Nicosia, Oct 20: Reza Kasaizadeh, the new Head of the National Iranian Gas Export Company (NIGEC), has said that Iran’s three major gas projects - the Iran LNG, the Pars LNG and the Persian LNG - will be completed by the end of 2014.

Ankara - The Turkish military on Friday said 35 Kurdish separatists had been killed in clashes this week on Mount Cudi in the southeastern province of Sirnak.

A General Staff spokesman told reporters that the number of Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) deaths was learnt through intercepted PKK communications.

Recent weeks have seen an increase in the number and intensity of PKK attacks on Turkish military targets. Five Turkish soldiers and five PKK rebels were killed late Wednesday in clashes in the province of Hakkari.

On October 3, 17 soldiers were killed in a PKK attack on a military border post and in response Turkey has staged almost daily aerial bombardments of suspected PKK positions inside northern Iraq.

Baghdad - Two Iraqi Christians were killed on Sunday in the city of Mosul after hundreds of Christians fled the city, a police source said Monday.

Unknown gunmen broke into a shop in an eastern district of Mosul and killed the shop's Christian owner and injured another shop assistant, the police source told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.

In another incident, gunmen shot a Christian man dead after they raided his house north-east of Mosul.

Around 300 Christian families are believed to have fled the city since last week.

Baghdad, Oct 13: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has asked the British forces to leave the country as they were no longer needed to maintain security there. He also criticised a “secret deal” made last year by Britain with the al-Mahdi Army, Iraq’s largest Shia militia, saying that Basra had been left at the mercy of militiamen who “cut the throats of women and children” after the British withdrawal from the city.

“We thank them for the role they have played, but I think that their stay is not necessary for maintaining security and control. There might be a need for their experience in training and some technological issues, but as a fighting force, I don’t think that is necessary,” timesonline. com quoted al-Maliki as saying in an interview.

Khost, Afghanistan - The young Texan woman talking to the Afghan tribesman wears a US military uniform and carries an assault rifle, but she's not a soldier.

Her training is in anthropology, which is proving an effective tool for negotiating the complexities of Afghanistan's honeycomb tribal structure and, according to a senior US commander, significantly reducing the need for "kinetic," or combat, operations.

Tel Aviv - Three people were injured in a third night of Arab-Jewish rioting in the northern Israeli town of Acre, local media reported Saturday.

Nine people were arrested over night in disturbances that began after Jewish youths threw stones at Arab inhabitants of the city, which prompted stone throwing by Arab youths.

The worst Arab-Jewish clashes in years broke out around midnight Wednesday on the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday when an Arab resident who drove his car through a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, playing loud music in an alleged provocation.