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Islamic State “Daesh” shave their faces en masse to flee Mosul’s Old City

July 5, 2017 by administrator

Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) forces stand guard next to Mosul’s destroyed ancient leaning minaret, known as the “Hadba” (Hunchback), in the Old City of Mosul on July 4, 2017, during the ongoing offensive to retake the city from Takfiri Daesh terrorists. (Photo by AFP)

A high-ranking Iraqi military commander says members of the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group are shaving their beards to blend in with civilians as they flee government forces’ advance on Mosul’s Old City.

“They just shave their beards and walk out. Just yesterday we captured two among a group of women and children,” Lieutenant General Sami al-Aridi of Special Forces told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

He added that hundreds of militants have managed to escape from the Old City, noting that some 300 Daesh extremists remain in the small patch of territory still controlled by them.

The remarks came on the same day that Staff Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a top commander in Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), told Arabic-language al-Forat news agency that Daesh terrorists’ hold on Mosul has shrunk to a 150-square meter area.

He went on to say that there are 100 bombers among the militants remaining in Mosul’s Old City, stressing that 90 percent of the remaining terrorists are foreigners.

Major Ali Mohsen, a member of the CTS, also told Basnews news agency that government forces have taken over 90 percent of al-Midan neighborhood, where Daesh terrorists were running underground detention facilities and stockpiling munitions.

He added that security forces have uncovered an incarceration center, where 40 people were being held in poor and unhealthy conditions.

On Tuesday, security forces liberated the main square and a multi-storey car park in the Bab al-Toub neighborhood of western Mosul and Khuzam Grand Mosque.

They also took control of the Khalid ibn al-Walid street in the Old City of Mosul.

Late on Tuesday, Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated the armed forces on a “big victory” in Mosul, declaring an end to Daesh terror group’s self-styled caliphate.

Iraqi army soldiers and volunteer fighters from the Popular Mobilization Units, commonly known by their Arabic name, Hashd al-Sha’abi, have made sweeping gains against Daesh since launching the Mosul operation on October 17, 2016.

The Iraqi forces took control of eastern Mosul in January after 100 days of fighting, and launched the battle in the west on February 19.

An estimated 862,000 people have been displaced from Mosul ever since the battle to retake the city began nine months ago. A total of 195,000 civilians have also returned, mainly to the liberated areas of eastern Mosul.

Iraq faces humanitarian disaster after Fallujah breakthrough

June 20, 2016 by administrator

DISPLACED. Iraqis from the city of Fallujah rest at a safe zone on June 17, 2016 in Amiriyiah al-Fallujah, after they were evacuated by Iraqi government forces. File photo by Moadh al-Dulaimi/AFP

FALLUJAH, Iraq (UPDATED) – Aid workers scrambled Sunday, June 19, to cope with a massive influx of Iraqi civilians who fled Fallujah after government forces retook much of the city from the Islamic State group.

Tens of thousands of civilians escaped the city, just 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad, on the back of a major advance that saw Iraqi forces thrust into central Fallujah in recent days.

The humanitarian community has been struggling to cope, with thousands of people already suffering from hunger and trauma now stranded in the scorching summer heat with no shelter.

“The estimated total number of displaced from Fallujah in just the last 3 days is now at a staggering 30,000 people,” the Norwegian Refugee Council said.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said up to 84,000 people had been forced to flee their homes since the start of the government offensive against the ISIS bastion nearly a month ago.

“Agencies are scrambling to respond to the rapidly evolving situation – and we are bracing ourselves for another large exodus in the next few days as we estimate that thousands more people remain trapped in Fallujah,” the UNHCR said.

“We implore the Iraqi government to take charge of this humanitarian disaster unfolding on our watch,” NRC’s Iraq director Nasr Muflahi said.

NRC said it could no longer provide the required assistance, with water rations drying up fast.

It cited the case of a newly opened camp in Amriyat al-Fallujah, south of Fallujah, that houses 1,800 people but has only one latrine for women.

