Category Archives: News

Israel destroys entire apartment building housing 48 families in Gaza

The Associated Press reports: Israeli aircraft fired two missiles at a 12-story apartment tower in downtown Gaza City on Saturday. They collapsing the building, sent a huge fireball into the sky and wounded at least 22 people, including 11 children, witnesses and Palestinian officials said.

Israel has launched some 5,000 airstrikes against Gaza in nearly seven weeks of fighting with Hamas, but Saturday’s strike marked the first time an entire high-rise was toppled. The explosion shook nearby buildings.

Facebooktwittermail

Amerli: Iraqi town besieged by ISIS starving to death

BBC News reports: With each new dawn, the people of Amerli wake up to the same nightmare.

Surrounded by towns and villages taken by the Sunni jihadist militants of Islamic State (IS), the residents of this small Shia Turkmen community about 180km (110 miles) north of Baghdad have been living under siege for two months.

There is no electricity, little medicine and food supplies are dwindling. Unlike recent US intervention to help save members of the Yazidi religious minority trapped on Mount Sinjar in north-western Iraq, there is no dramatic plan to rescue people here.

In the eyes of those in Amerli, the world has turned its back on them.

“After the attack of Mosul, all the Shia Turkmen villages around Amerli were captured by Islamic State,” explains Dr Ali Albayati, a local resident. “They killed the people and displayed their bodies outside the village.”

The majority of the residents of Amerli are part of the Turkmen ethnic group, who make up roughly 4% of Iraq’s population. As Shia, they are directly targeted by Islamic State, who consider them apostates.

“We have been trying to fight them off for 70 days,” says Dr Albayati. “We have no electricity, no drinking water.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Britain ‘will not work with Assad’ to combat ISIS

AFP reports: Britain will not work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to combat Islamic State (IS) fighters in the country and his permission would not be needed for any military intervention, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Friday.

Hammond also said Britain had no plans to arm moderate fighters in Syria’s civil war, and insisted that Western troops on the ground in Iraq would only make the situation worse.

Responding to comments made by former army chief Richard Dannatt, who argued that Britain should consider some kind of alliance with Assad, Hammond warned that it would deepen sectarian rifts in the region.

“We may very well find that we are fighting, on some occasions, the same people that he is but that doesn’t make us his ally,” Hammond told BBC radio.

“One of the first things you learn in the Middle East is that my enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend.

“It would poison what we are trying to achieve in separating moderate Sunni opinion from the poisonous ideology of IS,” he added. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

UN raises estimate of dead in Syrian conflict to 191,000

The New York Times reports: The number of dead in Syria’s civil war more than doubled in the past year to at least 191,000, the United Nations human rights office said Friday. The agency’s chief, Navi Pillay, bluntly criticized Western nations, saying their inaction in the face of the slaughter had “empowered and emboldened” the killers.

In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.

“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.

The report was confined to counting individuals who had been identified by name, along with the date and location of their death, using data from five organizations that was screened to avoid duplication. It did not include nearly 52,000 deaths that were recorded but lacked sufficient detail. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iraq militants kill 46 in attack on Sunni mosque

The Associated Press reports: Militants targeted a Sunni mosque in a province next to the Iraqi capital during weekly prayers on Friday, killing at least 46 people and wounding over 50 as members of the Islamic State group continue to push through the area, officials said.

An army officer and a police officer said a suicide bomber first broke into the Musab bin Omair Mosque in Imam Wais village in Diyala province, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Baghdad, detonating his explosives before gunmen rushed in and opened fire on worshippers.

The officials said that fighters with the Islamic State group have been trying to convince members of two prominent local Sunni tribes — the Oal-Waisi and al-Jabour — to join them but they have thus far refused.

Two medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to brief the media. The towns of Jalula and al-Saadiyah have recently fallen to militants with the Islamic State group but Imam Wais is thus far in government control. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran denies report linking Iraq cooperation to nuclear talks

Reuters reports: Iran denied a report that it is ready to help counter Islamic State insurgents in return for progress in negotiations with world powers over its nuclear program.

France, one of the six nations in nuclear talks with Tehran, said on Wednesday it wanted Arab states, Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to coordinate a comprehensive response against Islamic State, whose militant forces control large parts of Syria and Iraq.

