The Syrian army regained control of a road southeast of Aleppo on Wednesday, state television said, taking back the government’s only supply route into the city from ISIS fighters who had seized it last month.
Army forces took full control of the road which runs from Aleppo through the towns of Khanaser and Ithriya and links up with the cities of Hama and Homs further south, the channel flashed in a news bulletin. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group confirmed the report, according to Al Arabiya.
The road is the army’s supply route to government-held western parts of Aleppo, home to around 2 million people.
Rebels are mainly in the eastern sector of the city, which was Syria’s most populous before the conflict broke out in 2011.
ISIS said late last month it had taken control of most of the Syrian army checkpoints on the road and seized large caches of ammunition from army outposts in the area.
Areas around Aleppo have seen weeks of heavy fighting after Syrian troops backed by Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian fighters launched an offensive to retake territory around Aleppo from rebels and jihadist fighters.
The offensive has concentrated so far on clearing insurgent-held areas south of Aleppo rather than the city itself.
It is one of several assaults carried out by pro-government ground forces since Russian jets began carrying out air strikes on Sept. 30 in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
Syrian troops are also trying to advance to the east of Aleppo towards Kweires military airport, aiming to break a siege of the base by ISIS and other insurgents.
(armradio.am report) Today, the Armenian Assembly of America (Assembly) called on the Department of Justice to investigate potentially illegal activities of U.S. groups with ties to foreign entities in Turkey and Azerbaijan.
The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and the House Committee on Ethics concluded that 9 members of Congress and more than two dozen staff members accepted a trip that was improperly paid for by foreign corporations in Azerbaijan and Turkey. In addition to attending a convention in Azerbaijan, several Members of Congress and their staff also traveled to Turkey free of cost. The OCE’s review found that the congressional travel to Azerbaijan and Turkey was “not funded exclusively by the entities disclosed on travel forms submitted to the Committee on Ethics.”
A USA TODAY investigation discovered that Gülen groups, Turkish organizations who follow the leadership of Fethullah Gülen, “secretly funded as many as 200 trips to Turkey for members of Congress and staff since 2008, repeatedly violating House rules and possibly federal law.” Over the course of its review, the OCE obtained evidence that a Turkish organization, named the Bosphorus Atlantic Cultural Association of Friendship and Cooperation (BAKIAD), funded and coordinated the congressional travel within Turkey dating back several years. Four of the Gülen groups sponsoring the 2013 conference in Azerbaijan also “used BAKIAD to arrange and finance all in-country expenses for congressional travel in Turkey,” OCE found. “Importantly, however, BAKIAD’s role does not appear to have been disclosed to the Committee on Ethics in 2013 or in other years.” Congressional disclosures show the Gülen-backed trips totaled more than $800,000 in free travel for lawmakers and staff. Both the Turkish and Azerbaijani Congressional Caucuses have significantly increased their membership over the last several years.
According to the USA TODAY, “A dozen different Gülen groups have sponsored congressional travel since 2008 and have filed forms with the House certifying that they were paying for the trips. The House Ethics Committee approved all the trips in advance based on the forms the Gülen groups submitted. But a USA TODAY investigation found many of those disclosures were apparently false. Some of the Gülenist groups claimed to be certified nonprofits, but they do not appear in state or IRS databases of approved charities. Groups that did register with the IRS filed tax forms indicating that they did not pay for congressional travel. And five of the groups admitted to congressional investigators earlier this year that a Gülenist group in Turkey was secretly covering the costs of travel inside Turkey for lawmakers and staff.”
The OCE investigators received documentation that the lawmakers accepted donations by two Texas-based nonprofit corporations, the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians (TCAE) and the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ). They found that TCAE and AFAZ concealed the true source of the funding for travel and other expenses for the U.S. officials. Instead, much of the cost of travel and funding for the convention was paid for by undisclosed entities including the Republic of Azerbaijan through its national oil company, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR). Evidence revealed that SOCAR founded AFAZ in the month prior to the Convention, transferring $750,000 to an AFAZ bank account.
“The revelations by the USA TODAY investigation, in addition to the Office of Congressional Ethics investigation, are remarkable,” the Assembly said in its letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “We respectfully request a full and thorough investigation by the Department of Justice into these groups and the full application of the law. The reported activities constitute plainly illegal behavior and strikes at the core of our Constitutional government through blatant foreign influence peddling.”