The elite forces were focused primarily on Islamic State fighters in recent years, but other Islamic militant groups now also move through Iraq's porous borders with Iran and Turkey. The Iraqi government announced early on Tuesday that the drone was launched by Turkey and called on Ankara to halt such attacks. "This aggression constitutes a violation of Iraq's sovereignty, security and territorial integrity," said Maj. Gen. Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, military spokesman for the prime minister, "These repeated attacks are not consistent with the principle of good neighborly relations between countries, and threaten to undermine Iraq's efforts to build good and balanced political, economic, and security relations with its neighbors." Kurdish leaders, whose territory is routinely targeted by Turkey, used angrier rhetoric. "This criminal act is an open trespassing of the border of the Kurdistan Region and of Iraq, and it is part of the conspiracy aimed at disturbing the peace and stability of the Kurdistan Region," said Bafel Talabani, president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main political parties in Kurdistan and the dominant one in Sulaymaniyah.

At least six people have been killed in a suspected drone attack on an airport near the city of Sulaymaniyah in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, official sources have told Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera's Mahmoud Abdelwahed, reporting from the Iraqi capital Baghdad, said that the Arbat airport, located 50km (30 miles) to the east of Sulaimaniya, has been used by the "anti-terrorism" combat apparatus that is part of Sulaymaniyah security forces. "Whether all the victims are from the anti-terrorism apparatus remains to be known," he said. The airport was used for agricultural purposes in the past. Two members of the Kurdish security forces were wounded in the attack and were rushed to a military hospital in Sulaimaniya under tight security, a police source told Reuters.

Turkish drone attacks in northern Iraq have killed seven members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), authorities said, as the country's foreign minister met the president and prime minister of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). "A Turkish army drone struck a PKK vehicle, killing an official and two fighters", the KRG's counterterrorism services said on Thursday. The attack took place in Sidakan district, north of the regional capital Erbil. Later, the counter-terrorism services said that another drone strike in Sidakan had killed four PKK members, including two medical personnel. The PKK has fought a rebellion against Turkey since 1984, and has bases inside KRG territory.

As AI advances, could it replace your travel agent? To investigate just how effective a holiday planner AI can be, MailOnline Travel asked two chatbots - ChatGPT, created by California AI firm OpenAI, and Google's Bard - to plan a variety of trips. Scroll down to see the answers the chatbots provided, from hotel recommendations in Iraq to advice on planning budget sun holidays, honeymoons and stag weekends away. For a budget break in the sun, Bard recommended jetting off to Bulgaria, where it says that you can find a week-long all-inclusive holiday'for as little as £200'. MailOnline Travel asked ChatGPT and Google's Bard to plan a variety of holidays.

Iran launched cross-border missile and drone strikes that killed nine people in Iraq's Kurdistan region Wednesday after accusing Kurdish armed groups based there of stoking a wave of unrest that has rocked the Islamic republic. The September 16 death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of Iran's morality police has sparked a major wave of protests and a crackdown that has left scores of demonstrators dead over the past 12 nights. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has in recent days accused the Iraq-based Kurdish groups of "attacking and infiltrating Iran from the northwest of the country to sow insecurity and riots and spread unrest". After several earlier Iranian cross-border attacks that caused no casualties, a barrage of missiles and drones on Wednesday claimed nine lives and wounded 32, said the regional health minister in Arbil, Saman al-Barazanji, while visiting some off the wounded in a hospital in the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region. "There are civilians among the victims", including one of those killed, a senior official of the Kurdistan region earlier told AFP.

Iran has attacked an Iranian-Kurdish opposition group in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, killing nine people and injuring several others, Kurdish officials said. The missile and drone attacks on Wednesday focused on bases in Koya, some 60km (35 miles) east of Erbil, said Soran Nuri – a member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. The group, known by the acronym KDPI, is a left-wing armed opposition force that is banned in Iran. Iran's state-run IRNA news agency and broadcaster said Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps ground forces targeted some bases of a separatist group in the north of Iraq with "precision missiles" and a "suicide drone". "This operation will continue with our full determination until the threat is effectively repelled, terrorist groups' bases are dismantled, and the authorities of the Kurdish region assume their obligations and responsibilities," the IRGC said in a statement read on state television. Nine people were killed and 24 wounded, according to Kurdistan Regional Government's health minister, Saman Barazanchi.

This article presents the data used to evaluate the performance of evolutionary clustering algorithm star (ECA*) compared to five traditional and modern clustering algorithms. Two experimental methods are employed to examine the performance of ECA* against genetic algorithm for clustering++ (GENCLUST++), learning vector quantisation (LVQ) , expectation maximisation (EM) , K-means++ (KM++) and K-means (KM). These algorithms are applied to 32 heterogenous and multi-featured datasets to determine which one performs well on the three tests. For one, ther paper examines the efficiency of ECA* in contradiction of its corresponding algorithms using clustering evaluation measures. These validation criteria are objective function and cluster quality measures. For another, it suggests a performance rating framework to measurethe the performance sensitivity of these algorithms on varos dataset features (cluster dimensionality, number of clusters, cluster overlap, cluster shape and cluster structure). The contributions of these experiments are two-folds: (i) ECA* exceeds its counterpart aloriths in ability to find out the right cluster number; (ii) ECA* is less sensitive towards dataset features compared to its competitive techniques. Nonetheless, the results of the experiments performed demonstrate some limitations in the ECA*: (i) ECA* is not fully applied based on the premise that no prior knowledge exists; (ii) Adapting and utilising ECA* on several real applications has not been achieved yet.

Iraq cancelled a ministerial visit and summoned Turkey's ambassador on Wednesday as it blamed Ankara for a drone attack that killed two high-ranking Iraqi military officers. Iraqi officials called the attack a "blatant Turkish drone attack" in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, where Turkey's military has for weeks raided positions of fighters it considers "terrorists". Two border guard battalion commanders and the driver of their vehicle were killed on Tuesday, the army said in a statement, marking the first Iraqi troop deaths since Turkey launched the cross-border operation in mid-June against Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels. Iraq's foreign ministry - which already summoned the Turkish envoy twice over the military action on its soil - said the ambassador would this time be given "a letter of protest with strong words" rejecting the offensive. The ministry also confirmed the Turkish defence minister would no longer be welcomed for a planned visit on Thursday.

The Iraqi army says two senior security officials have been killed in a "blatant Turkish drone attack" in the country's north, where Ankara has for weeks been raiding positions of fighters it considers "terrorists". The drone targeted a vehicle belonging to the Iraqi border guards in the Bradost area, north of Erbil, the military said in a statement on Tuesday. The strike caused the deaths of the two border guard battalion commanders and the vehicle's driver. There was no immediate statement by Turkey. The deaths announced by the military marked the first time members of the regular Iraqi forces have been killed since Turkey launched a cross-border ground and air operation in mid-June against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the mountainous terrain of northern Iraq.

Officially, the group is responsible for issuing fatwas – which are rulings by Islamic authorities – in Iraqi Kurdistan. However, other imams have come out against the ban.