“We need the Iraqi government to take a leading role in providing for the needs of the most vulnerable civilians who have endured months of trauma and terror,” Muflahi said.

An Iraqi aid worker employed by the government at a camp in Amriyat al-Fallujah said the resources were inadequate to deal with the scope of the crisis.

“Four hundred families have reached my camp in the last 4 days, they don’t have anything,” said the camp manager, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We were shocked by the number of displaced people and we weren’t prepared to receive them,” he said.

“We secured tents for some of them but the rest, including women and children, are sleeping on the ground under the sun,” he said. “Their situation is a tragedy.”

Sniper fire

The temperature in Baghdad has been hovering above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and it often gets hotter in Anbar province, where inhabited areas along the Euphrates River are flanked by desert.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has promised to support the displaced.

On Friday evening, after Iraqi forces raised the national flag above the main government compound, he declared that Fallujah had been “brought back to the fold.”

Yet Iraqi forces have some work left to do, with hundreds of ISIS fighters still holed up in the city’s northern neighborhoods.

Abadi announced the liberation of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, in December but the area was not brought under control until February.

Sporadic ISIS attacks there have continued, the latest of which was a thwarted ambush on the top military commander for Anbar on Sunday in an area called Zankura.

Despite facing less resistance than expected from ISIS in Fallujah, an emblematic jihadist stronghold, sniper fire, car bombs, and booby traps remained a risk for Iraq’s forces.

“Our forces are cleansing central Fallujah of pockets of Daesh (ISIS),” federal police chief Raed Shaker Jawdat told AFP, using an Arabic acronym for the jihadist group.

In the Officers neighborhood of Fallujah, ISIS snipers shot at an Iraqi flag pole until it broke, an AFP photographer reported.

The loss of Fallujah would continue a losing streak for ISIS that already leaves the “caliphate” it proclaimed two years ago looking moribund.

To keep the pressure on the jihadist organization, Iraqi forces also rekindled offensives east and south of Qayyarah in the north of the country.

With its strategic location west of the Tigris and its air field, Iraqi forces hope to make it a key launchpad in a major push to retake Mosul.

Abadi vowed on Friday that Mosul, the country’s second city and ISIS’s last remaining major urban hub in Iraq, would be liberated “very soon.” –

Source: Rappler.com

Two Journalist out of Jail Another Turkish columnist faces four years in jail for ‘insulting Erdoğan’

February 26, 2016 by administrator

Prominent columnist Cengiz Çandar faces four years in jail for “insulting” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in seven opinion pieces published on the Radikal news website.

The indictment prepared by Bakırköy Public Prosecutor Ertuğrul Sarıyar is based on a complaint filed by Erdoğan’s lawyer Ahmet Özel regarding seven of Çandar’s pieces published between July 26 and Aug. 19.
Çandar will be tried for violating Article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK). If found guilty he faces between one to four years in prison.

The trial will begin on April 7.

Speaking to news website T24, Çandar said he received the written notice on Feb. 26, which he noted coincided with both President Erdoğan’s birthday and “Can Dündar and Erdem Gül’s release from prison.”

Imprisoned daily Cumhuriyet journalists Dündar and Gül were released from pre-trial detention after 92 days of imprisonment, after Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that their rights had been violated.

February/26/2016

Turkey opposition leader Gulen faces subversion charge

October 19, 2015 by administrator

A court in Turkey has accepted an indictment against opposition leader in exile Fethullah Gulen for attempting to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to the indictment seen on Monday, Gulen is accused of “forming and leading a terrorist group” and “obtaining secret information for the aim of political espionage”.

Gulen and 68 other people are also accused of being behind the country’s corruption investigations in 2013 that undermined Erdogan’s allies. They are charged with “seeking to overthrow the government or obstruct its activities by force.” They potentially face life sentences.

