Ethiopia, Pakistan, Iran

Today's three stories you should know

Ethiopia

World leaders urged restraint as violence flared again in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, with local officials accusing the central government in Addis Ababa of launching drone attacks. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), at the time the regional authority, fought a war against Ethiopian government forces from 2020-2022, during which the African Union said up to 600,000 people may have been killed. A TPLF-affiliated news outlet published photos of charred trucks it said were transporting food, prompting government supporters to claim they were carrying weapons. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres’s office called on "all parties to exercise restraint." The European Union warned of potential regional instability, and Britain advised its citizens against traveling to Tigray.

More from RFI here.

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Pakistan

Pakistani forces have killed at least 177 separatist rebels over the last 48 hours, officials said, after a wave of attacks from the insurgents killed at least 33 people, most of them civilians. Local police and the army have been conducting raids after an estimated 200 fighters from the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) were reported to have carried out simultaneous suicide and gun attacks on police stations, security facilities and civilian homes. Ethnic separatists have been fighting the Pakistani government in Balochistan, the country’s biggest and poorest province, for decades, with the BLA the strongest of the groups.

More from AP here.

Iran

Iranian state media said police have arrested four foreigners over involvement in last month’s anti-government demonstrations that rocked the country, grabbed international headlines and prompted threats from U.S. President Donald Trump to bomb the country. Iran had accused foreign nations, including Israel and the U.S., of fomenting the protests, but it did not specify which countries the four were from. The report quoted police as saying the men had been arrested in a “hideout” in possession of homemade sound grenades. Thousands are reported to have been killed in a crackdown on the protests, which were the biggest since the 1979 revolution that brought the current government to power.

More from Reuters here.