Survey of 25,000 people in Middle East and North Africa also shows 52% of 18- to 29-year-olds are thinking about migrating
The Arab world is turning its back on religion and on US relations, according to the largest public opinion survey ever carried out in the region.
A survey of more than 25,000 people across 10 countries and the Palestinian territories found that trust in religious leaders has plummeted in recent years.
Continue reading...The explosions, on a vital passageway for the world’s oil supply, may prove Trump’s policy of coercion has backfired
The explosions were bigger and the damage more extensive. But the message and its means of delivery have some similarities.
Thursday’s attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman caused jitters in global markets and unease across a region that has been bracing for conflict throughout much of the year. As with the earlier attacks on 12 May, news of the latest strikes was again broken by media outlets aligned to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran, who broadcast images of the attacks within minutes of them taking place.
Continue reading...Umm Sayyaf, sentenced to death in Iraq, tells how she exposed fugitive’s secrets
The most senior female Islamic State captive has played a central role in the hunt for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, helping identify safe houses used by the fugitive terrorist leader and in one case pinpointing his location in Mosul, the Guardian can reveal.
The Isis woman, Nisrine Assad Ibrahim, better known by her nom de guerre, Umm Sayyaf, has helped the CIA and Kurdish intelligence officers build a detailed portrait of Baghdadi’s movements, hideouts and networks, investigators have disclosed. The claims have been confirmed by Umm Sayyaf in her first interview since being captured in a Delta Force raid in Syria four years ago that killed her husband, the then Isis oil minister.
Continue reading...Foreign ministry says it is opposed to the death penalty ‘at all times and in all places’
France has confirmed it will take “the necessary steps” to try to prevent Iraq carrying out the death penalty against French citizens convicted of fighting with Islamic State.
“France is opposed in principle to the death penalty at all times and in all places,” the French foreign ministry said on Monday, as an Iraqi court sentenced a fourth French citizen to death, a day after handing capital punishment sentences to three others.
Continue reading...Human rights groups have criticised the country’s trials of fighters captured in Syria
An Iraqi court has sentenced three French citizens to death after they were found guilty of joining Islamic State, a court official said.
Captured in Syria by a US-backed force fighting the jihadists, they are the first French Isis members to receive death sentences in Iraq, where they were transferred for trial.
Continue reading...More than 40 international volunteers – a third of them British – who fought in Syria against the Islamic State terror group have written to the home secretary, Sajid Javid, to condemn his plans to prosecute UK citizens who remain in the country.
Four British families whose sons or daughters were killed fighting Isis have also signed the letter, raising concerns that Javid is “criminalising” those who risked their lives supporting the US-led coalition which two months ago defeated the IS caliphate.
Continue reading...Home Office releases Najat Ibrahim Ismail, an Iraqi Kurd who faced deportation three times
A man who brought his baby niece to the UK from a French refugee camp after she sustained serious burns has been released from detention and reunited with his family.
Najat Ibrahim Ismail, 32, an Iraqi Kurd, faced three attempts by the Home Office to put him on a plane to Iraq in recent weeks. He is married to a British woman, Emma Ismail, and has three young British children, including a 10-year-old son who has autism.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Top military leader delivers message at Baghdad meeting as tensions rise
Iran’s most prominent military leader has recently met Iraqi militias in Baghdad and told them to “prepare for proxy war”, the Guardian has learned.
Two senior intelligence sources said that Qassem Suleimani, leader of Iran’s powerful Quds force, summoned the militias under Tehran’s influence three weeks ago, amid a heightened state of tension in the region. The move to mobilise Iran’s regional allies is understood to have triggered fears in the US that Washington’s interests in the Middle East are facing a pressing threat. The UK raised its threat levels for British troops in Iraq on Thursday.
Continue reading...Deputy commander of anti-Isis coalition rebuts White House justification for sending troops
The top British general in the US-led coalition against Isis has said there is no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria, directly contradicting US assertions used to justify a military buildup in the region.
Hours later however, his assessment was disowned by US Central Command in an extraordinary rebuke of an allied senior officer. A spokesman insisted that the troops in Iraq and Syria were on a high level of alert due to the alleged Iranian threat. The conflicting versions of the reality on the ground added to the confusion and mixed signals in a tense part of the Middle East.
Continue reading...Video comes weeks after Islamic State was ousted from last stronghold in Syria
The fugitive Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has appeared in a propaganda video for the first time in five years, in which he acknowledges the terrorist group’s defeat in the Syrian town of Baghuz.
