Sister of killed Isis leader captured, says Turkish official

Unnamed senior figure hopes for ‘trove of intelligence’ from Rasmiya Awad after raid in Syrian border town

Turkey claims to have captured the sister of killed Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and is interrogating her and her husband and daughter-in-law, who were also detained.

A senior Turkish official told Reuters that Rasmiya Awad, 65, was seized on Monday during a raid near the Turkish-controlled northern Syrian town of Azaz. When captured, she was also accompanied by five children.

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Car bomb explodes in Syrian town captured by Turkey from Kurds

At least 13 people killed in explosion in northern border town of Tal Abyad

A car bomb exploded in a northern Syrian town along the border with Turkey on Saturday, killing 13 people. Turkey’s defence ministry said about 20 others were wounded when the bomb exploded in central Tal Abyad, which forces backed by Ankara captured from Kurdish-led fighters last month.

The ministry harshly condemned the attack, which it blamed on Syrian Kurdish fighters, and called on the international community to take a stance against this “cruel terror organisation”. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

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Kurds call on US to block Turkish military drones from Syrian air space

  • Unmanned weapons ‘targeting anything they wish to’
  • Kurds say Turks have killed 509 civilians and 412 troops

Syrian Kurds are asking the Pentagon to block US-controlled air space over north-eastern Syria to Turkish armed drones which they claim are causing significant civilian casualties.

Ilham Ahmed, the head of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), said the Kurds would hold the Pentagon responsible for Turkish war crimes if they did nothing to guarantee protection from the air.

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Visual guide to the raid that killed Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Baghdadi died in a US raid on a compound near the village of Barisha in north-west Syria

The US began to receive intelligence on the whereabouts of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi about a month before the 26 October raid, according to Donald Trump. Intelligence officials were able to scope out his exact location – near the village of Barisha in north-west Syria – in mid October.

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Baghdadi raid video released as US general warns of Isis reprisal attacks

General Kenneth McKenzie says Isis will remain a threat as he shows footage of raid on leader’s Syria hideout

The US military has said it expects a retribution attack in the wake of the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as it released the first footage of the raid by commandos on the Isis leader’s hideout.

The Pentagon showed brief black-and-white aerial footage on Wednesday night of the raid and the subsequent bombing of Baghdadi’s compound in northern Syria.

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How the US caught up with Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi | podcast

The Guardian’s Martin Chulov describes how US special forces finally tracked down Baghdadi, who was killed in a raid at the weekend. Plus: Robert Booth on the criticism of the London fire brigade’s response to the Grenfell Tower disaster

US special forces finally caught up with the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on Saturday at a safe house in the Syrian province of Idlib, one of the few areas of the country still outside regime control. In a night-time raid, Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest and killed himself and three of his children, according to Donald Trump.

The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, Martin Chulov, has followed the rise and fall of Isis in the past five years from close quarters. He tells Rachel Humphreys what Baghdadi’s death will mean to the terrorist organisation, which has lost almost all the territory it held at its peak.

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Germany charges two Syrians with crimes against humanity

Charges – including 59 counts of murder – linked to UN exhibition of torture photographs in 2015

Germany has charged two alleged former Syrian secret service officers with crimes against humanity, federal prosecutors have announced.

The two men were arrested in the capital, Berlin, and the southern state of Baden-Württemberg in February, in a coordinated operation by German and French police.

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Syrian Kurds say spy stole Baghdadi’s underpants for DNA test

Syrian Democratic Forces also claim they played a key role in tracking down Baghdadi to a compound in northern Syria

Syrian Kurds say they managed to place a spy in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s inner circle who stole a pair of the Isis leader’s underpants to prove his identity and then helped guide US soldiers to his Syrian hideout.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claim they played a key role in tracking down Baghdadi to a compound in northern Syria where he was reportedly planning his escape over the nearby border into Turkey.

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Pelosi slams Trump for cutting Democrats out of loop on Baghdadi raid

Top Democrats reacted with anger to Donald Trump’s decision to go ahead with the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi raid without giving them advance notice, on grounds that they were not to be trusted with such highly sensitive information.

Related: Trump impeachment: Schiff expects battle over key witness John Bolton

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Nowhere left to run: how the US finally caught up with Isis leader Baghdadi

The hunt for the Islamic State leader had lasted years until Iraqi officials got a break last month

Cornered in a dead-end tunnel, with a robot creeping towards him, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had nowhere left to run. Dogs barked in the darkness, a US soldier called out … and then came the thundering explosion that killed the world’s most wanted man – together with three terrified children he was using as human shields.

