BEIRUT, April 26 -- The U.S.-backed assault to drive Islamic State from its Syrian capital Raqqa in 2017 killed more than 1,600 civilians, 10 times the toll the coalition itself has acknowledged, Amnesty International and the monitoring group Airwars reported. Amnesty and Airwars, a London-based group set up in 2014 to monitor the impact of the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State, spent 18 months researching civilian deaths including two months on the ground in Raqqa, they said. “Our conclusive finding after all this is that the U.S.-led coalition’s military offensive (US, UK and French forces) directly caused more than 1,600 civilian deaths in Raqqa,” they said. They said the cases they had documented probably amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and called for coalition members to create a fund to compensate victims and their families. The coalition has previously said it takes great care to avoid civilian casualties and that it investigates accusations that it has done so. Islamic State seized Raqqa in early 2014 during its lightning advance through Syria and Iraq in which it built a self-proclaimed caliphate characterized by summary executions of opponents. Its mass killing and enslavement of minorities was described as genocide by the United Nations. The group, which controlled a third of both Syria and Iraq in 2014, has since been driven from all the territory it controlled by military campaigns waged by an array of enemies including the Syrian and Iraqi governments, the United States, its European allies and their rivals Russia and Iran. It was defeated by U.S.-backed fighters in its last Syrian stronghold this year. Despite no longer controlling territory, it is still seen as a threat to launch attacks around the world. An international coalition led by Washington has given military support to both the Iraqi government and a Syrian militia, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF captured Raqqa in October 2017 after a five month offensive backed by U.S.-led air strikes and special forces. Amnesty said last year that there was evidence coalition air and artillery strikes in Raqqa had broken international law by endangering the lives of civilians, but until now had not given an estimate of the death toll during the battle. Reuters reporters in Raqqa during and after the campaign said that bombardment had caused massive destruction in the city, laying waste to entire districts.
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ST.PETERSBURG, April 18 -- Some 1,500 foreign terrorists, who took part in combat actions in the Middle East, are in Europe now, Director of Russia’s Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov told a conference on countering international terrorism on Thursday. "Some 1,500 out of 5,000 terrorists have arrived in the European Union from the Middle East, according to experts’ estimates. A significant number of them are gunmen, who have been sent by chieftains to Europe to continue terrorist attacks," Bortnikov told the conference organized by the Commonwealth of Independent States’ Interparliamentary Assembly. Despite major losses in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda terrorist groups, outlawed in Russia, and military groups affiliated with them still pose a serious threat, he said. "They managed to operate their forces based on a network principle. Interconnected and autonomous cells spread from the Middle East to Europe, Central and South East Asia, and major militant groups go deep into the African continent, in particular to Libya," Bortnikov noted. According to the FSB chief, the situation in Afghanistan is of special focus. Illegal terrorist groups there are joined by terrorists from Syria, creating a threat for the Central Asian region’s states. LONDON, April 16 -- Shamima Begum was a member of the Isis morality police, a feared group which enforced the terror organisation’s strict interpretation of Islamic law – and she also tried to recruit other young women to join the jihadist group. The 19-year-old British citizen, who fled her home in Bethnal Green four years ago with two other schoolgirls, has claimed that she was only a “housewife” during her time living with the group in Syria. But according to a report in The Sunday Telegraph she played a much more active role in the organisation’s reign of terror as a member of the “hisba” – which metes out punishment to those found flouting Isis laws on how to dress and behave. One activist quoted by the newspaper said Begum had been seen holding an automatic weapon and shouting at Syrian women in the city of Raqqa for wearing brightly coloured shoes. “Members of our group from Raqqa knew her well”, said Aghiad al-Kheder, an activist from Deir ez-Zor who founded an anti-Isis collective that published information about Isis crimes from sources on the ground. “There were lots of young European women in the hisba. Some of them were very harsh and the local population became very scared.” There were separate allegations that Begum stitched suicide bombs onto explosive vests, so they could not be removed without detonating. The Mail on Sunday reported that the prime minister and home secretary had been briefed on intelligence received by the CIA and Dutch military intelligence. DAMASCUS, March 23 -- U.S.