their villages.

The Saudi interior ministry regularly gives details of casualties among its Border Guard troops but other military services normally do not.

SPA on Monday reported that separate funeral prayers were held for five other soldiers killed on duty in the south.

There were no details of how they died.

The rebels’ Almasirah television website said on Monday that insurgents killed an unspecified number of Saudi soldiers during an advance “towards the mountains surrounding Jazan”.

The latest losses came as Yemeni government forces claimed full control of the Red Sea coastal town of Mokha on Friday and prepared a push further north into rebel-held territory.

Medical and military sources in Yemen on Monday reported renewed clashes in Mokha as well as the coastal town of Midi, which is just over the border from Jazan.

They reported eight rebels and three pro-government troops dead in fighting on Monday evening.

Six loyalist troops died on Tuesday when a coalition air strike hit their convoy north of Mokha in “error”, a military source said.

The war in Yemen has left thousands dead and millions struggling to feed themselves, a toll which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in Riyadh on Sunday left him heartbroken.

Seven ceasefires brokered between government and rebel forces by the UN have failed, while UN-backed peace talks have repeatedly broken down.

82nd Airborne Division paratroopers are honing Iraqi security forces’ urban combat skills ahead of a planned offensive to eject the Islamic State group from the western half of Iraq’s second largest city, like reported by stripes.com.

“They (the Iraqi troops) already know how to clear rooms,” said Sgt. 1st Class Bradley Thomas, 36, one of 1,000 soldiers from the legendary airborne unit that is advising and helping government forces battling the militants in Mosul.

The paratroopers, who have been in Iraq for a month, aren’t teaching the Iraqis new tactics for fighting in built-up areas. Rather, they’re providing tips that will help them limit casualties during what’s expected to be a tough battle in some of Mosul’s most densely populated and oldest neighborhoods, Thomas said.

“They want to be the ones doing it rather than having U.S. forces do it for them. We just give them input on how they can improve,” said Thomas, a native of St. Joseph, Mo.

His unit, Company A, 2nd Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment, recently moved to a temporary assembly area in northern Iraq to guard four M109 Paladin 155 mm self-propelled howitzers that will provide artillery support for advancing Iraqi forces, he said.

“We are repositioning people,” in preparation for the push into the western half of Mosul, said Lt. Col. James Downing, the battalion commander.

Downing, 40, of Lewistown, Ill., and his soldiers took over the advise and assist mission from members of the 101st Airborne Division.

Some of the paratroopers initially occupied houses in Bartella, a Christian town on the outskirts of Mosul, alongside Australian and Iraqi special forces. However, Downing said his soldiers are now on the move to a new location.

The tall infantryman visited Mosul in 2004. His senior enlisted adviser, Command Sgt. Maj. Santos Cavazos, lost an eye battling insurgents there on a previous deployment, but the injury didn’t appear to have dampened his enthusiasm for the mission on a cold winter day near the battlefield.

Some of the battalion’s Mosul veterans spent time at Forward Operating Base Marez, which is still in enemy territory west of the Tigris River. But they don’t expect to see many familiar sights once the area is recaptured. Aerial images show the base has been destroyed beyond recognition, Downing said.

The airborne troops are focused on helping Iraqi security forces prepare for their final assault on the city, he said.

“The enemy has been heavily attritted,” he said. “They were handed a pretty heavy defeat (in eastern Mosul) and they are suffering from things like desertion.”

Iraqi commanders have learned from the hard fighting over the past few months and have devised a good plan to capture the rest of the city, Downing said.

“It could go a lot quicker (in the west), but it’s very complex terrain,” he said. “It’s an older part of town, and the population is denser.”

The airborne soldiers won’t see any action on the front line during the battle. Instead they will be coaching Iraqi officers, sharing intelligence and coordinating fire support, he said.

“The Iraqis are doing the fighting, and they are getting after it,” he said, adding that other Iraq veterans would likely be impressed at the skill and professionalism of the local forces.

“I’m certainly proud to serve next them,” he said.

China’s ethnic Uighur minority were fighting and dying in Syria — including for Islamic State — though she claimed they had been duped into doing so.

Rebiya Kadeer, who heads the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said that among the thousands of Uighurs who have fled to Southeast Asia, Turkey and elsewhere in recent years, a small number have ended up in the war-torn Middle Eastern country and have joined militant groups, like reported by japantimes.co.jp.

“Some Uighurs … died after Russian airplanes bombed them, they were killed in Syria,” she said at a news conference during a visit to Japan.

Russia’s militarily backs the regime of President Bashar Assad in Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011 and has left more than 300,000 people dead. Numerous groups, including IS, are fighting for control of the country.

The mostly Muslim Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and number some 10 million, are native to the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang bordering Central Asia and have long complained of religious and cultural discrimination.

China has frequently warned that radical forces from outside have inspired terrorist attacks in Xinjiang as well as in other regions of the country and has launched a harsh crackdown.

It says among Uighurs who have fled are some seeking to train with extremists in Syria to eventually return and fight for independence in Xinjiang.

In 2015, China’s Security Ministry said more than 100 Uighurs that were repatriated by Thailand had been on their way to Turkey, Syria or Iraq “to join jihad.”

Once a wealthy and prominent businesswoman, Kadeer, now 70, fell out with the Chinese government and was jailed before her 2005 release into exile in the United States where she serves as president of the WUC.

She said Uighurs who end up in Syria are vulnerable and prone to being “brainwashed” into joining the fighting there, but still denounced them.

