The US military has launched a mission to transfer up to 7,000 Islamic State (IS) group fighters from prisons in north-eastern Syria to Iraq, as Syrian government forces take control of areas long controlled by Kurdish-led forces. US Central Command said it had already moved 150 IS fighters from Hassakeh province to a secure location in Iraq. The move aimed to prevent a breakout that would pose a direct threat to the United States and regional security, it added. On Tuesday night, Syria's government announced a new ceasefire with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), after the militia alliance withdrew from al-Hol camp, which holds thousands of relatives of IS fighters. Separately on Wednesday, Syria's defence ministry said seven soldiers were killed in a drone attack by Kurdish forces in the Kurdish-dominated province of Hasakah.

Military experts warn that Chinese missile strikes on U.S. air bases could cripple American airpower in the Pacific, as both nations pursue different strategies for air superiority.

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in time series modeling, yet their internal mechanisms remain opaque. This work demystifies the Transformer encoder by establishing its fundamental equivalence to a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). We show that in the forward pass, the attention distribution matrix serves as a dynamic adjacency matrix, and its composition with subsequent transformations performs computations analogous to graph convolution. Moreover, we demonstrate that in the backward pass, the update dynamics of value and feed-forward projections mirror those of GCN parameters. Building on this unified theoretical reinterpretation, we propose \textbf{Fighter} (Flexible Graph Convolutional Transformer), a streamlined architecture that removes redundant linear projections and incorporates multi-hop graph aggregation. This perspective yields an explicit and interpretable representation of temporal dependencies across different scales, naturally expressed as graph edges. Experiments on standard forecasting benchmarks confirm that Fighter achieves competitive performance while providing clearer mechanistic interpretability of its predictions.

"What we're hearing is stories of horror and terror and weekly shelling, attacks on civilian infrastructure," Ms Vu told the BBC Newshour programme. "There are local volunteers - they are really struggling, risking their lives every day to try and provide a little bit of food for people who are mostly starving." Siddig Omar, a 65-year-old resident of el-Fasher, told the BBC the RSF entered the city on Friday from the south and south-west. The RSF, whose fighters have been mustering in trenches dug around the city, frequently attack el-Fasher. According to the army, this was their 220th offensive.

Sudanese paramilitaries have attacked the city of el-Fasher killing at least 38 people, according to local activists, while international rights groups accuse the fighters of widespread sexual violence. The local resistance committee, a volunteer group coordinating aid in el-Fasher, said on Sunday that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) targeted the centre of the capital of North Darfur state "with four high-explosive missiles". The massacre followed an earlier drone attack on the city's Saudi Hospital on Friday, which killed nine people and wounded 20, forcing doctors to halt operations. World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described attacks on healthcare facilities across Sudan as "deplorable" in a post on X on Saturday. The RSF and Sudan's army have been locked in a power struggle since mid-April 2023, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises, with tens of thousands killed and more than 11 million displaced.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has claimed responsibility for an attack on a Turkish state-run defence company near the capital, Ankara, that killed five people and wounded 22. The "act of sacrifice" in Ankara "was carried out by a team of the immortals battalion" of the PKK, the group said on the Telegram messaging app on Friday. Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) was attacked on Wednesday with fighters setting off explosives and opening fire using automatic rifles at the campus of the company that designs and manufactures civilian and military aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other defence industry and space systems. On Friday, Turkey's Ministry of National Defence said it carried out air strikes for the second night in a row in northern Iraq, hitting 34 PKK targets in Hakurk, Gara, Qandil and Sinjar, destroying shelters, warehouses and other facilities. The overnight strikes followed a security meeting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan chaired with key ministers and chiefs of the armed forces and intelligence agency in Istanbul. The Turkish government said earlier it had proof that the PKK, listed as a terror group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, was behind the attack.

That's the unofficial moniker of almost 100 women aged 19 to 64 who are volunteers in part-time military service in air defence units in the suburban community northwest of Kyiv. Each "Bucha witch" trains to handle assault rifles and machineguns to shoot down Russian drones that swarm above their homes several times a month. The weapons fly towards Kyiv to blow up buildings, prompting Ukrainian air defence forces to launch pricey Western-supplied missiles at them. The buzzing swarms repeat the route of Russian ground forces in early 2022 when they occupied most of the Bucha district for 33 days and committed atrocities, now well documented, that captured the world's attention. According to Ukrainian officials and international war crimes monitors, Russian fighters killed hundreds of civilians and robbed, raped and tortured thousands more.

Israel killed three Palestinians in a drone strike on Thursday in Tulkarem, a city and refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. That was during an Israeli raid – a near-daily occurrence in the West Bank – on the Tulkarem refugee camp, during which Israeli troops clashed with fighters from the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, according to fighters in the city. Here's all you need to know about Israeli raids on Tulkarem: News reports say Israeli soldiers were deployed on rooftops and sent bulldozers into the camp to destroy large residential areas. Israel also reportedly set fire to people's homes and prevented local relief workers from putting the fires out. Experts say Israel's tactics during its raids appear to be part of a broader doctrine to collectively punish the population, ostensibly because pockets of armed resistance are fighting back against Israel's ever-entrenching occupation. Israel claims that it is conducting "counter-terrorism" operations.

Mae Sot, Thailand – Once again, the attack came from the sky. The Kachin resistance fighters barely heard the sound of the propellers as the Myanmar military's two drones released their payload above their heads in northern Kachin State in late April. "I fell down to the ground when the bombs dropped," Aung Nge, a fighter with the Kachin People's Defense Force (PDF), told Al Jazeera from an undisclosed location. I was awake the whole time." The drone attack seriously injured three men who were holed up close to the front line in Kachin State where battles with the armed forces have been escalating since October last year. In critical condition, field medics sent the men to a hidden hospital deep in the jungle where they could be treated by professional doctors. Within a day of receiving treatment, however, one of the soldiers started to show symptoms the doctors could not understand and his condition began to deteriorate rapidly. Another man from the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), who had been injured in a separate drone strike days after the first attack and appeared to be on the mend with no signs of infection, also took a turn for the worse and died in his sleep. Aung Nge, meanwhile, was about to endure ghastly infections that would spread across his entire body. Doctors told Al Jazeera that the men experienced rapid onset necrosis, an effect not normally seen in a blast wound. Necrosis causes the deterioration of most or all of the cells in an organ or tissue due to disease or the failure of the blood supply. While necrosis can be caused by sepsis, which appears rapidly and is usually accompanied by a fever, doctors said they could find no physiological reason for the rapid deterioration in their patients. Toxic substances can also trigger such reactions, they said. "In close examination of the wounds, they are rapidly necrotising, easily decomposed and not associated with metallic foreign bodies," Dr Soe Min, the veteran trauma doctor who treated the suspicious cases, told Al Jazeera. He has been treating combat-related cases since January 2022 and has seen and treated hundreds of blast injuries. These cases were different, he said. "After two days, all the wounds became blackish in colour with foul-smelling discharge.

Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Turkish drone strikes in northeastern Syria on Friday evening killed four U.S.-backed fighters and wounded 11 civilians, the Kurdish-led force said. The strikes on areas held by the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces came a day after Turkey's president said his government won't hesitate to act against Kurdish-led groups in northern Syria if they proceed with plans to hold local elections. It accuses the groups of having links to outlawed Kurdish militants in Turkey. The SDF said drone strikes hit its positions eight times as well as civilian homes and vehicles in and near the northern city of Qamishli.