The Sunni Islamist insurgency threatening to tear apart Iraq has alarmed both Shi’ite Muslim Iran and the United States, which have had no diplomatic relations since soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran.

On Thursday a story from the official Iranian News Agency (IRNA) cited by several news organizations including Reuters reported Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as saying that if Iran agreed to “do something in Iraq, the other side in the negotiations will need to do something in return”.

“All the sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear activities should be lifted in return for its help in Iraq,” it quoted him as saying.

But later on Thursday IRNA reported foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham as dismissing “reports by some news agencies about Iran and U.S. cooperation in Iraq”.

“These reports are a misinterpretation of the foreign ministerˈs remarks and are ‘totally baseless’,” IRNA reported her as saying.

IRNA did not elaborate. On Friday, the story on IRNA’s website still showed remarks attributed to Zarif but the word Iraq had been omitted. A similar report by the semi-official Mehr news agency about Zarif’s comments continued to cite him mentioning Iraq.

Iran has offered to cooperate with the United States on stabilizing Iraq, which like Iran has a majority Shi’ite population, but Washington has responded cautiously.

Western officials have repeatedly said they do not want to mix the nuclear dossier with events elsewhere in the region.

In Washington, State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said she understood that Zarif’s comments did not refer to Iraq and instead referred to Arak, the site of a facility that is one of the topics under discussion in nuclear negotiations between Tehran and six world powers. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pentagon: ISIS is an ‘apocalyptic’ threat that can be ‘contained’ — but not indefinitely

The Guardian reports: Senior Pentagon officials described the Islamic State (Isis) militant group as an “apocalyptic” organisation that posed an “imminent threat” on Thursday, yet the highest ranking officer in the US military said that in the short term, it was sufficient for the United States to “contain” the group that has reshaped the map of Iraq and Syria.

Army general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters in a Pentagon briefing that while Isis would eventually have to be defeated, the US should concentrate on building allies in the region to oppose the group that murdered an American journalist, James Foley.

“It is possible to contain them,” Dempsey said, in a Pentagon press conference alongside the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel. “They can be contained, but not in perpetuity. This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated.”

Dempsey’s comments came a day after secretary of state John Kerry said Isis “must be destroyed” following the killing of Foley, the first American known to have died at the hands of Isis. President Obama had referred to the organisation as a “cancer”. Their remarks raised expectations that the administration was preparing for a wider war aimed at wiping out Isis, rather than stopping its advances in Iraq.

Internal administration deliberations over a response to Isis continue, and US officials predicted that there would be little departure from the strategy of limited airstrikes launched since 8 August. One said the military plan “may ultimately evolve”.

Hours after a senior White House foreign-policy official, Ben Rhodes, said the US would not be limited in its response by “geographic boundaries”, Dempsey assessed that cross-border action was necessary to defeat the group. At the same time, he tamped down speculation that US warplanes would strike Isis in Syria as well as Iraq.

Isis “will have to be addressed on both sides of what is at this point essentially a non-existent border”, Dempsey said, which would require “a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is air strikes. I’m not predicting those will occur in Syria, at least not by the United States of America.”[Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Former hostages pay tribute to James Foley

Didier Francois, a 53-year-old reporter with radio station Europe 1, described the American he came to know during the period in which both he and James Foley were being held hostage.

For two-and-a-half months, Mr Francois was chained to fellow French hostages, Nicolas Henin, Edouard Elias, and Pierre Torres. They were released in April after France paid a ransom.

Mr Henin said today that Mr Foley was beaten more than any other hostage because he was an American and ISIS knew his brother was in the U.S. Air Force, and in one incident he was ‘crucified against a wall’, it has emerged.

The killer spoke in a distinctive English accent and his eyes and build are clearly visible in a propaganda video in which he cuts Mr Foley’s head off.

Mr Francois spent eight months with Mr Foley as a captive in Syria, enduring most of that time in underground cells with no natural light.

Mr Francois said he had never spoken publicly about James Foley or the remaining American hostage, Steven Sotloff, before because of threats of reprisals.

Mr Francois said he was told by his captors: ‘If you make public the fact they are being held or that you were together, reprisals will follow against them. Their exact words were: “They’ll be punished”’.

