Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected the idea of negotiations with the US over its nuclear programme, as Tehran confirmed receiving a letter from President Donald Trump. Last week, Trump said the letter proposed talks on a deal that would prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and avert possible military action. Although Khamenei said he had not seen the letter, which was delivered by an official from the United Arab Emirates, he dismissed it as a "deception of public opinion".

"When we know they won't honour it, what's the point of negotiating?" he asked, referring to Trump's decision to abandon the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal during his first term. Ten years ago, the country agreed a historic deal with six world powers - China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK and the US - to limit its nuclear activities and allow monitoring by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in return for sanctions relief. However, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the accord in 2018.

Pakistan's army said it had freed more than 300 hostages from a passenger train seized by militants in Balochistan province on Tuesday (Mar. 11). The military spokesperson said 33 militants were killed during the operation. Twenty-one civilian hostages and four military personnel were killed by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) before the operation began, the military spokesperson said. The numbers remain uncertain at this point, and it is unclear how many passengers are unaccounted for.

Two days on, the military was continuing its search operation in the area to rule out any remaining threats. Pakistan's prime minister traveled to the restive southwestern province Thursday to meet survivors of the train attack and the commandos. The Baloch Liberation Army, an outlawed group behind multiple deadly attacks in recent months, claimed responsibility for the attack that began Tuesday and ended Wednesday when troops killed all the insurgents in an operation that the military said resulted in no further passenger deaths.

Philippine police arrested former President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila on Tuesday and sent him by plane to the Netherlands to face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, President Ferdinand Marcos said. The global court in The Hague had ordered Duterte's arrest through Interpol after accusing him of crimes against humanity over deadly anti-drug crackdowns he oversaw while in office, Marcos said in a late-night news conference. Duterte had been arrested at the Manila international airport Tuesday morning when he arrived with his family from Hong Kong.

Walking slowly with a cane, the 79-year-old former president turned briefly to a small group of aides and supporters, who wept and bid him goodbye, before an escort helped him into the plane. His daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, said she sought entry to the airbase where her father was held but was refused. She criticized the Marcos administration for surrendering her father to a foreign court which currently has no jurisdiction in the Philippines.

After Syria's longtime autocratic ruler Bashar al-Assad was toppled late last year, the man who led rebel groups to victory immediately faced a new challenge: unifying the country. The peril and promise of Syria under interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa - the former leader of an Islamist insurgent group - were on dramatic display over the past week. Beginning last Thursday (Mar. 6), clashes between government security forces and armed groups loyal to Assad spiraled into sectarian revenge attacks that killed hundreds of civilians, most of them Alawites, a minority sect to which Assad belongs.

After days of deadly sectarian violence, a diplomatic triumph united a powerful force in the country's northeast with the new national army. By Tuesday (Mar. 11), it seemed as if Syria had made major steps toward quelling the tensions that erupted. But analysts say the country still has a long way to go, and that the risks of sliding back into civil war, or partitioning the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, remain.