SIX MISSING AFTER DEADLY GREEK FLOODS

ATHENS: Six people are still missing in Greece two days after a flash flood killed 16 people near the capital, the fire department said on Friday. “We are looking for two additional people whose disappearance was declared to police,” a fire department spokesman said. “That brings the total to six,” he said. One of the missing is apparently a hunter. The other was last seen at a roadside canteen, the spokesman said. The Greek government on Wednesday declared a three-day state of mourning after the freak flood struck the towns of Mandra, Nea Peramos and Megara, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Athens. Some elderly people died inside or near their homes, drivers were trapped in their cars as they drove to work, and two bodies were found at sea. Stricken areas will request EU solidarity funds, the Athens governor’s office said.

IRAQ FORCES RETAKE LAST IS-HELD TOWN

BAGHDAD: The Iraqi army retook the last town in the country still held by the Islamic State group on Friday as the jihadists’ self-proclaimed “caliphate” faced collapse on both sides of the border with Syria. The lightning recapture of the small Euphrates valley town of Rawa in an offensive launched at dawn came as the jihadists were also under attack for a second day in the last town they still hold in Syria, Albu Kamal just over the border. Government troops and paramilitary units “liberated the whole of Rawa and raised the Iraqi flag on all of its official buildings,” General Abdelamir Yarallah of Iraq’s Joint Operations Command (JOC) said in a statement. An army general contacted by AFP at the front had predicted that the battle would be swift as “the majority of IS fighters who were in the town have fled towards the Syrian border.” The Islamic State group (IS) has lost 95 percent of the cross-border “caliphate” it declared in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the US-led coalition fighting it said on Wednesday.