Mr Foley had been singled out for beatings, said Mr Francois, after his captors found pictures on his computer of his brother, who works for the US Air Force.

He said that Mr Foley was subjected to mock executions, including one in which he was ‘crucified against a wall’.

Paying tribute to the American, Mr Francois said: ‘He was an extraordinary guy – a companion in imprisonment who was very agreeable, very solid.’

Mr Henin became tearful said the murdered journalist shared his food and blanket.

He said: ‘We spent seven months in a very extreme situation together, including for one week we were handcuffed one to the other day and night.

‘In circumstances where you are held captive you develop some kind of survival instincts, meaning that, for instance, you try to grab everything that you can find.

‘James was the total opposite. He was so truly generous. Basically everything he could share, he would share it. If we were cold, and we were missing blankets, he would share his blanket.

‘If we were starving and missing food, he would share his ration.’ [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

People are blocking cargo ships to protest Israel

Vice News: The Israeli Zim Piraeus cargo ship arrived at the port in Oakland, California for its usual weekly offloading last Saturday—but it was unable to unload any of its cargo. The ship’s crew had to wait four days at sea before faking a departure and then sneaking back into a new terminal to evade hundreds of activists who had created a picket line the longshoremen’s union wouldn’t cross. Even when the ship finally left, many believe it still had most of its cargo.

The ship’s acrobatics were induced by a coalition of Palestine solidarity activists and organized labor, with activists originally intending to delay it for just a day as a way to send a message that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians should make it an international pariah.

The Zim Integrated Shipping Services is Israel’s largest shipping company, but its appeal as a target for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement goes beyond its mere financial value. With Israel’s ability to drop thousands of tons of explosives on the captivated and densely packed population of Gaza and then sail into international ports without consequence, Zim vessels embody Israel’s enduring impunity. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran will join fight against ISIS if West lifts sanctions

AFP reports: Iran is ready to join international action against jihadists in Iraq provided the West lifts crippling sanctions, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Thursday.

His comments followed a call by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Wednesday for all countries in the region, including Iran, to join the fight against Islamic State (IS) fighters who have seized swathes of Iraq as well as neighbouring Syria.

“If we agree to do something in Iraq, the other side of the negotiations should do something in return,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Zarif as saying.

“All the sanctions that are related to Iran’s nuclear programme should be lifted,” he said.

It is the first time that Iran has explicitly linked its readiness to work with the West in Iraq with a lifting of the crippling EU and US sanctions imposed over its nuclear programme. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel kills mourners burying their relatives in Gaza

Ma’an News Agency reports: Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in Gaza City on Thursday after targeting a cemetery in the Sheikh al-Radwan district, Gaza health official Ashraf al-Qidra said.

The bodies of Muhammad Talal Abu Nahl, Rami Abu Nahl, Haitham Tafesh and Abed Talal Shuweikh were taken to al-Shifa medicial center.

The victims were burying relatives who had been killed overnight by Israeli airstrikes.

The Guardian reports: Israel dealt a blow to Hamas on Thursday by killing three of its most senior military commanders as uncertainty continued over the fate of the organisation’s top military chief, Mohammed Deif, whose wife and children died in an air strike on Tuesday.

Hamas announced the deaths of Mohammed Abu Shamlah, Raed Attar and Mohammed Barhoum after a house in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, was demolished by a series of missiles. Five civilians were also killed, and at least 40 injured.

A joint statement from the Israel Defence Forces and the internal security agency Shin Bet said that Abu Shamlah and Attar had been killed, but made no mention of Barhoum. Defence minister Moshe Ya’alon said the assassinations were a “great operational and intelligence achievement”.

It was unclear how Hamas’s military command structure would be affected by the losses, but rockets continued to be launched from Gaza throughout Thursday and Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Israel’s actions would “not succeed in breaking the will of our people or weaken the resistance”. Israel would “pay the price”, he added.

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS seizes four more foreign hostages in Syria

The Guardian reports: Flush with looted weapons, buoyed by sweeping gains in Syria and eager to shock, Islamic State militants have seized four more foreign hostages near Aleppo in recent days, taking to more than 20 the number of foreigners they now hold.

