President says caliphate ‘ready to fall’ and US doesn’t want to watch ‘fighters permeate Europe’
Donald Trump has asked his European allies to “take back over 800” Islamic State fighters captured in Syria and put them on trial.
“The Caliphate is ready to fall,” the US president said in a tweet. “The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them ...”
Continue reading...Family calls for her return to UK and considers legal action to stop government blocking it
The UK’s most senior counter-terrorism officer has said that Shamima Begum, who left the UK to join Islamic State as a 15-year-old, had “potentially criminalised” herself as her family considers court action to stop the government blocking her return to Britain.
Government and counter-terrorism officials are still considering what to do after Begum, now 19, was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp after fleeing Isis’s last stronghold and said she wanted to return to Britain.
Continue reading...Wives of jihadist fighters wounded as they flee Baghuz, the final Isis enclave in Syria
Islamic State fighters shot and wounded fleeing family members trying to escape from its besieged enclave in Syria, according to a coalition commander, as Kurdish forces continued to tighten the noose on the remaining extremists.
The battle to recapture the group’s last speck of territory is now only days from completion, Kurdish commanders said, with perhaps several hundred hardcore members dug into the centre of Baghuz village, a hamlet on the banks of the river Euphrates.
Continue reading...The remarks made by the 19-year-old British Islamic State recruit Shamima Begum to a journalist in a refugee camp in eastern Syria are horrifying. She described being unmoved by the sight of a severed head, showed no sympathy for executed hostages, and said she had no regrets about her decision to leave the UK. We do not yet know whether she played any role during her four years with Islamic State other than that of a wife and mother. Other western recruits have acted as propagandists and recruiters. Ms Begum, who is heavily pregnant, wants to return to the UK and is entitled to do so, as security minister Ben Wallace has acknowledged. Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was Metropolitan police commissioner when the teenager and two friends left their homes in Bethnal Green, east London, in 2015, said then that the girls had “no reason to fear” returning, provided they had not committed terrorist offences. The official tone has now changed, with Mr Wallace saying on Thursday that he would not risk British lives to rescue UK citizens from Syria.
Ms Begum, who married a Dutch Islamic State fighter 10 days after arriving in Raqqa, told the Times she had lost two young children to illness, lived through six months during which her husband was imprisoned and tortured, and witnessed unimaginable brutality. Whatever her degree of culpability, she and her friends, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, were children when they left the UK and are thought to have been groomed. Ms Sultana is reported to have wanted to return, but been too afraid following the murder of another jihadi bride who tried to escape. Mr Sultana is thought to have been killed in an airstrike three years ago.
Continue reading...Facts on the ground as much as ethical and legal factors may come into play in repatriating
US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria have almost completely dismantled Islamic State’s once sprawling “caliphate”, with Isis fighters making their last stand in an area smaller the one sq km in the eastern desert near the border with Iraq.
Wives and children of Isis fighters, along with thousands of civilians unconnected to the group, have left for al-Hol refugee camp, where dozens of people, mostly children, have died in squalid and freezing conditions in recent weeks.
Continue reading...Ben Wallace says ‘actions have consequences’ as schoolgirl who joined Isis is found in Syria
The security minister, Ben Wallace, has said he would not put officials’ lives at risk to rescue UK citizens who went to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State, insisting “actions have consequences”.
“I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Continue reading...Shamima Begum, 19, in refugee camp in Syria after fleeing last territory held by Islamic State
An east London schoolgirl who left the UK in 2015 to join Islamic State has been tracked down in Syria where she said has no regrets about joining the group, but now wants to come home as she is nine months pregnant.
Shamima Begum, 19, said she fled the jihadists’ last remaining enclave in Baghuz, eastern Syria, as she was tired of life on a battlefield and feared for her unborn child after her two other children died.
Continue reading...Small enclave of extremists holds out in Syria against intensive bombardment
Clamouring up dirt berms, clutching babies and blankets, the newest refugees of the Islamic State could well be the last.
Inside the nearby enclave they fled are perhaps no more than 500 people – nearly all of them fighters who are refusing to leave a two square kilometre corner of eastern Syria that is all that remains of the group’s so-called caliphate.
Continue reading...Foreign fighters reportedly executed after launching attack against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Fresh details have emerged of the coup attempt against Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with witnesses claiming foreign members of the terror group lost a two-day battle with his bodyguards before being rounded up and executed.
A witness who spoke to the Guardian after being smuggled from the last hamlet in eastern Syria held by Isis, said the clash took place in al Keshma, a village next to Baghouz in September, three months earlier than regional intelligence officials believed it had taken place.
Continue reading...Jihadist group placed bounty on head of foreign fighter after plot, say intelligence officials
The Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, survived a coup attempt last month launched by foreign fighters in his eastern Syrian hideout, intelligence officials believe, and the terrorist group has since placed a bounty on the main plotter’s head.
The incident is believed to have taken place on 10 January in a village near Hajin in the Euphrates River valley, where the jihadist group is clinging to its last sliver of land. Regional intelligence officials say a planned move against Baghdadi led to a firefight between foreign fighters and the fugitive terrorist chief’s bodyguards, who spirited him away to the nearby deserts.
