The United States has accused Russian fighter jets of flying dangerously close to several of its drones over Syria, setting off flares and forcing the MQ-9 Reapers to take evasive action. US Air Forces Central released a video of Wednesday's encounter, showing a Russian SU-35 fighter closing in on the drone. Footage showed the Russian pilot positioning his aircraft in front of the Reaper and turning on the afterburner, dramatically increasing speed and air pressure and making it harder to operate the drone, the air force said in comments accompanying the video. So-called parachute flares were also released. "The Russian SU-35 fighter aircraft employed parachute flares in the flight path of US MQ-9 aircraft," the air force said.

The United States military said a helicopter accident in northeast Syria has left 22 US service members injured, though no enemy fire was reported at the time of the "mishap". "The service members are receiving treatment for their injuries and 10 have been evacuated to higher care facilities outside of the CENTCOM AOR [US Central Command Area of Responsibility]", the US military said in a statement on Monday. An investigation is under way to determine the cause of the accident on Sunday in northeast Syria, US Central Command said in a statement. The statement added that "no enemy fire was reported" at the time of the accident. US forces operating in Syria since 2015 have come under sporadic attacks from ISIL (ISIS) fighters and Iranian-backed groups operating in the country.

Structural causal models provide a formalism to express causal relations between variables of interest. Models and variables can represent a system at different levels of abstraction, whereby relations may be coarsened and refined according to the need of a modeller. However, switching between different levels of abstraction requires evaluating a trade-off between the consistency and the information loss among different models. In this paper we introduce a family of interventional measures that an agent may use to evaluate such a trade-off. We consider four measures suited for different tasks, analyze their properties, and propose algorithms to evaluate and learn causal abstractions. Finally, we illustrate the flexibility of our setup by empirically showing how different measures and algorithmic choices may lead to different abstractions.

A drone attack hit a US-led coalition base in southern Syria, the US military's Central Command has said. "Three one-way attack drones attacked the al-Tanf Garrison in Syria," a CENTCOM statement said on Friday. Two of the drones were shot down by the coalition, but the third hit the compound, wounding two allied Syrian opposition fighters who received treatment, the statement added. "Attacks of this kind are unacceptable," CENTCOM spokesperson Joe Buccino said, without specifying who carried it out. "They place our troops and our partners at risk and jeopardise the fight against ISIL." There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

At first glance, the July 31 killing of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri by a US drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, appears to be the most significant setback the group has experienced since the death of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in 2011. However, throughout the decade he administered al-Qaeda, al-Zawahiri worked to ensure the organisation has all the necessary tools in place to survive his death. As such, while the operation that eliminated one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks is undoubtedly a major win for the current US administration, it is unlikely to debilitate the group. Indeed, the fallout from this targeted assassination will be minimal for al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri, seen by many as nothing other than a "grey bureaucrat", can easily be replaced by someone with a similar managerial mindset.

For the second time in 24 hours, a United States-led coalition fighting ISIL (ISIS) in Iraq says it has foiled a drone attack on a base hosting US troops. An official of the international military coalition said on Tuesday two armed drones were shot down as they approached the base in western Anbar province. "Two fixed-wing drones rigged with explosives were engaged and destroyed by defensive capabilities at the Iraqi Ain al-Asad airbase early this morning," the official was quoted as saying by news agencies. "The attempted attack was unsuccessful. All forces are accounted for."

The US military says it has shot down an armed, Iran-made drone that had been bearing down on its forces near a garrison in Syria's southeast. In the latest sign of increasingly frequent confrontation with Damascus and its allies, Tuesday's incident closely followed Sunday's US downing of a piloted Syrian army jet in the southern Raqqa countryside after it dropped bombs near US-backed forces. The Pentagon said a US F-15 aircraft, flying over Syrian territory, fired on the drone after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on coalition forces. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said it had "dirty wings", meaning it was armed. "I can tell you it was an Iranian-made drone," Davis said, declining to speculate on who was operating it.

British politicians who examined the details of a drone strike which killed a British man in Syria said they were disappointed by the government's lack of transparency during investigations. On August 21, 2015, the UK conducted a drone strike in Raqqa for the first time outside the traditional theatre of war, killing 21-year-old British national Reyaad Khan, a suspected fighter with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), and two other people. "We are in no doubt that Reyaad Khan posed a very serious threat to the UK," the Intelligence and Security Committee in the UK said in a report on Wednesday. "There is nevertheless a question as to how the threat is quantified and in this instance whether the actions of Khan and his associates amounted to an'armed attack' against the UK or Iraq - which is clearly a subjective assessment," the committee said. "The [government's] failure to provide what we consider to be relevant documents is profoundly disappointing," the report added.

With frequent suicide bombings and assaults on Somalia's hotels and military targets, the armed group al-Shabab continues to threaten stability in the war-ravaged country. The emergence of fighters pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group can only make things worse. After vowing to target "radical Islamic terrorism", US President Donald Trump's administration plans to pursue wider military involvement in Somalia as current strategies, including drone attacks, are not enough, security experts say. Recommendations by the Pentagon sent to the White House would allow US special forces to increase assistance to the Somali National Army and give the US military greater flexibility to launch more preemptive air strikes. "The concern in Washington has been mounting for some time now. The Trump administration is simply reiterating what has been policy, with slight variations," said Rashid Abdi, a Horn of Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Mosul, Iraq - As fighting raged in eastern Mosul on a recent afternoon, a black Humvee arrived at an Iraqi army command post with a collection of plastics, electronics and rotor blades lashed to its back. Soldiers leaped to unload the cargo, which comprised the remnants of the latest tool in ISIL's armoury: drones. The haul included a number of small devices of the kind favoured by filmmakers and hobbyists, costing a few hundred dollars apiece. But there were also larger, fixed-wing craft fashioned out of corrugated plastic and duct tape, apparently made by the fighters themselves. Since mid-2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group has held Mosul, after sweeping through northern Iraq in a shock offensive.