-backed forces said they had captured Islamic State's last shred of territory in eastern Syria at Baghouz on Saturday, ending the group's self-proclaimed caliphate after years of fighting. "Baghouz has been liberated. The military victory against Daesh has been accomplished," Mustafa Bali, a Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spokesman, wrote on Twitter, declaring the "total elimination of (the) so-called caliphate". However, a Reuters journalist at Baghouz said there were still some sounds of shooting and mortar fire. The final battle lasted weeks as huge numbers of civilians poured out, and for many Kurdish fighters in the SDF, victory was sweeter as it coincided with their "Now Ruz" new year. Though the defeat of Islamic State in Baghouz ends the group's grip over the jihadist quasi-state straddling Syria and Iraq that it declared in 2014, it remains a threat. Some of its fighters still hold out in Syria's remote central desert and in Iraqi cities they have slipped into the shadows, staging sudden shootings or kidnappings and awaiting a chance to rise again. The United States believes the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is in Iraq. He stood at the pulpit of the great medieval mosque in Mosul in 2014 to declare himself caliph, sovereign over all Muslims. Further afield, jihadists in Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere have shown no sign of recanting their allegiance to Islamic State, and intelligence services say its devotees in the West might plot new attacks. Still, the fall of Baghouz is a big milestone in a fight against the jihadist group waged by numerous local and global forces - some of them sworn enemies - over more than four years. It also marks a big moment in Syria's eight-year war, wiping out the territory of one of the main contestants, with the rest split between President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey-backed rebels and the Kurdish-led SDF. Assad and his Iranian allies have sworn to recapture all Syria, and Turkey has threatened to drive out the SDF, which it sees as a terrorist group, by force. The continued presence of U.S. troops in northeast Syria might avert this. Islamic State originated as an al Qaeda faction in Iraq, but it took advantage of Syria's civil war to seize land there and split from the global jihadist organisation. In 2014, it suddenly grabbed Iraq's Mosul, one of the region's great historic cities, as well as Syria's Raqqa, and swathes of land each side of the border. It declared an end to modern countries and called on supporters to leave their homes and join the jihadist utopia it claimed to be erecting, trumpeting its currency, flag, passports and military parades. Oil production, extortion and stolen antiquities financed its agenda, which included slaughtering some minorities, public slave auctions of captured women, grotesque punishments for minor crimes and the choreographed killing of hostages. Those excesses brought an array of forces against it, forcing it from Mosul and Raqqa in a year of heavy defeats in 2017 and driving it, eventually, down the Euphrates to Baghouz. Over the past two months some 60,000 people poured out of that dwindling enclave, fleeing SDF bombardment and a shortage of food so severe that some said they were reduced to cooking grass. Intense air strikes throughout the campaign have levelled entire districts and rights groups have said they killed many civilians, allegations the coalition has often disputed. A mass grave the SDF discovered last month showed there were other dangers in the enclave, though it has released no details on the identities of the victims or how they died. Civilians made up more than half the people leaving Baghouz, the SDF said, including Islamic State victims such as women from the Iraqi Yazidi sect whom the jihadists had sexually enslaved. Thousands of the group's unbending supporters also abandoned the enclave while still vowing their allegiance to a ruined caliphate and showing no remorse for its victims. At displacement camps in northeast Syria where they were sent by the SDF, the hardliners, including many foreign women who came to Syria and Iraq to marry jihadists, had to be kept away from other, often traumatized, residents. Their fate has befuddled foreign governments, who see them as a security threat and are loath to accede to SDF entreaties to take them back home. As the fighting progressed, the convoys of trucks from Baghouz started to include hundreds, and then thousands, of surrendering jihadist fighters, many hobbling from their wounds. The SDF said it captured hundreds more in recent weeks who tried to slip through its cordon and escape into Iraq or across the Euphrates and into the Syrian desert. At the end, they were besieged in a tiny camp full of rusting vehicles and makeshift shelters, pinned against the Euphrates and overlooked by hills held by the SDF. Islamic State released video from inside that squalid, shell-pounded enclave, showing its last fighters still shooting at the SDF as smoke billowed overhead. It was an attempt to shape the narrative of its defeat, portraying it as a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds and a call to arms for future jihadists. But in Baghouz in recent weeks long lines of abject, surrendering fighters sat or squatted in a desolate landscape, their dream of world domination in tatters. BANGKOK, March 15 -- Countries are grappling with what to do with women who left to join ISIS. Now, as the organization is driven from its last strongholds in Syria, many of these women have sought to return to their home countries. Shamima Begum, of Britain, was stripped of her citizenship on security grounds last month, leaving her in a detention camp in Syria. Her three-week-old baby died on March 9, the third of the 19-year-old's infant children to die since she traveled to Syria in 2015. Found in a refugee camp in February, an unrepentant Begum sparked a debate in Britain and other European capitals as to whether a teenager with a jihadist fighter's child should be left in a war zone to fend for herself. Iranian-American journalist and writer Azadeh Moaveni works as a gender analyst for the International Crisis