Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Iraqis who flee fighting in Falluja find hardship and hunger

The New York Times reports: Out of security concerns, the Baghdad government, which is Shiite-led, has long restricted the movement of people between the capital and Sunni-dominated Anbar, almost as if the two areas were separate countries. For some agencies, it can be difficult and time-consuming to receive permission from the Iraqi government to travel across the bridge and deliver aid.

In some instances, aid agencies have turned to a powerful Shiite militia, Kataib Hezbollah, which is controlled by Iran and in charge of an important checkpoint in Anbar, to get aid to the displaced.

Also, as the offensive for Falluja unfolded, the Iraqi authorities were eager to facilitate access for journalists to the front lines, but have not allowed them to travel to areas to see displaced civilians.

It was only because of an invitation to join a local aid agency’s convoy on Sunday that a reporting team from The New York Times was able to visit the camps for civilians fleeing the violence around Falluja.

The government-controlled areas of western Anbar Province, a Sunni-dominated region that has been a heartland for the Islamic State, have become vast wastelands of human suffering.

Bare-bones tent cities are sprouting up all over, providing little more than basic shelter and some, but not nearly enough, food, water and medicine. The heat is terrible, always well above 100 Fahrenheit during the day, and most tents do not have fans or the electricity to run them.

When Iraqi forces reached his town of Saqlawiya, north of Falluja, last week, Hatem Shukur waved a white flag to catch their attention. In an interview, he said he and his family had been given cold water, watermelon, apples and bananas — delights after months of being under siege.

“But now we are facing another problem,” Mr. Shukur, 58, said. “Can you imagine your family living here in this heat?”

He waved his arm around the space where he and his family live, a small square of concrete floor, a metal frame and plastic sheeting for walls. On the floor, lying on a blanket, was his 8-month-old granddaughter, Rawan, flies buzzing around her as she slept.

Aid workers expressed frustration at their inability to meet the basic needs of civilians caught up in the war — there is not even enough fresh drinking water in the camps, officials said. There is always this question: Why is there always so much more money for military operations than for water and food for the civilians uprooted by them? [Continue reading…]

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ISIS members from the West seek help getting home

The Wall Street Journal reports: Westerners who joined Islamic State once enjoyed not only power and social status but also free food, housing and even cars. But that gave way to cowering in basements during air raids, dwindling food stocks and scant medical care, according to Syrians who have fled and diplomats who debriefed defectors.

“Father, help me,” a teenager from Europe said about six months ago in a text message to her father. “I want to get out. But I now have a small child.”

The father, who declined to be identified, said he had previously made several attempts to persuade his daughter to return from Raqqa after she left to join Islamic State in late 2013.

Speaking by phone and Facebook messenger from his home in Scandinavia, the father said he asked his government for help but that there is little authorities can do. She would first have to get to Turkey, according to government officials of her home country who corroborated the father’s story.

She remains in Raqqa, too scared to flee for fear of being caught, according to her father. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq on the path to disintegration

Michael Weiss writes: A fortnight before the battle got underway in Iraq to retake the city of Fallujah from the so-called Islamic State, I sat down with a native son of that restive town, Sheikh Khamis al-Khanjar. He was once a central power broker in Iraq’s political system and is now an exile with, it would seem, many millions of dollars at his disposal to try and buy his way back in.

As we talked in the lounge of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, where we were both attending the annual Lennart Meri Conference, Khanjar touched on the core problem bedeviling Iraq, of which ISIS is only one manifestation. The United States, he believes, is almost autistically focused on the issue of Sunni jihadism at the expense of broader social cohesion and geopolitics, particularly Tehran’s meddling in the affairs of its next-door neighbor. The very integrity of the modern nation-state a Western superpower tried hubristically to reinvent in Mesopotamia 13 long years ago is now in mortal jeopardy.

“Instead of saying, ‘We need to keep Iraq united,” Khanjar said, echoing a favored American talking point, “we must admit that Iraq is no longer united and ask what can we do to bring it back together. Iraq is on the path to disintegration.”