The US military finally caught up with the Islamic State leader in a remote hamlet of northwestern Syria, but not before he detonated a suicide vest strapped to his body as special forces troops disgorged from helicopters and crouched near the frugal stone house in which he was hiding.

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Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed in US raid – video

Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US special forces raid in the north-west of Syria. According to the president, the Isis leader died 'running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way'. Trump made the announcement in Washington hours after tweeting: 'Something very big has just happened!'

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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death comes as new order takes shape in Middle East

In aftermath of Isis’s toxic mix of chaos and intolerance, new spheres of influence are being demarcated

Reports of his death had been frequent – and exaggerated. But not this time. Even as US forces were flying to Iraq the remains of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in Syria in the early hours of Saturday, a debate about his legacy was stirring.

For more than five years, Baghdadi, who was known by birth as Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, was the most wanted man on the planet – a figure who had turned an already potent post-invasion insurgency in Iraq into a formidable terrorist juggernaut that changed the course of history.

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Donald Trump confirms Isis leader died in US raid – video

The US president has said Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, was killed in a raid by US special forces in north-west Syria. Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest after running into a dead-end tunnel, killing himself and three of his children, Donald Trump said

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Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed, says Donald Trump – live updates

Donald Trump makes statement following US raid in north-west Syria

President Donald Trump has just started speaking. He says last night the US brought the “world’s greatest terrorist leader to justice”. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead,” he says.

President Trump is about to give a press conference at the White House. You can follow it live above or on YouTube here.

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Who was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and why is his death important?

Self-declared caliph was operational leader of Isis and symbol of its Islamic credentials

Baghdadi is thought to have been born in the central Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971. Though a weak student, whose poor eyesight disqualified him from joining the Iraqi military, he rose to command al-Qaida’s Iraqi division and then broke away to form Islamic State (Isis).

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Syria: videos of Turkey-backed militias show ‘potential war crimes’

Arab forces have allegedly been filmed torturing Kurdish fighters and mutilating bodies


Calls for war crimes investigations into the conduct of militias used by Turkey in Syria are mounting after a spate of new videos depicting Ankara-linked fighters torturing captives and mutilating dead bodies.

Footage of atrocities allegedly committed by Arab forces in northern Syria is circulating widely across Kurdish regions of the country, sparking fears of renewed fighting and a deepening ethnic divide in the region, even as a tenuous ceasefire begins to settle.

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Turkey accused of using threats and deception to deport Syrian refugees

Amnesty claims people bussed out in handcuffs were beaten or signed ‘voluntary return’ forms in belief they would get blankets

Hundreds of Syrian refugees in Turkey have been compelled to return to their war-torn home country, some in handcuffs, after receiving threats of violence or being tricked into signing “voluntary return” agreements.

These are the claims contained in a hard-hitting report by Amnesty International, released on Friday, which claims to have documented at least 20 cases of forced illegal deportations by Turkish authorities.

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US plans to send tanks to Syria oil fields, reversing Trump troop withdrawal – reports

  • Tanks to come from units already in Middle East, report says
  • Trump has said US ‘secured oil’ despite withdrawal

The US is reportedly planning to deploy tanks and other heavy military hardware to protect oil fields in eastern Syria, in a reversal of Donald Trump’s earlier order to withdraw all troops from the country.

The most likely destination for US armoured units is a Conoco gas plant near the city of Deir Ezzor, the site of a February 2018 clash between US special forces and Syrian regime-backed militias fighting with Russian mercenaries.

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UK man who fought Isis found guilty of terror offence in retrial

Aidan James, 28, is first Briton to stand trial for travelling to Syria to join battle against Isis

A British man who trained to fight with Kurdish units against Islamic State has been found guilty of a terrorism offence in a retrial at the Old Bailey.

Aidan James, 28, from Formby in Merseyside, was found guilty of training in weapons with the banned Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) in Iraq.

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Trump: Syria ceasefire will be ‘permanent’ – video

Donald Trump has said he will lift the economic sanctions imposed on Turkey after its government informed the US that it would make the ceasefire in Syria ‘permanent’. Claiming success at the US-brokered effort, the US president said on Wednesday that ‘this was an outcome created by us’

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