Center. She's an expert on gender and Islamic insurgencies and she spoke with Marco Werman about the role women have played in ISIS as many try to re-enter the countries they left when they went to join the militant group. Marco Werman: Writer Azadeh Moaveni has been considering the case of Shamima Begum. Let me just start with your concerns over how to refer to these young women who joined ISIS. What is the problem with calling them jihadi brides or ISIS brides? Azadeh Moaveni: Well I think "bride" suggests that their only relationship to this insurgent movement or this militant group was a civilian spouse, whereas many young women joined before they were even married. They joined up as members. They were voluntary recruits because they believed in the ideology and the politics of the organization. So, I think "brides" strips away that agency and that motivation. It doesn't really help us understand the way that recruitment worked. "I think 'brides' strips away that agency and that motivation." Is there a better terminology that you can think of? To me, "member" is more clear. It suggests some agency and voluntary affiliation. It doesn't immediately read as operational involvement because in a great many cases, women were not operationally involved or they didn't participate in direct violence, but it reflects that they were part of the organization. They lent their support to it in ways that made it stronger and that helped to recruit. And why is it important what we call these women? I mean, some people might say they joined a terrorist organization. In the case of Shamima Begum, she's got no remorse about joining. Why should we pay attention to the words we use to describe them?Well, I think in lots of conflicts around the world, whether it's Boko Haram in Nigeria, ISIS in Syria, or Al-Shabab in Somalia, we are increasingly seeing or are ready to see, prepared to see, and understand how actively women are involved. I think it's really hard to read the deep social base, how the contexts of state collapse affect men and women and bring women to the centers of these insurgencies. So I don't really think we get these conflicts unless we can also map the involvement of women onto them. So there are the semantics and then perhaps more troubling issues like how should a young woman like Shamima Begum be judged? Certainly, there is a problem of intelligence and there's really no good solutions when it comes to prosecuting women or men who are coming out of these kinds of conflict zones because some of the evidence against them is inadmissible. There are retroactive ways or new laws that have been instituted, for example, that could lead to higher sentences simply for joining a prescribed organization or for going to a zone where there was this kind of violence going on. I think something that is being turned to in the UK is the stripping of citizenship, which essentially — and this has happened in the case of Shamima — renders her stateless and then foists the problem of all of these jihadists or women militants onto the very vulnerable fragile states like Iraq or Syria itself, which can't be the best solution. So, I think a case-by-case basis, maybe tribunals. I think there certainly are legal systems — like the American legal system, the British, or the European states — that have more robust ways to be able to prosecute. If we leave these women stranded in places like this, they may actually never be punished or see the consequences for what they've done. As you said earlier, "jihadi brides" or "ISIS brides" takes away the agency of these women and what they were doing. What do we know about what these women — like Shamima Begam — were actually doing once they were inside the caliphate? For a lot of women, if they were skilled, educated, or trained in something, they took those skills to Syria. I spent a lot of time in Tunisia where hundreds of women went and there were doctors, language teachers, midwives and graphic designers. They would take their skills and work there because they thought they were building a new society. Less educated and unskilled women either stayed at home or they were involved in these morality police brigades that would essentially terrify and beat into submission the local population by beatings, lashings, fines for little infringements in dress codes. Of course, I think women were active as recruiters as well and were running the infrastructure of women kind of coming in and out of the caliphate. I would say a huge a spectrum of roles; operationally in relation to the group and also the civilian roles of a building society that they believe themselves to be building from scratch. "They would take their skills and work there because they thought they were building a new society." As for Shamima Begum, she's been stripped of her British citizenship, but how do you reconcile Begum's desire to return to the UK and her lack of remorse for what she's done? To me, her lack of remorse is not really surprising. She's highly indoctrinated. This is really the only adult life she has known. But I think she does retain a British socialization, which has taught her that there is a country that has institutions like courts that will follow the rule of law and a healthcare system that will take care of you even if you are jobless. These are great strengths of British society and I think it's quite poignant that she's internalized the fact that a state can provide this in a kind of altruistic way even though she abandoned it. To me, I feel like there's a glimmer of hope that she could be rehabilitated. A glimmer of hope at home, but how worried are you about what someone like Shamima Begum now becomes? I think it's very worrisome, certainly, and I think that this is something that countries