The appearance is only Baghdadi’s second on video, and comes weeks after the remnants of Isis were ousted from their last organised stronghold in the eastern Syrian desert. Looking heavier than when he proclaimed the existence of the now-collapsed caliphate in mid-2014, Baghdadi blames its demise on the “savagery” of Christians.
Continue reading...Death toll from Easter Sunday’s eight bomb blasts nears 300, with 500 others injured
The wave of bombings on Sunday targeting churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka is among the worst terrorist attacks carried out worldwide since September 11, in which 2,977 people died.
On Monday, police said the death toll had surged overnight to 290, with the number expected to rise further. About 500 people were injured, according to reports.
Continue reading...Hamdaniya has been reclaimed from the extremists who made it a hotbed of violence
The church ceiling was still scorched and some cherished relics missing, but after five years of war and exile, their tormentors were finally gone.
When the men and women of Iraq’s oldest Christian town gathered for Easter mass this weekend, they did so knowing that the Islamic State extremists who had chased them away were not coming back. Their battlefield defeat two months ago meant the people of Hamdaniya (also called Qaraqosh) could once again celebrate without fear.
Continue reading...Baghdad in talks with US to receive remnants of terror group held in detention centres in Syria
Baghdad and Washington are in talks to transfer and place on trial tens of thousands of suspected Isis fighters and their families from detention centres in Syria to prison camps in Iraq, with Iraqi officials seeking a multibillion dollar fee to receive remnants of the terror group captured over five years of war.
Discussions about what to do with Isis members, among them thousands of foreign men, women and children, have been pushed intensively by US officials, who have also lobbied coalition partners to remove their citizens from two cramped detention centres in Syria’s north-east, which one former senior US official described as a “volcano”.
Continue reading...Once a magnet for would-be jihadists worldwide, Islamic State’s dominion collapsed amid infighting and paranoia
On a midwinter night in early January, the most wanted man in the world entered a home in a forsaken town near the Syrian border for a rare meeting with his surviving aides.
Continue reading...20 March 1991: Kurdish forces have almost completed the capture of the northern Iraqi oil town of Kirkuk
Kurdish rebels have almost completed the capture of the northern Iraqi oil town of Kirkuk, a Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) spokesman said last night.
Related: Kurds lay claim to oil riches in Iraq as old hatreds flare
Continue reading...Four years ago, Bashir Shikder’s wife Rashida flew from Florida to Syria with the couple’s young children to join Isis, ignoring anguished Bashir’s repeated pleas for her to return home. Now, after hearing news of his wife’s death, and that his children – Yusuf now nine, and Zahra, five – are being held by jihadists in the last corner of the terror group’s lands, Bashir travels to Iraq in the hope of crossing the border into Syria and rescuing them.
Continue reading...The final unravelling of the Islamic State’s evil caliphate exerts a horrible fascination. The jihadis committed many appalling crimes in Syria and Iraq – exploiting the chaos caused by the Syrian civil war – and were responsible, directly or indirectly, for murderous attacks in Britain and several other European countries.
Most people expect a reckoning. It is only right that Isis fighters who have been captured alive, and those who gave them aid and succour, should face justice as soon as possible.
Continue reading...RAF says 4,315 Isis fighters were killed or injured in airstrikes and just one civilian
The Ministry of Defence claim that the RAF killed only one civilian in thousands of airstrikes against Isis has been dismissed as ludicrous and “stretching credibility”.
According figures released by the MoD following a freedom of information request by the charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), the RAF strikes between 2014 and January this year killed or injured 4,315 of the group’s fighters. It said 90% of those were killed.
Continue reading...Hawar was healthy but I felt nothing but guilt for bringing him into the world
I was nine months pregnant when Islamic State came. It was 2014 and I was living with my husband, Ferhad, and one-year-old son, Haval, in the village of Tal Qasab in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. My husband and I had been childhood sweethearts. We led a simple life, and were very happy.
For a couple of months, we had been worrying about an attack; Isis were targeting the Yazidi people in our region. Then, one August morning, we woke to the news that they had attacked Tuazar, the neighbouring village. We had just sat down to breakfast when a bullet hit our window. I looked outside and realised our neighbours were running for their lives.
Continue reading...You see these gravity-defying quiffs everywhere in Iraq’s capital: on reception staff in the secure hotels, on waiters in cafes and on the youths who gather in Zawra amusement park on Friday afternoons. Often teamed with drainpipe trousers and a fitted jacket, the flashy, ostentatious haircut requires care. It says something of the city’s new confidence: a rejection of the long years of sanctions and war
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