The 1,453-page indictment was prepared by Istanbul’s Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office. It said Ankara could not fulfill its potential due to “ugly interventions, plots, terror and crises” created by “our Western ‘friends'” and allies in Turkey.

The court also issued a new arrest warrant for Gulen and his assistants. Earlier on October 2, another arrest warrant was issued for the preacher for “conspiracy, forgery of official documents and slander.”

Erdogan has accused Gulen and his followers of plotting to overthrow the ruling AKP party, a charge Gulen denies. Hundreds of people, believed to be sympathizers of Gulen, many of them members of the police and the judiciary, have been arrested as the government intensifies crackdown ahead of the November 1 snap elections in which the AKP seeks to restore its majority in the parliament.

On October 8, a state prosecutor in the capital, Ankara, issued an order to ban service provider Digiturk from broadcasting two major news networks, namely the Bugun TV and S Haber, along with a children’s channel and four other general stations as they were allegedly close to Gulen.

Daily Mail Genocide of the Christians: The blood-soaked depravity exceeded even today’s atrocities by Islamic State – now, 100 years on Turkey faces global disgust at its refusal to admit butchering over a MILLION Armenians

April 18, 2015 by administrator

By Tony Rennell for the Daily Mail

In 1915 the rulers of the Ottoman empire turned their hatred on Armenians
The Young Turks persecution of the minority turned to unbridled savagery
Modern Turkey faces disgust over refusal to admit the historic genocide
WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES

She was in bed when the soldiers came in the middle of the night and dragged her father out of the family home in Diyarbakir, a city in eastern Turkey.

The last thing little Aghavni (her name means ‘dove’ in her native Armenian) heard as she cowered in her room was his shout of defiance: ‘I was born a Christian and I will die a Christian.’

Not until first light did Aghavni dare to creep downstairs on that morning 100 years ago. ‘I saw an object sticking through the front door,’ she later remembered. ‘I pushed it open and there lay two horseshoes nailed to two feet.

the ruling Turks had turned their hatred on the 2 million men, women and children of Armenian extraction who lived within their borders

‘My eyes followed up to the blood-covered ankles, the disjointed knees, the mound of blood where the genitals had been, to a long laceration through the abdomen to the chest.

‘I came to the hands, which were nailed horizontally on a board with big spikes of iron, like a cross. The shoulders were remarkably clean and white, but there was no head.

‘This was lying on the steps, propped up by the nose. I recognised the neatly trimmed beard along the cheekbones. It was my father.’

The year was 1915. In the sprawling, beleaguered Ottoman Empire — an ally of the German Kaiser in the world war that had engulfed Europe and parts of Asia for nine months — the ruling Turks had turned their hatred on the 2 million men, women and children of Armenian extraction who lived within their borders.

The Armenians — who lived on the eastern edge of the empire ruled from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) — were Christians and had been since the year 301, making theirs the first nation officially to adopt Christianity, even before Rome.

But here, among the Islamic Turks, they had long been second-class citizens, a persecuted minority. Now, as power in the land was seized by a junta of nationalist officers known as the Young Turks, persecution turned to unbridled savagery.

Over the next six months, there was to be a systematic uprooting and slaughter of perhaps as many as 1.5 million Armenians — on the grounds that they were infidels, racially inferior ‘dogs’ and traitors who were siding with Russia against Turkey.

Those who weren’t put to death on the spot, their faith cruelly mocked — such as Aghavni’s father, a mild-mannered, cultivated spice merchant who spoke five languages — were hounded in columns, eastwards, into the deserts of Syria and Iraq to die.

Their remains are long turned to dust, but the controversy that surrounds those terrible events is as alive as ever.

Just this week at mass in St Peter’s in Rome, the Pope heralded the upcoming centenary of the first killings on April 24 by describing the slaughter of the Armenian Christians as ‘the first genocide of the 20th century’ — only to be ticked off by Turkey in no uncertain terms for inflammatory remarks.

Read the complete story on Daily Mail

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