“Again today, we are repeating the mistake of betting completely on one person: Abadi,” Khanjar said. He was referring to Iraq’s prime minister, a Haider al-Abadi, a U.S. ally who has faced popular revolt against his dysfunctional government and seems ever less in control over Iraq’s security apparatus. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS kills dozens of its own in hunt for spies

The Associated Press reports: In March, a senior commander with the Islamic State group was driving through northern Syria on orders to lead militants in the fighting there when a drone blasted his vehicle to oblivion.

The killing of Abu Hayjaa al-Tunsi, a Tunisian jihadi, sparked a panicked hunt within the group’s ranks for spies who could have tipped off the U.S-led coalition about his closely guarded movements. By the time it was over, the group would kill 38 of its own members on suspicion of acting as informants.

They were among dozens of IS members killed by their own leadership in recent months in a vicious purge after a string of airstrikes killed prominent figures. Others have disappeared into prisons and still more have fled, fearing they could be next as the jihadi group turns on itself in the hunt for moles, according to Syrian opposition activists, Kurdish militia commanders, several Iraqi intelligence officials and an informant for the Iraqi government who worked within IS ranks.

The fear of informants has fueled paranoia among the militants’ ranks. A mobile phone or internet connection can raise suspicions. As a warning to others, IS has displayed the bodies of some suspected spies in public — or used particularly gruesome methods, including reportedly dropping some into a vat of acid. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS is winning the media war

Mohammed A. Salih writes: Faced with what has been often described as the world’s most resourceful and sophisticated terror organization, Iraq’s news media outlets have stumbled in how to cover the Islamic State (IS). The country’s news media appear to have unwillingly assisted IS in disseminating some of its gruesome propaganda releases, thus enabling it to achieve broader reach and possibly even impact.

IS brutality and its dramatic expansion in Iraq over the last couple of years has posed a major challenge for Iraqi media outlets. Is covering the group’s activities a legitimate public service or an extension of its own jihadi propaganda?

While media editors and managers at major Iraqi news outlets are aware of the ethical debate surrounding the use of propaganda materials by terrorist groups, and especially graphic content, a combination of political agendas and lack of rigorous editorial oversight appear to hamper the translation of that knowledge into practice. [Continue reading…]

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Deadly hatred fractures anti-ISIS alliance in Iraq

Christoph Reuter reports: For over a year, the US has been pushing for the launch of an offensive on IS-held Mosul and has been bombing the city almost daily. But despite repeated announcements that an attack was imminent, very little has happened on the ground aside from the recapture of a handful of surrounding towns and villages. Nevertheless, Iraqi commanders have already made competing claims on the expected spoils.

“Nothing and nobody will stop us from marching into Mosul,” says Hadi al-Ameri, the top commander of a conglomerate of Shiite militias that are officially called the Popular Mobilization Units but which are widely known as Hashd.

“All areas of Mosul east of the Tigris belong to Kurdistan,” counters Brigadier Halgord Hikmat, spokesman of the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, which controls the Kurdish fighting force. “We aren’t demanding any more than that, and the river is a clear border.”

What’s more, the Sunni ex-governor of Mosul — together with several thousand fighters and the support of 1,200 Turkish troops whose presence in Iraq is tolerated by the Kurds — is planning to invade the city from the north. Under Sunni leadership.

The government in Baghdad, under the leadership of the respectable yet weak Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, has mostly stayed out of it — despite the fact that the Iraqi army would seem best positioned to prevent a fight among the allies over the spoils of Mosul. But Abadi has been fighting for political survival ever since followers of the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the government quarter in Baghdad a short time ago, the second such incident in a month. Instead of recapturing Mosul, once Iraq’s second-largest city, the military has now been tasked with first liberating Fallujah, the much smaller IS stronghold west of Baghdad.

Right in the middle, located at the halfway point between Baghdad and Mosul, is Tuz Khurmatu — the harbinger of Iraq’s future. It is a place where those groups fighting together to defeat IS are killing each other away from the front lines. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. falters in campaign to revive Iraqi army, officials say

Reuters reports: A 17-month U.S. effort to retrain and reunify Iraq’s regular army has failed to create a large number of effective Iraqi combat units or limit the power of sectarian militias, according to current and former U.S. military and civilian officials.