“We think they are just like criminal groups in our society,” she said.

The WUC describes itself as a “peaceful opposition movement against Chinese occupation of East Turkestan” — their name for Xinjiang.

It says it promotes “human rights, religious freedom, and democracy” for Uighurs and advocates “peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic means to determine their political future.”

But China has blamed the WUC, as well as the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), of radicalizing Uighurs and fomenting violence and independence.

Overseas experts, however, have expressed skepticism, with some accusing China of exaggerating the Uighur threat to justify a tough security regime in resource-rich Xinjiang.

Human Rights groups argue that harsh police tactics and government campaigns against Muslim religious practices, such as the wearing of veils, have fueled Uighur violence.

China says it has boosted economic development in Xinjiang and upholds minority and religious rights for all of the country’s 56 ethnic groups.

The Iraqi airforce carried out a strike on a house where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was thought to be meeting other commanders, Iraq’s Iraqi military said in a statement on Monday, without making clear whether he had been hit, according to jpost.com.

The statement said Iraqi F-16s had targeted the house in western Iraq on Saturday. It also published the names of 13 Islamic State commanders it said had been killed in the airstrike but the list did not include Baghdadi.

Syrian jihadists seen as close to Islamic State battled a rival hardline Islamist faction on Monday in northwestern Syria, a war monitor and an official with another insurgent group said, like reported by reuters.com.

Jund al-Aqsa and Tahrir al-Sham clashed around Kafr Zeita in the countryside north of Hama, and near Tamaniaa, Khan Sheikhoun and Tal Aaas in southern Idlib Province, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor.

An official with a rebel group that fights under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was not involved in Monday’s confrontations, confirmed the fighting.

A statement released by Tahrir al-Sham said Jund al-Aqsa was responsible for the violence, accusing it of coordinating with Islamic State and of having attacked Tahrir al-Sham with suicide blasts and a car bomb.

The main conflict in Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and Shi’ite militias, against an array of rebel groups aiming to oust him, including some that have been backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies.

Since the army recaptured Aleppo in December, some of the many armed groups in the northwest have consolidated into factions that are now fighting each other for control of territory and resources.

Tahrir al-Sham was formed in January from a merger of Syria’s former branch of al Qaeda, previously known as the Nusra Front and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, along with several other Islamist groups

Jund al-Aqsa and Fateh al-Sham fell out last year despite having previously aligned with each other, and insurgent sources and the Observatory say Jund al-Aqsa’s ideology is closer to that of Islamic State group, al Qaeda’s main jihadist rival.

Both Tahrir al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa are also fighting against an alliance of another Islamist group, Ahrar al-Sham, and rebel factions fighting under the FSA banner. Jihadist groups attacked the FSA for sending delegates to peace talks in Kazakhstan last month.

Islamic State militants in Kirkuk are telling people they have to choose between fighting security forces alongside the group or to leave after paying tolls, a local security source said to iraqinews.com .

The group deployed members of its Hisbah (vigilantism) service with megaphones in the group-held town of Hawija, southwest of the province, to announce the new rules, the source told Alsumaria News on Monday.

“The group is obliging whoever wants to leave to pay US$1500 per person or an equivalent amount in gold,” according to the source.

IS have been in control over the southern Kirkuk regions of Hawija, al-Zab and al-Riyadh since 2014, when the group emerged to proclaim the establishment of a so-called “Islamic Caliphate” at various Iraqi cities.

IS’s hardline, bloody governance, coupled with minimal subsistence and ongoing battles between the group and Iraqi government forces, have forced hundreds of thousands to flee regions occupied by the group to refugee camps, with the numbers of refugees standing at at least 191.000, according to a latest count by the government.

IS has sustained consecutive losses of personnel and ground since Iraqi government forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition launched a major offensive to retake Mosul, the group’s biggest stronghold in Iraq.

An Islamic State militant, the group’s chlorine bombs expert, was killed mysteriously in western Mosul as the group builds up defenses anticipating a security offensive, like reported by iraqinews.com.

Reports quoted a local source in Nineveh as saying that the so-nicknamed Abu Yaha al-Iraqi, 44, was killed near his residence in Islah al-Zeraie district in “mysterious circumstances”. He was referred to as the “engineer” of the group’s chlorine bombs.

“Al-Iraqi’s family had disappeared before his death,” the source said, noting that the fact adds to the mystery around his killers. The group was unmoved by his death, which makes it possible that its members were the perpetrators, as he put it.

IS lost the eastern section of Mosul to Iraqi government forces on January 24th after three months of battles that left at least 3000 of its fighters dead.

Since security operations launched to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and IS’s largest stronghold, the group has been ravaged with both combat losses and internal divisions. There had been several reports of infighting and assassinations of senior group figures, while others told of executions of delinquent fighters.

Iraqi forces are awaiting higher orders to carry on with an invasion of the group’s strongholds in the west.

Saudi security forces arrested on Saturday morning more than 10 terror members during raids in Jeddah and Medina, Sabq local online news portal reported.

The raids took place as part of the preemptive operations to prevent terror plots. No official confirmation was made by the interior ministry yet, although the portal confirmed the confiscations of guns and sharp objects with the arrestees.

Last month, Saudi Arabia arrested 16 terrorists, 3 Saudis and 10 Pakistanis during similar raids in Jeddah, and two extremists killed by the police.

Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a war against terrorism for years, especially the Islamic State militant group.