Deadly flash flooding batters Sumatra
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Torrential rains triggered flash floods and landslides on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, killing at least 27 people, including a dozen children at a school, officials said Saturday.
A flash flood carrying mud and debris from landslides struck Mandailing Natal district in North Sumatra province and smashed an Islamic school in Muara Saladi village, where 29 children were swept away on Friday afternoon, said local police chief Irsan Sinuhaji.
He said rescuers retrieved the bodies of 11 children from mud and rubble hours later.
National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said rescuers and villagers managed to rescue 17 other children and several teachers on Friday and pulled out the body of a child on Saturday near Aek Saladi river, close to the school.
Nugroho said two bodies were found early Saturday from a car washed away by floods in Mandailing Natal, where 17 houses collapsed and 12 were swept away.
Four villagers were killed after landslides hit 29 houses and flooded about 100 buildings in neighboring Sibolga district, Nugroho said.
He said flash floods also smashed several villages in West Sumatra province's Tanah Datar district, killing five people, including two children, and leaving another missing. Landslides and flooding in the neighboring districts of Padang Pariaman and West Pasaman killed four villagers after 500 houses flooded and three bridges collapsed.
16 people die in Somali terror attacks
NAIROBI, Kenya -- A suicide bomber detonated in the middle of a restaurant in the Somali town of Baidoa and a grenade struck a hotel nearby, leaving at least 16 people dead and more than 30 wounded, authorities said Saturday.
Most of the casualties were caused by the bomber, who walked into the restaurant with explosives strapped around his waist, officials said.
At least 10 of the wounded were being treated at Baidoa's main hospital.
Baidoa is a key economic center about 155 miles west of the capital, Mogadishu, and about the same distance east of the Ethiopian border.
The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group claimed responsibility for the blasts via its radio arm, Andalus. It said one blast targeted a hotel owned by a former Somali minister, Mohamed Aden Fargeti, one of several candidates running for the presidency of the South West State in November's election.
Al-Shabab, which controlled Baidoa between 2009 and 2012 before being driven out by Ethiopian-backed government forces, still holds parts of southern and central Somalia.
Coalition strike kills 17 people in Yemen
SANAA, Yemen -- An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition targeting Yemen's Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, killed at least 17 people in the port city of Hodeida on Saturday, Yemeni rebel officials said.
The strike, which hit in the Jebel Ras area, also wounded 20 people, a spokesman for the rebel-run Health Ministry, Youssef al-Hadari, said.
Hodeida, with its key port installations that bring in U.N. and other humanitarian aid, has become the center of Yemen's conflict, with ground troops allied to the coalition struggling to drive out the rebels who control it.
Tribal leaders said the strike hit traffic, including a bus that was destroyed, killing all inside, and that women and children were among the dead. The tribal leaders spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for their safety.
The death toll is expected to rise, as many of the wounded were in critical condition.
The Saudi-led coalition has been locked in a stalemated war with the rebels since 2015. An estimated 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen's conflict, which has produced what the United Nations says is the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
ISIS abducts families from Syrian camp
BEIRUT -- The Islamic State group stormed a settlement for displaced people in eastern Syria and abducted scores of civilians in the latest attack by the extremists on civilians, a U.S.-backed Syrian force and a war monitor said on Saturday.
The area in Syria's eastern Deir el-Zour province has experienced days of intense clashes between the Islamic State and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces amid bad weather and low visibility.
The Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement that the fighting on Friday in the Hajin camp for the displaced left 20 Islamic State gunmen and "several" Syrian Democratic Forces fighters dead. It added that Islamic State gunmen seized civilians by force and took them to areas in the last pocket of territory they control in the region.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria's war, said as many as 130 families were abducted by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. The Observatory warned that the Islamic State group might kill them.
The Observatory said the families are mostly made up of foreign women, including widows of Islamic State members who had been killed earlier in the Syrian war.
A Section on 10/14/2018