Concern about the shortcomings of the American attempt to strengthen the Iraqi military comes as Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militias have launched an offensive to retake the city of Falluja from Islamic State. Aid groups fear the campaign could spark a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 50,000 Sunni civilians remain trapped in the besieged town.

The continued weakness of regular Iraqi army units and reliance on Shi’ite militias, current and former U.S. military officials said, could impede Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s broader effort to defeat Islamic State and win the long-term support of Iraqi Sunnis. The sectarian divide between the majority Shi’ite and minority Sunni communities threatens to split the country for good. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS at real risk of losing much of the territory it holds

The Guardian reports: For the first time in the two years since the leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed the existence of an “Islamic caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq, the jihadi group is at real risk of losing much of the territory it holds.

Four Isis strongholds – two in Syria and two in Iraq – are now under concerted attack, and in all cases the militants defending them are struggling to contain well-organised and resourced assaults planned over many months.

The attacks are heavily backed by the US, which since April has stepped up its campaign to “destroy and degrade” the terrorist organisation in its self-declared heartland of eastern Syria and western Iraq. A two-year project that had been derided by allies and proxies alike as being too limited and cautious now has military momentum. [Continue reading…]

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The Falluja offensive risks handing a propaganda victory to ISIS

Janine di Giovanni writes: My memory of Falluja is of roads leading to the city, of fields of swaying date palm trees, which my Iraqi friend Thaier once told me represented the souls of the country’s people. “They are symbols of our hopes and dreams,” he said, pointing to the lush fields along the Euphrates, on a trip we took crossing Iraq east to west and north to south, in the late winter of 2003. It was shortly before the invasion that crushed all those hopes and dreams.

Today, more than a week into the US-backed Iraqi forces offensive on Falluja, that trip seems very long ago, in the distant land that once was Iraq. The road north of Falluja is a road of bleak war – of mortars, rockets and bullets. It is brown and gutted and veined in places with tunnels built by Islamic State during their occupation there for the past two years. An Australian farmer who came to Baghdad in 2010 told me, as he sifted the dirt in his hands, that the land was so “traumatised” by war it would take generations for nutritious food to grow.

While the US-backed Iraqi forces, aided by Shia militias (backed by Iran), are now pushing back Isis in Falluja, farming or any form of ordinary life has vanished. Along with Isis, there are also 50,000 civilians trapped in the centre of the city who might become (that horrible phrase) collateral damage.

They are vulnerable to mortar and rocket attacks, and terror: reports of Shia death squads roaming the streets conjure up memories of another heavy-handed military “clearing operation” – in Tikrit in 2015, when many civilians fled their homes as Isis positions were encircled and pounded. [Continue reading…]

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The social scientists who talk to ISIS

Tom Bartlett writes: On a good day, driving to the front line of the war against the Islamic State carries some risk. This is not a good day: High winds have kicked up enough dust to dim the sun and hide nearby mountains, a thick haze that could provide cover for snipers or suicide bombers. While Kurdish soldiers, known as Peshmerga, meaning “those who face death,” have proved adept at keeping a determined foe at bay, they can’t prevent every incursion along a roughly 650-mile border, particularly when those sneaking in are willing, even eager, to die in the attempt.

The road to the front passes through tiny villages of cinderblock houses and over flat, green fields before giving way to rockier terrain as it winds southwest from Erbil, capital of Kurdistan, a country that doesn’t quite exist. It also passes through a series of military checkpoints where increasingly skeptical soldiers, ancient AK-47s slung over their shoulders, peer into a vehicle and ask its occupants — not unreasonably — where, exactly, they think they are going.

Phone calls must be made, documents presented. Satisfied, the soldiers step back and wave the car on.