across the world are going to have to grapple with: How to rehabilitate these women and how to ensure that they do not continue to spread these kinds of ideas and keep them incubated in a way? Credit: Reuters KUALA LUMPUR, March 12 -- When bombs started falling around her in the ISIS-controlled territory in Syria, Lidia decided it was time to leave. For the first time in more than four years, the 29-year-old Malaysian longed to return home. The Mandarin-speaking medical lab technician disappeared from the Southeast Asian nation with her infant son and husband in October 2014 to travel secretly to Syria. Two weeks ago, she sent a text message to her father in the southern state of Johor to tell him she had fled the territory of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) and asked him to help her return to Malaysia. "I never lost hope that one day Lidia would tell me she wants to come home," her father, a Johor-based businessman who declined to be named. Lidia is one of the 13 Malaysians now wanting to come home as an offensive by the United States-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) enters its final stage in the last ISIS enclave in the village of Baghouz in eastern Syria, and the authorities are working out how to repatriate them. "We are trying to bring them home … yes, it includes Lidia. But you know, the situation is difficult as it involves many parties from different countries," Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, head of counter terrorism for Special Branch, the intelligence arm of the Malaysian police. Interrogation and rehabilitation While some countries are attempting to strip former fighters and their families of citizenship and prevent them from returning, Malaysia says citizens will be allowed to come back, provided they comply with checks and enforcement and complete a one-month government-run rehabilitation programme. "Not everyone will be detained but all returnees will be interrogated," Ayob said. "We will conduct thorough checks and investigation on each returnee. We bring in clerics and psychologists to evaluate their ideology and psychological make-up. "We will compare intelligence which we received from friendly foreign services. If there is evidence that a returnee was involved in ISIS's militant activities, he or she would be charged in court," Ayob added. To date, 11 Malaysians have returned to the country. Eight were charged in court and convicted, all of them men. The other three were one woman and two children aged three and five. "The woman underwent a rehabilitation programme and has now returned to her kampung village," Ayob said. "She continues to be monitored." Even though ISIS has all but collapsed in Iraq and Syria, there are Malaysians who are still willing to fight for the group, according to police. "We are keeping an eye on them," Ayob said. "Those who cannot go to Syria are now setting their sights on Mindanao in southern Philippines where militant groups there have links to ISIS." Meanwhile, 51 Malaysians remain in Syria, including 17 children, according to Ayob. IDLIB, February 28 -- Terrorists of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (terror group) pose a threat to Syria’s stability by conducting events for building up their offensive potential. "A threat to security and stability in Syria is coming from terrorists of the Nusra-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham alliance, which controls almost the entire Idlib de-escalation zone. Field commanders are carrying out events on reshaping allied groups with the goals of increasing their offensive capabilities in the directions of Aleppo, Hama and mountainous Latakia," the diplomat stressed. "The militants plan to expand the sphere of their influence and establish full control of Idlib." It's also noted a growing number of ceasefire violations. "Only over the past four days nearly 40 such cases have been recorded, when people died or were wounded," she said. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres drew attention to the deplorable situation in the Idlib de-escalation zone in his recent report on the humanitarian situation in Syria. Besides concerns over the growing activity of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the report details atrocities of terrorists against civilians, including suppressing ethnic and religious minorities, illegal detentions of civilians and cases when people have gone missing, she noted. ANKARA, February 18 -- The US may continue to have a military presence in Syria after the withdrawal of troops, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News circulated on Monday. "Where will they pull out to, will someone else replace them, who will they leave the arms, will their presence continue? When they pull out, their presence will most probably not end, it will continue in some way," Peskov said. "All these questions are on the agenda, the presidents are talking about them. The general attitude is the same, there is no reason for optimism, and uncertainty is troubling. And this situation is not helping the crisis in Syria and hope for a solution at all," the spokesman emphasized. On December 19, 2018, US President Donald Trump said that the United States had defeated ISIS (Islamic State, a terrorist organization banned in Russia) in Syria, which was the only reason for the US troops being there, so all US troops would be pulled out of Syria. According to US officials, the US would withdraw its entire force of 2,000 service members from Syria within 60 to 100 days. KABUL, February 11 -- The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group has been increasing its activities in eastern Afghanistan. Moreover, fears are growing that as its fighters are forced out of Syria