The latest captives, two Italian women, a Dane and a Japanese national, were seized in or near Syria’s largest city. All held are either reporters, photographers or aid workers taken near Aleppo or Idlib. They have been subsequently moved to Raqqa, the Isis stronghold in north Syria.

The abductions have controversially proved good business for Islamic radicals. In the past six months at least 10 hostages, including a Dane, three French nationals and two Spaniards, were freed after lengthy negotiations with captors, who demanded ransoms. Some organisations have insisted on information blackouts about nationals still being held.

One former hostage said the suspected killer who appeared in the recent video, apparently murdering the US journalist James Foley, was one of three Britons who had guarded him in Raqqa. He said the man had been responsible for negotiating hostage releases, dealing with families of captives via email. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. staged secret operation into Syria in failed bid to rescue Americans

The Washington Post reports: U.S. Special Operations forces staged an unsuccessful operation this summer to rescue photojournalist James Foley and other Americans being held in Syria by Islamic State militants, according to senior Obama administration officials.

The attempt, in which at least one U.S. serviceman was injured, came after at least six Western hostages freed by the militants had been debriefed by U.S. intelligence.

“The president authorized earlier this summer an operation to attempt the rescue of American citizens held by ISIL,” one of the acronyms used to refer to the Islamic State, said a senior official who provided information on the mission on condition of anonymity.

“We had a combination of…intelligence that was sufficient to enable us to act on it,” the official said, and the military moved “very aggressively, very quickly to try and recover our citizens.”

“Unfortunately,” the official said, “it was not ultimately successful because the hostages were not present…at the site of the operation.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Hamas warns foreign airlines to stop flying into Ben Gurion, says Israel truce talks over

AFP reports: The armed wing of Hamas warned foreign airlines against flying into Tel Aviv on Wednesday and declared truce talks in Cairo over as a six-week war with Israel spirals into further bloodshed.

Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of air strikes across Gaza again on Wednesday in response to multiple rocket attacks on southern Israel, as nine days of calm exploded into bloodshed.

Several thousand furious mourners poured onto the streets of Jabaliya refugee camp to bury the wife and infant son of the top commander of Hamas’s armed wing, baying for revenge.

Mohammed Deif, who has topped Israel’s most wanted list for more than a decade, escaped the assassination attempt, Hamas said.

Israel, which had carried out five previous attempts on Deif’s life, said its offensive in Gaza would continue until the security of Israelis was guaranteed.

At least 2,049 Palestinians and 67 people on the Israeli side have now been killed since the conflict began on July 8, more than 20 of those Palestinians since fighting resumed late Tuesday.

“We are warning international airlines and press them to stop flying into Ben Gurion airport from 6 am (0300 GMT),” the spokesman of the Hamas armed wing, Abu Obeida, said in a televised speech.

Last month, many international airlines briefly suspended flights into Tel Aviv after a Hamas rocket struck close to the airport. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tributes to James Foley

James’ mother, Diane Foley, posted this message on Facebook:

We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.

We implore the kidnappers to spare the lives of the remaining hostages. Like Jim, they are innocents. They have no control over American government policy in Iraq, Syria or anywhere in the world.

We thank Jim for all the joy he gave us. He was an extraordinary son, brother, journalist and person. Please respect our privacy in the days ahead as we mourn and cherish Jim.

Habiba Hamid writes: This journalist, Foley who was beheaded, I watched the video. Something shifted in me. This wasn’t Lee Rigby‘s mentally unwell killer. This was someone from us – who killed this innocent journo. This killer wasn’t part of a resistance against oppression. This wasn’t an aggrieved Chechen, a tortured Bosnian or persecuted Uyghur. He wasn’t a brainwashed convert sucked into one of the MI5 Hizby cults. This wasn’t someone demanding his rights or fighting back against drone strikes or territorial grabs or Israeli ethnic cleansing. Foley’s killer had slaughtered an honourable man in cold, calculated, lucid terms. Foley’s journalism, his timeline was for Muslim uprisings, and he shined a light – against Assad, against Gaddafi. And then I went to his twitter account and saw Foley followed me on twitter. And I see again that this Foley was an innocent man who sought to expose wars of aggression against Muslims – there is nothing that separates us. ‘Only Connect’ – and with it comes the realisation that we are all closer to Foley than IS. I mourn his loss and think of his family. Nothing is sacred and no quarter can be given, now.