“I am really worried,” says Lydia Wilson from the back seat. “This is the worst time to be going.” Wilson, a medieval historian by training, is not easily cowed. She’s visited military bases before, and she’s sat across a table from ISIS fighters. She’s just not keen on needless risk. Hoshang Waziri, this group’s translator and cultural ambassador, scans the blurred horizon and doesn’t like what he sees, either. It’s not the lobbed shell or the stray bullet that unnerves him so much as the prospect of getting kidnapped. “That’s what scares me,” he says. “The idea of falling into their hands.”

They spent the morning drinking strong black tea from small glass cups with a Kurdish official who, they hope, will grant them access to captured ISIS fighters, the holy grail of research subjects and, for obvious reasons, the toughest to track down. They explained to the official, as they explain to everyone, that they are not journalists angling for a story or government envoys pushing an agenda, but rather social scientists interested in knotty universal questions regarding the nature of human conflict. Answering such questions is difficult in part because of an established gap between expressed willingness and actual willingness; that is, between what people promise to do and, when it comes down to it, whether they pick up the gun or strap on the vest. Interviewing fighters engaged in combat or plucked from the battlefield has the neat advantage of eliminating that gap. Then the only question is: Why?

But getting to those fighters — that’s the trick. Weeks of planning can evaporate in an instant, forcing the researchers to improvise. Beyond the logistical aggravation, there’s the matter of personal safety. Where there are fighters, there is often fighting, and while the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq remains relatively sheltered compared with Syria or large swaths of southern Iraq, the proximity to bloodshed prompts understandable unease.

The least jittery member of the team is its leader, Scott Atran, an anthropologist who floats among several institutions, including the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. He’s also a founder of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, at the University of Oxford. He’s normally the one arguing to go a little farther afield, to challenge the group’s comfort zone, perhaps to cross over into Syria. While sitting around the hotel he appears restless and testy, headed toward ISIS territory he is in his element, enlivened and unfazed. “We don’t want to drive off the road, because it’s probably mined on both sides,” he warns casually from the passenger seat, the way you might note a change in speed limit or a forthcoming rest stop. [Continue reading…]

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What happens after ISIS?

The Daily Beast reports: Troops fighting ISIS appeared to on the verge of another victory over the self-proclaimed Islamic State Wednesday, as they moved into a city that has served as the main thoroughfare for ISIS foreign fighters and weapons. But the potential seizure of the Syrian city of Manbij by U.S.-backed forces is only likely to set off a new battle for control — this time pitting Arabs against Kurds.

The battle Wednesday reflected a growing problem for the U.S. and its push to train local fighters, even as those forces take territory from ISIS. Who exactly will govern those towns now? Will it be the Kurds who have led the fight against ISIS? Or will it be what some in the Pentagon have privately called the “token Arabs” trained by the U.S. to accompany them?

Two defense officials told The Daily Beast Wednesday they don’t know. They believe the Arabs would be in charge. But even these officials admit that asking the 5,000-or-so newly-trained Arab fighters to control three or more formerly ISIS-controlled areas — and at the same time move into the ISIS capital of Raqqa — would be difficult.

On the other hand, some worry that a Kurdish controlled Manbij could be ethnically cleansed, creating the kind of Sunni disenfranchisement that led to the rise of ISIS. The fall of Manbij into Kurdish hands, however, would give the Kurds a contiguous region in northern Syria. Moreover, a Kurdish controlled Manbij could draw the ire of U.S.-allied Turkey, which rejects a Kurdish controlled region on its border.

The question “what happens after ISIS?” looms increasingly over the U.S.-led effort. Indeed, defense officials said how the governance question is answered in Manbij could foreshadow the strategy for Raqqa, ISIS’s capital. Local U.S.-backed forces, accompanied by U.S. forces, have moved within 18 miles of the city in the last week. Over the Memorial Day weekend, one U.S. service member was injured while supporting the local fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Militias in Libya advance on ISIS stronghold of Surt with separate agendas

The New York Times reports: Fighters aligned with Libya’s United Nations-backed unity government are advancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt, signaling the first major assault on territory that, since last year, has become the terrorist group’s largest base outside of Iraq and Syria.

Two separate militia forces have fought their way toward the city in recent days, attacking from both the east and the west, in apparently uncoordinated attacks that have reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles. On Wednesday, one of the militias claimed to have seized control of Surt’s power plant, 20 miles west of the city.