Continue reading...The Syrian Democratic Forces, the multi-ethnic secular forces in northern Syria primarily made up of the Kurdish YPG as well as other local Assyrian, Arab and Turkmen groups, have never sought the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad as your article suggests (British hostage Cantlie, seized by Isis in 2012, is alive, says Home Office, 6 February). Their military aim is the defeat of Islamic State and their political goal is secular democracy and autonomy in northern Syria as seen by the multi-ethnic, feminist, democratic socialist, commune-based society they have been constructing in the areas they have liberated from Isis. There have been no major battles with regime forces and in fact they have worked with the Syrian Arab Army in the Kurdish Aleppo district of Sheikh Maqsood, which was liberated from al-Nusra jihadists in 2016.
Rosa Gilbert
Co-secretary, Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign
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Continue reading...The young children of an Islamic State fighter were abandoned in Syria after his death. But with the help of human rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith and reporter Joshua Surtees, the boys have been reunited with their mother. Also today: columnist Gary Younge on the storm over Liam Neeson’s race comments
In 2014, Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira were abducted by their father in Trinidad and taken to Syria to live under Islamic State rule in the so-called caliphate. After the death of their father and the liberation of the Isis stronghold of Raqqa, the boys, now aged 11 and seven, were abandoned before being picked up and taken into Kurdish custody.
Mahmud and Ayyub had been apart from their mother for four years but a combined effort from the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, Guardian reporters, including Joshua Surtees, and the Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters tracked down Felicia Perkins-Ferreira in Trinidad and reunited the family.
Continue reading...Nigerian refugees are chased from homes as president stakes re-election bid on claims that Islamist group has been beaten
When Boko Haram stormed into Baga in a hail of gunfire on Boxing Day, Zara Abubakar was lying in bed, waiting for her two-week-old triplets, Maryam, Muhafat and Mohammed, to go to sleep so she could have a bath. Heart pounding, she shouted for her four other children playing in the yard to come in, covering the babies with her body. For hours they all lay inside, waiting for the battle to let up.
Then there was silence, followed by shouts of Allahu Akbar, and Baga mosque’s loudspeakers crackled into life. “Boko Haram made an announcement that they were not here for us but for the infidels [the military] and that they were now in charge,” Abubakar recounted, jogging one of the triplets in the crook of her elbow and another on her knee.
Continue reading...Turkey is seen as the Kurds’ mortal enemy but it uses German tanks and British helicopters: this is an international outrage
Remember those plucky Kurdish forces who so heroically defended the Syrian city of Kobane from Isis? They risk being wiped out by Nato.
The autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northeast Syria, which includes Kobane, faces invasion. A Nato army is amassing on the border, marshaling all the overwhelming firepower and high-tech equipment that only the most advanced military forces can deploy. The commander in chief of those forces says he wants to return Rojava to its “rightful owners” who, he believes, are Arabs, not Kurds.
Continue reading...Christopher Pyne says the deaths, which occurred during operations between Iraqi and allied forces, are ‘deeply regrettable’
Australian Defence Force officials have admitted between six and 18 civilians were killed in a Mosul airstrike involving Australian jets, but said they could not determine if Australian or allied missiles caused the deaths.
The defence minister, Christopher Pyne, described the deaths as “deeply regrettable” but said the 12-month investigation into the strike on 13 June 2017 could not come to a conclusion over who was at fault.
Continue reading...Turkish president tells Donald Trump he is ready to send troops into US-overseen areas
The threat of a growing security vacuum in Syria as a result of Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops has been underlined by an attack on a joint US-Kurdish patrol, which reportedly killed five people and injured at least two American soldiers.
The attack on Monday, in which a suicide bomber drove a car into a checkpoint, emphasised the vulnerability of American troops since the US president declared he was withdrawing 2,000 soldiers from northern Syria on the grounds that Islamic State has been defeated.
Continue reading...Judges rule decision to share evidence with US without death penalty assurances not unlawful
The mother of an alleged hostage killer for Islamic State has lost her legal challenge against a Home Office decision to share evidence with the US without seeking assurances that her son and another suspected jihadist terrorist would not face the death penalty.
El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey are accused of belonging to a group of Isis members, nicknamed the Beatles because of their British accents, responsible for killing a number of western captives.
Continue reading...Nearly two years after raising the alarm, Human Rights Watch report reveals continued allegations of electric shocks and beatings on boys aged 14 to 17
Kurdish security forces in Erbil are continuing to torture children to confess their involvement with Islamic State, according to allegations in a report released by Human Rights Watch.
According to the organisation, which first raised the alarm about the mistreatment of child detainees by Kurdish security forces nearly two years ago, it has collected claims of the continued regular use of beatings and electric shocks to extract confessions, often prior to trials lasting a handful of minutes.
Continue reading...For years western policymakers have tried to establish what causes individuals to be radicalised. Now a pioneering study has used medical science to gain fresh insight into the process – in the brains of potential jihadists.
University College London (UCL) researchers were part of an international team that used neuroimaging techniques to map how the brains of radicalised individuals respond to being socially marginalised. The findings, they claim, confirm that exclusion is a leading factor in creating violent jihadists.
Continue reading...Attack comes after Trump said he would withdraw US troops as ‘we have defeated Isis’
Two British special forces soldiers have been seriously injured in a missile attack by the Islamic State (Isis) in Syria. The incident is thought to have happened on Saturday morning and the soldiers were airlifted by US forces for medical treatment.
Rudaw, a Kurdish news outlet, reported that the British soldiers were hurt in an attack on a Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) base in the town of Deir ez-Zor, in the east of the country.
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