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...Lack of participation at Middle East event reflects anger over US policy on Iran and Syria
Key European powers will offer only limited participation in a high-profile Trump administration summit on the Middle East starting on Wednesday, reflecting their growing anger over unilateral US policymaking on Iran and Syria.
The UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will leave the Warsaw summit early, pleading Brexit Commons business, while France is sending a civil servant and Germany its junior foreign minister.
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...Comments come after Donald Trump suggested US forces in Iraq were monitoring activity in Iran
Iraq’s president has hit back at comments made by Donald Trump, saying that the US president did not ask Iraq’s permission for US troops stationed there to “watch Iran”.
A day after Trump said US soldiers in Iraq would be tasked with monitoring Iran, Barham Salih told reporters at a forum in Baghdad that the US military presence in the country was the result of a bilateral agreement with the specific goal of fighting terrorism.
Continue reading...Pope Francis’s visit to the United Arab Emirates this week will be greeted enthusiastically. Some 120,000 people are expected to turn out for his mass in a sports stadium in Abu Dhabi – as many as turned out in Dublin when he travelled to historically Catholic Ireland last year. The first visit by a pontiff to the Arabian peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, highlights the complications of the religious situation in the Middle East, and more widely the issues of Christian-Muslim relations.
There may be as many as 2 million Christians in the Middle East today. Despite nearly 16 years of war and sometimes brutal persecution in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, many remain in the lands that were the cradle of Christianity. In part this is because it is still made as hard as possible for them to leave the region. The Christians of Iraq have largely been driven from their homes by persecution, as have some of the Christians of Syria, where a number have taken the side of the Assad dictatorship. But they have ended up in refugee camps rather than reaching notionally Christian Europe.
Continue reading...Five-storey building falls in formerly rebel-held neighbourhood of Syria’s second city
At least 11 people, including four children, have died after a block of flats collapsed in Aleppo, Syria, on Saturday, according to state media.
One child was pulled out alive from the rubble of the five-storey, war-damaged block after rescue teams worked to remove the shattered breeze blocks that had buried him, AFP photographers said.
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...Syria ordered to pay $300m over death of Sunday Times journalist in ‘targeted’ shelling in 2012
The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has been held liable by a US court for the extrajudicial killing of the Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and ordered to pay $300m dollars (£228m) in punitive damages.
In a judgment published on Thursday, the Syrian government was found to have targeted journalists deliberately during the country’s civil war in order to “intimidate newsgathering” and suppress dissent.
Continue reading...World Health Organization sounds alarm over freezing conditions facing 23,000 people fleeing conflict
At least 29 children and newborn babies have died in freezing temperatures after fleeing conflict in the last Isis controlled villages in eastern Syria.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said it was extremely concerned about the conditions facing 23,000 people who have taken flight from rural areas of Deir ez-Zor over over the past two months, warning that services are severely overstretched.
Continue reading...Study questions lack of detail surrounding scale and quantity of weapons sales
A highly critical report has found extensive flaws in the British government’s arms sales strategy.
Based on analysis of the Yemen conflict, the study urges a reduction in weapons exports to conflict zones and states involved in human rights abuses.
Continue reading...Sudan missed out on the Arab spring, but that may be changing. Protests against Omar al-Bashir, the indicted war criminal who has dominated the country for 29 years, are becoming a daily occurrence. Street-level unrest, sparked by rising bread and fuel prices, began last month and spread quickly. But the focus of demonstrators, their ranks swollen by teachers, lawyers and doctors, has switched to Bashir himself. They want him gone.
Bashir’s response has been predictably repressive. And the president may succeed in battering his critics into silence, as in the past. But the causes of the unrest cannot be bludgeoned away: a struggling economy, low investment, high unemployment, corruption, bad governance and a potentially disastrous lack of opportunity for new generations of young people.
Continue reading...Despite appalling conditions in Lebanese camps, most refugees say it is unsafe to go home
In knee-deep snow and biting cold, 10-year-old Saleh Qarqour had almost finished shovelling a path to the tent that had been his family’s home for the past six years. Elders and children huddled around a heater inside. Chimney smoke wafted from the town of Arsal in the valley below.
Over the ridge behind them was the Syrian frontier, from which the Qarqour family and nearly everyone else in this Lebanese border town had fled. Their homes ever since had been makeshift tents, their frugal lives sustained by aid and goodwill, which, on this frozen ledge above Lebanon, was fast running out.
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...An Israeli interception of a Syrian missile was caught on a snowboarder's camera from the snowy slopes of Mount Hermon on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israel's military said its Iron Dome interceptor system shot down a rocket fired at the northern part of the occupied Golan Heights on the Syria frontier on Sunday.
Continue reading...In a very unusual move, military issues a statement about attack and warns Syrian forces not to retaliate
Israel’s military has said it struck Iranian Quds targets inside Syria and warned Syrian forces not to attack Israeli territory or forces.
Syrian state media cited a Syrian military source as saying Israel launched an “intense attack through consecutive waves of guided missiles”, but that Syrian air defences destroyed most of the “hostile targets”.
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