Facebooktwittermail

James Foley: U.S. and U.K. try to identify ISIS militant with British accent

The Guardian reports: Prof Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, said the militant was chosen to front the video to cause maximum impact in the west. “This is significant because it signifies a turn towards threatening the west. They are saying we’re going to come after you if you bomb us,” he said.

Neumann said British fighters had been carrying out “horrific acts” like beheadings, torture and executions for a year and a half, but this appeared to be the first with a western victim. He added: “They clearly wanted someone who spoke fluent English because they wanted it to create maximum impact, especially in the US, and because there are not that many Americans it was probably the best second option. They want this to have maximum impact on the west and for parts of it to be streamed on American television networks they needed an English speaker, so it was more about the English language than the nationality.

“It’s not significant that British fighters have been beheading and torturing because that’s been happening for a year and a half. That sort of horrific stuff is something British jihadis have been doing for some time. You will find a number of instances of British jihadis executing, torturing and beheading other people – and we know it’s not just Brits but other Europeans doing it – and occasionally this has come to the surface. Most people beheaded before were not westerners so that’s why this is different. The significant thing is that this was an American and was connected to a direct message that ‘we are targeting you’.”

Leading figures in the counter-terrorism field said it would be possible for intelligence services to identify the militant, despite it being filmed in an unknown location with the fighter dressed head to toe in black. Dr Claire Hardaker, a linguistics experts at Lancaster University, studied the clip and said the man’s vowels marked him out as likely from the south-east of England, but most likely from London. “We’re definitely looking at a British accent, from the south and probably from London, Kent or Essex. He does something interesting when he says ‘Muslims’. You typically get ‘Muzlims’ but he says something closer to ‘Musslims’.”

Dr Afzal Ashraf, of the Royal United Services Institute, said many of the estimated 500 British fighters in Syria and Iraq had left criminal pasts in the UK so were likely to be known to police. Intelligence agencies would also be using linguistics technology to track down the man, he said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Palestinians decry Gaza journalist killings

Al Jazeera reports: Hala Hamad first received the news of her husband Khaled’s death in a television report. “My family were telling me, ‘No, it’s not him,’ but I knew [from] his camera and his vest written Press on it,” she told Al Jazeera, breaking down in tears.

Twenty-four-year-old Khaled Hamad worked for a local media company in Gaza City called ‘Continue’ Production Films. He was killed alongside 28-year-old ambulance driver Fouad Jaber when an Israeli tank shell struck the ambulance in which they were travelling.

The two were in the hard-hit neighbourhood of Shujayea, as Jaber’s ambulance was one of the first to arrive to evacuate the wounded, and collect the dead bodies.

“I had an unusual feeling, something etched deep in my heart,” said Abu Fouad, about the day his son was killed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

#Gaza war resumes with deadly strikes, rocket fire

Reuters reports: Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets at Israel for a second day on Wednesday after fighting resumed with the collapse of truce talks and an Israeli air strike that killed three people in Gaza.

Charging Israel had “opened a gateway to hell,” Hamas’s armed wing vowed to target Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport with rocket fire, possibly to retaliate for what Hamas was quoted by Israeli media as saying was an Israeli attempt to assassinate its top militant leader, Mohammed Deif, in a Gaza City strike.

It was not clear whether Deif, who has survived previous Israeli attacks, had survived the strike that killed a woman and a two-year-old girl who media reports said may have been his wife and daughter.

Deif has topped Israel’s wanted lists for years, as mastermind of deadly suicide bombings more than a decade ago. He is currently believed to be a behind-the-scenes leader of Hamas’s campaign against Israel.

Ynet adds: Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk charged on Wednesday after Gaza truce talks collapsed in a spasm of violence that Israel had targeted the group’s armed wing leader Mohammed Deif in one of its air strikes on Tuesday in the coastal territory.

The IDF would not specify any of the targets of some 30 attacks across Gaza in response to rocket fire aimed at Israel. Marzouk said Israel had ruptured the truce alleging it was in order “to assassinate Mohammed Deif,” but that civilians were killed at the site of the attack.

Facebooktwittermail