Those victories occurred in sparsely populated areas, and it was unclear whether the militias had either the strength or the will to push into Surt, which is thought to be heavily fortified and also harbor several thousand foreign fighters. But the advance did signal a new setback for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, at a time when it is already under concerted attack in Falluja, Iraq, and in parts of Syria.

Analysts and diplomats warn that while the offensive addresses the West’s biggest concern in Libya, it also risks destabilizing the fragile peace effort by fostering violent competition between rival groups.

“Only a year ago, these two groups were battling for control of the so-called oil crescent, and lobbying rockets and shells at one another,” said Frederic Wehrey, a Libya specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who visited that country recently. “Now they are converging on a common enemy, but the great fear is what comes next.” [Continue reading…]

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Fear of ‘catastrophe unfolding’ amid fighting in Falluja

The New York Times reports: Along the battle line north of Falluja, small units of Shiite fighters are raining mortar shells and rockets down on the city and its Islamic State occupiers. Militia graffiti is scrawled in red paint along a network of low walls cratered by bullets and bombs, and a wailing ambulance siren signals another load of wounded bound for treatment away from the front.

The battle for Falluja has become entrenched outside the city itself. Iraqi forces surrounding the area have been bogged down by a fierce Islamic State counterattack. A few civilians managed to escape the city as the fighting closed in, but the status of tens of thousands still trapped there is an urgent question.

Some parts of the extended battlefield are lush with date palm trees and almost bucolic, familiar to anyone who watched television images of American Marines fighting over the same territory more than a decade ago. But mostly, the land is brown and parched, scarred by the fighting. A charred tank, split in two, sits at an intersection, and smoke is always rising in the distance, from an airstrike, a mortar or a car bomb.

The landscape has also been gutted by an elaborate network of tunnels — some of which have been hit in recent days by American airstrikes — that the Islamic State was able to construct while it held the area for more than two years. [Continue reading…]

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Price of a life: Yazidis kidnapped by ISIS in 2014 and their desperate relatives now trying to buy them back

Sophie McBain writes: On the morning of 3 August 2014, a 58-year-old chef known as Abu Majed faced the most agonising decision of his life. Earlier that summer, Islamic State (IS) fighters had overrun vast areas of northern Iraq. Now, they were closing in on the villages and towns that surround Mount Sinjar, a jagged ridge of rock that rises abruptly from the flatlands and extends for tens of kilometres towards the Syrian border. Abu Majed’s village, Khanasur, had few defences and would fall to the militants. How should he protect his family?

A popular, humorous man, Abu Majed learned to cook in Baghdad in the 1970s before returning to Khanasur to open his gazino, an outdoor restaurant where young people liked to gather for grilled meat, beer and whisky among trees strung with fairy lights. He had five children and was fiercely proud of all of them. They were at the top of their classes at school and his two eldest wanted to study medicine. To Abu Majed – who, like almost everyone else in Khanasur, had descended from a long line of subsistence farmers – these ambitions were remarkable.

Abu Majed’s restaurant had been a haven during many turbulent years in Iraq. He kept it open through the repressive reign of Saddam Hussein and during the violence that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the threat now posed by the jihadists was greater than anything that had come before – especially because the villagers of Khanasur are Yazidis, an isolated and marginalised religious minority that has lived for centuries in north-west Iraq.

Having heard reports of the jihadists’ brutality elsewhere, Abu Majed was certain that IS’s main target would be the Yazidi men. The best option was for his family to split. After sending his wife and four youngest children – then aged between eight and 15 – to shelter with another family in the village, he walked with his eldest son towards Mount Sinjar. Abu Majed was still on the ascent when his phone rang. On the screen, he saw his daughter’s number. “They’ve captured us,” she whispered. [Continue reading…]

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Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft back EU hate speech rules

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Reuters reports: Facebook, Twitter, Google’s YouTube and Microsoft on Tuesday agreed to an EU code of conduct to tackle online hate speech within 24 hours in Europe.

