Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 400

On July 08 2017 22:11 bardtown wrote:

For instance...

The so-called spokesman of the PKK's Syrian affiliate the People's Protection Units (YPG), Redur Xelil and senior PKK militant Şahin, which is on the Turkish Interior Ministry's list of most wanted terrorists, with a bounty of four million liras

The presence of children at a suspected car bomb factory for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has prevented the U.S.-led coalition from striking the site, a military official said Wednesday.

Coalition spokesman U.S. Army Col. Ryan Dillon told reporters that children have been seen gathering around the site in ISIS' de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, at all hours, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.

Their presence has prevented the coalition from destroying the site with an airstrike, Dillon said. The coalition has been keeping the building under surveillance and attacking vehicles after they leave.

CBS News correspondent Holly Williams reports that U.S.-backed Syrian forces have ISIS forces surrounded in Raqqa. However, when she and a CBS News crew were on the outskirts of the city over a week ago, those forces appeared to be overstretched and had few fighters on the front line.

Dillon said Wednesday that U.S. advisers are operating with Syrian fighters inside Raqqa and are "much more exposed to enemy contact than in Iraq."

On Monday, Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over ISIS in Mosul, the country's second-largest city.

ISIS captured Mosul three years ago. The fight to liberate it began last October, but Williams reports that Mosul won't be completely rid of ISIS fighters or their roadside bombs and booby traps for weeks or months.

On July 13 2017 19:14 Redox wrote:

Why would you ever report this to the press?
"Hey ISIS, having children around saved your ass. Please get them out of the way next time, in the spirit of fair play. Tyvm."

Days after Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, declared victory over Islamic State forces in Mosul, emaciated figures were still emerging from tunnels and basements in the shattered city on Wednesday: old men carried on the backs of their sons and women wearing dusty, tattered abayas, dragging behind them their parched and thirsty children.

In the shadow of what had once been the city’s 12th century al-Nuri mosque, blown up by Isis fighters last month in the final, desperate days of battle, a special forces officer pointed at the families who were limping out of the ruins without a male relative.

“Those are all Daesh,” he said. “The old city is where the fighters brought the loyalist families, but what can we do?”

Two injured young men, both of military age, were detained on the spot, despite the pleading of their families. “I swear he was injured by a sniper when he went to get water from the river,” said a young woman, pointing at a man who had a long, fresh scar in his abdomen.

Almost three years after the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate in the northern Iraqi city from the steps of the now ruined mosque, its “terrorist state” has at last collapsed, Abadi said on a visit on Sunday.

Even after he spoke, however, fighting continued in a handful of alleyways of Mosul’s old city, where the last, desperate remnants of the Isis resistance were trapped.

For nine months, Iraqi soldiers and special forces units were locked in battle to capture the city, but the last weeks of urban combat through the old district, with its narrow alleyways, stone houses and webs of connected basements and tunnels, proved the most difficult of all.

“In three years of fighting Isis we have seen so much and suffered many losses, but nothing we have seen can compare to the last couple of weeks here in the old city,” said Brigadier-General Flah, chief of staff of the Iraqi Special Operation Forces.

In these tangled streets, where there was no fixed front line and no safe areas, it was the civilians who bore the brunt. Here, the care that the Iraqi forces largely took elsewhere to save the lives of civilians disappeared. When advancing soldiers faced resistance, air support was called in, and the subsequent aerial bombardment shattered much of the city, along with its inhabitants.

A report by Amnesty International, published on Tuesday, accused Isis of deliberately trapping civilians to use as human shields, and the government forces and their coalition allies of using imprecise explosive weapons, potentially committing war crimes, in response. The British deputy commander of the anti-Isis coalition dismissed the report on Wednesday as “deeply irresponsible”.

Inside a church, tired soldiers rested against thick pink columns as shafts of light shining through the partially collapsed vaulted roof illuminated a floor strewn with debris, weapons and discarded meals.

Some of the soldiers collected their gear and weapons and headed out to continue searching their sector for any jihadists still hiding in basements and tunnels.

To do so, they were forced to climb over concrete boulders, chunks of stone masonry and twisted shop shutters. Air strikes have levelled entire buildings, digging deep craters and forcing up huge mounds of earth and debris, even placing the skeletons of cars on rooftops.

So complete is the destruction that in some places only a few traces remain of the building that once stood there: a door; a window frame; a flipped, broken sofa – all coloured grey by ash. The dead litter the area, and over everything hangs the putrid smell of decomposing bodies, excrement and rotting food.

Through a small opening in a wall, the soldiers climbed into a room filled with colourful bras and underwear. They stepped over the mutilated body of a fighter whose leg hung from the wheels of a motorbike, then crossed a small street lined with collapsed buildings, zigzagging between the bodies of two more dead fighters.

On July 13 2017 19:14 Redox wrote:

Why would you ever report this to the press?
"Hey ISIS, having children around saved your ass. Please get them out of the way next time, in the spirit of fair play. Tyvm."

On July 24 2017 23:10 xM(Z wrote:
can easily be argued that the West is Saudi Arabia. from Blair to Trump, all of them fuckers across all continents.

On July 24 2017 21:54 AssyrianKing wrote:
Honestly wish the West just invaded Saudi Arabia, take all the oil, and leave them without a penny, that way they wont have any more money to fund terrorists...

On October 17 2017 15:00 xM(Z wrote:
i'd chill a bit if i were you. the city was probably part of a deal kurdish leaders pre-agreed upon.