they will flock to the area. The fight is more than physical, with Afghan security services arresting a religious cleric and a professor for allegedly spying for ISIL and Western reports alleging that Afghan universities are being used for ISIL recruitment. Reports from Kaskala, a mountainous border region near Pakistan, where the fight against ISIL is already taking place. BEIRUT, February 7 -- Syrian civilians and family members of ISIS jihadists are continuing to flee the last area held by the so-called Islamic State in Syria. The area is under attack from Kurdish-Syrian forces, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports. According to the NGO, hundreds of people are fleeing towards the refugee camp of al Hold in eastern Syria but are in very difficult humanitarian conditions. Kurdish forces and American soldiers on the ground are separating men from women to try to identify ISIS affiliates among the civilians, including foreign militants from Iraq, other Arab countries as well as Caucasians, Russians and Europeans. (ANSAmed). "Iraqi suspects ordered detonator, downloaded bomb-making instructions and tested explosive powder" BERLIN, January 30 -- German authorities arrested three suspected Islamic extremists on allegations they were planning a bombing attack, and searched properties in three states in connection with their investigation. Federal prosecutors said Iraqis Shahin F. and Hersh F., both 23, and Rauf S., 36, were taken into custody in an early morning raid by a police SWAT team in the area of Dithmarschen, near the border with Denmark. In addition, searches were carried out of other residences in northern and southwestern Germany of people linked to the three main suspects but not currently to the bomb plot. The two younger men are suspected of preparing a bomb attack and violating weapons laws, and Rauf S. is alleged to have aided them. Their last names were not given in line with German privacy laws.The men appear to have been in the early stages of planning, and had not yet built a functioning bomb nor decided upon a target for attack, prosecutors said in a statement. Prosecutors allege Shahin F. and Hersch F. decided in late 2018 to “carry out an attack motivated by Islamic extremism in Germany.” There are indications that they sympathized with Islamic State, but a direct link to the extremist group or others is currently under investigation. In December, Shahin F. downloaded “various instructions” on how to build a bomb, and ordered a detonator from a contact person in Britain, prosecutors said. Its delivery, however, was stopped by British law enforcement agencies. ANKARA, January 28 -- Turkey is aiming to form safe zones in northern Syria so that Syrian refugees hosted by Turkey could return to their home country, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. Speaking in Istanbul on Monday, Erdogan also said nearly 300,000 Syrians had already returned to areas controlled by Turkish-backed rebels in northern Syria, adding that he expected millions of Syrian nationals to return to the proposed safe zones. Turkey hosts about four million Syrian refugees. US President Donald Trump announced in December the withdrawal of the 2,000 US troops from Syria and Erdogan subsequently said they had discussed setting up a 32km-deep safe zone in Syria along the border with Turkey. On Friday, Erdogan said that Turkey expected the safe zone to be set up within a few months, otherwise, it would establish a buffer zone without the help of other nations. He added that the zone will aim to protect Turkey from "terrorists", referring to the US-backed Syrian Kurdish militia that controls areas in northeastern Syria along the Turkish border. Ankara wants the zone to contain the fighters of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which the United States has armed and trained to fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). The YPG is seen as an effective ground force by the US in the fight against ISIL, but Turkey says it is linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara and Washington list as a terrorist group. Turkey's foreign minister said on Thursday that Turkey has the capacity to create a safe zone in Syria on its own, but will not exclude the US, Russia, or others if they want to cooperate. "Turkey has not forced refugees to go back to Turkey for years. However, around 300,000 refugees returned to areas held by Turkey and Turkey-backed rebels in northern Syria, such as Jarablus and Al-Bab," Al Jazeera's Osama Bin Javid, reporting from Gaziantep on Turkey-Syria border, said. "And more refugee returns are only possible, according to Erdogan, if Turkey can have some sort of control from the west side of the Euphrates River until the Iraqi border." BEIRUT, January 23 -- Kurdish-led fighters overran the last village held by the Islamic State group in Syria on Wednesday, confining its once vast cross-border “caliphate” to two small hamlets. It is the culmination of a broad offensive launched by the Syrian Democratic Forces last September with U.S.