EU governments have been trying in recent months to get social platforms to crack down on rising online racism following the refugee crisis and terror attacks, with some even threatening action against the companies.

As part of the pledge agreed with the European Commission, the web giants will review the majority of valid requests for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to the content if necessary.

They will also strengthen their cooperation with civil society organisations who help flag hateful content when it goes online and promote “counter-narratives” to hate speech.

“The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech. Social media is unfortunately one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalise young people,” EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said.

Germany got Google, Facebook and Twitter to agree to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours last year and even launched an investigation into the European head of Facebook over its alleged failure to remove racist hate speech. [Continue reading…]

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America’s Middle East allies could win friends for ISIS

Hassan Hassan writes: The tortuous war against Isis is taking a treacherous turn. Two years after the militant Sunni group declared its brutal caliphate, the US and its allies in Iraq and Syria have begun a two-front offensive to dislodge the militant group from its strongholds in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and Raqqa in Syria. But, while the campaign has made progress, the composition of the forces leading the battles in the two Arab Sunni cities is intensifying sectarian and ethnic tensions in the bitterly divided nations and beyond. The danger is that the US-led action will, ultimately, help Isis gain legitimacy as a defender of Sunnis — even if it cedes territory.

Heightened fears in Syria, Iraq and the wider region about the offensive in Falluja and Raqqa bode ill for the long-term fight against the group. With western help channelled to militias beholden to the Shia regime in Iran and close to Tehran’s allies in Damascus, the fight is widely seen in the region as nakedly sectarian.

The US-backed offensive is the first of its kind since the American-led anti-Isis campaign began soon after the group swept into Iraq. America has long sought to avoid providing air support for Shia and Kurdish militias to fight in two Sunni areas at once: when Baghdad launched the battle to retake the city of Tikrit from Isis in March last year, Washington refrained from providing air strikes in support of the estimated 30,000 Shia fighters until the battle stalled three weeks later. [Continue reading…]

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Elite U.S. soldiers and Kurdish troops moving on ISIS near Mosul

Florian Neuhof reports: The operation is the largest by the Kurds in Iraq since they took Sinjar from the Islamic State last November. Intent on driving ISIS out of nine villages facing them at the Khazir front, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) threw 4,700 men into the offensive, according to Arif Tayfor, the sector commander at Khazir.

By Monday afternoon, seven of those nine villages had been taken.

The Kurds, without question, benefitted from some hands-on U.S. support. A few miles from Mufti, on the road leading directly to Mosul, I came across a U.S. special operations commando shoveling empty machine-gun cartridge cases out of the turret of an armored car.

These camera-shy elite soldiers usually refrain from engaging the enemy directly, instead gathering intelligence and directing air strikes. But at Khazir, U.S. ammunition clearly was expended.

It is not the first time American special operations forces have tangled with ISIS on the Kurdish front lines in Iraq. Early in May, U.S. Navy Seal Charlie Keating was killed when a group of Seals helped contain an ISIS attack on Telskuf, an abandoned Christian town near Mosul.

The Khazir operation’s immediate aim is to relieve the pressure on the nearby frontline town of Gwer and push ISIS further away from Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region that is barely an hour’s car ride away.

The long-term goal is to carve out a greater Kurdistan from the crumbling caliphate and a disintegrating Iraq. The villages at Khazir are part of the disputed territories, areas claimed by both the KRG and the central government in Baghdad. [Continue reading…]

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Fears ISIS will use 50,000 trapped civilians as human shields as Iraqi forces storm Fallujah in dawn offensive

The Telegraph reports: The Iraqi army entered Islamic State-held Fallujah in a major dawn offensive on Monday as it made its “final push” to recapture the city from jihadists.

Troops pincered Isil from three directions and managed to push into urban areas for the first time since the operation began a week ago.

With the help of an Iran-backed Shia militia and air support from the US-led coalition, the army said it had gained control of 80 per cent of the towns and villages around Fallujah and was now focused on retaking the city itself.

Some 1,500 Isil fighters holed up in the centre, which has been under their control for more than two years, were putting up fierce resistance with suicide bombings and rocket attacks. [Continue reading…]

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