-led coalition support in which they have reduced the jihadis’ last enclave on the north bank of the Euphrates valley near the Iraqi border to a tiny rump. The capture of the village of Baghouz leaves the few remaining diehard IS fighters holed up in scattered farmhouses among the irrigated fields and orchards on the north bank of the Euphrates River. “Search operations are continuing in Baghouz to find any IS fighters who are still hiding,” the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, said. “The SDF will now have to push on into the farmland around Baghouz.” The Observatory said late on Tuesday that around 4,900 people, mostly women and children but including 470 IS fighters, had fled the jihadis’ fast dwindling enclave in two days. Of those 3,500 surrendered to the advancing SDF on Tuesday alone. They were evacuated on dozens of trucks chartered by the SDF. The fall of Baghouz follows the SDF’s capture of the enclave’s sole town of Hajin and the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa in recent weeks. The new wave of departures means that nearly 27,000 people have left former IS areas since early December, including almost 1,800 jihadis who have surrendered, the Observatory said. The whereabouts of the ultra-elusive IS supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has made just one public appearance — in Iraq’s then IS-held second city Mosul in 2014 — are unknown. The U.S.-led coalition declined to be drawn on when it expected its SDF allies to overrun the final sliver of territory still under IS control. It stressed the operation’s bigger goal was to minimize the continuing threat the jihadis could pose from underground. “It is difficult to say how much longer, despite the progress,” coalition spokesman Colonel Sean Ryan said. “We try to stay away from timelines as it is more about degrading the enemy’s capabilities. “We are seeing a lot of enemy fighters fleeing. The Syrian forces are less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Iraqi border but still fighting against a resistance of diehard fighters.” The remaining jihadis are well within artillery range of Iraqi forces stationed along the border, who are determined to prevent fugitive IS fighters from slipping across. On Saturday, Iraqi shelling and airstrikes on IS positions in an around Baghouz killed at least 20 jihadis, according to the Observatory. The coalition has stepped up its own airstrikes against IS since the jihadis killed four Americans and 15 other people in a suicide bombing on a restaurant in the flash point northern town of Manbij on Jan. 16. The U.S. losses were the biggest since Washington deployed troops in Syria in 2014 in support of the SDF. Previously it had reported just two combat losses in separate incidents. The Manbij bombing rekindled controversy triggered by President Donald Trump last month with his surprise announcement of a full withdrawal from Syria. The U.S. president justified the order with the assertion that the jihadis had now been “largely defeated” in Syria, a claim that the attack threw into renewed question. It is a far cry from the jihadis’ peak in 2014, when they overran large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq, and IS proclaimed a “caliphate” in areas under their control. The gains have come at the cost of heavy losses for the mainly Kurdish fighters of the SDF and despite their sense of betrayal by their U.S. ally after Trump’s withdrawal announcement. Neighboring Turkey has threatened repeatedly to launch a cross-border operation to crush the Kurdish fighters of the SDF and the autonomous region they have set up in areas of northern and northeastern Syria under their control. Turkish troops had been held at bay by the intervention of U.S. troops who set up observation posts along the border and mounted joint patrols with Kurdish fighters. But with those troops gone, the Kurds fear they will be exposed to the full might of the Turkish military. DAMASCUS, January 16 -- American servicemen were killed in a suicide attack that targeted the northern Syrian city of Manbij on Wednesday, the US-led coalition said. It did not specify how many soldiers were killed in the blast which was claimed by ISIS but unidentified US officials told Reuters and Bloomberg that up to four Americans may have been killed. The US troops were conducting a "routine patrol" in Manbij at the time of the attack, the coalition said in a statement on Twitter. The White House said President Donald Trump has been fully briefed. "We will continue to monitor the ongoing situation in Syria," Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters during a briefing. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 16 people have died, including five US-backed fighters as well as nine civilians. The war monitor and the Kurdish-run Hawar News Agency reported that at least two US troops died in the blast. Amaq – ISIS's media wing – claimed that the attacker used a suicide vest to strike at coalition forces near a resteraunt in the flashpoint Kurdish-held city. A video posted on social media networks purported to show the moment the attacker detonated his suicide vest. The National could not independently verify the authenticity of the footage. The attack came one day after coalition forces and US-backed fighters captured a key village from ISIS in their last holdout east of the Euphrates River, leaving just 15 square kilometres of land under the militants' control.
It is the first major attack that explicitly targets US forces in Syria since Mr Trump announced that he would be withdrawing troops from the country. Sharfan Darwish, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Manbij Military Council (MMC), said the blast took place on a crowded street. He said there were casualties but did not specify how many people died. ANKARA, January 15 -- After talks with US President Donald Trump Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has confirmed his country’s intention to create a buffer zone in northern Syria. Erdogan was speaking on Tuesday at a meeting with parliament members from the Justice and Development Party he leads. "In yesterday’s telephone conversation US President Donald Trump reaffirmed his decision to pull troops out of Syria. We’ve decided to go ahead with our contacts on all issues involving Syria, including the security zone Turkey will create," the daily Sabah quotes Erdogan as saying. |
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