The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Islamic State

  • Syrian Palmyra temple ‘blown up by IS’

    Islamic State militants have destroyed Palmyra’s ancient temple of Baalshamin, Syrian officials and activists say.

    Syria’s head of antiquities was quoted as saying the temple was blown up on Sunday.

    The United Kingdom -based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that it happened a month ago.

    IS took control of Palmyra in May, sparking fears for the site, the BBC reports.

    It is considered one of the ancient world’s most important cultural centres.

    The ancient city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, is famed for its well-preserved Greco-Roman ruins, and the Baalshamin temple was built nearly 2,000 years ago.

    The IS has destroyed several ancient sites in Iraq. The militants believe any shrines or statues implying the existence of another deity are sacrilege and idolatry, and should be destroyed.

    The Baalshamin temple is dedicated to the Phoenician god of storms and fertilising rains, and was almost completely intact.

    IS “placed a large quantity of explosives in the temple of Baalshamin today [Sunday] and then blew it up causing much damage to the temple,” Syrian antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim told AFP news agency.

    “The cella (inner area of the temple) was destroyed and the columns around collapsed,” he said.

    Residents who had fled from Palmyra also said IS had planted explosives at the temple, although they had done it about one month ago, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

     

  • Arab League meets over Islamic State attacks

    Arab League meets over Islamic State attacks

    The Cairo-based Arab League (AL) on Tuesday held an emergency meeting on Islamic State (IS) crimes in Libya, local media reports have said.

    The report quoted Bishr Khasawneh, Jordan’s Permanent Representative to AL as saying the meeting was held under the request of Libya who demanded air strikes by Arab states to confront IS attacks in Libya.

    He said the request if granted, would be executed under the framework of the Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation of the League of Arab States.

    Violent clashes were reported last week between IS militants and local fighters over control of the city of Sirte.

    The IS-linked group has beheaded 12 people and crucified their bodies during the clashes.
    The Libyan government condemned the `massacre’ in the Sirte, the majority of which fell into the militants’ control at the end of May.

    Libya has been in turmoil since the fall and killing of its former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011.

  • IS leader ‘raped American hostage’

    A United States aid worker who was killed in February while held hostage by Islamic State militants in Syria, was sexually abused by the group’s top leader, American officials told ABC news.

    Kayla Mueller, 26, was repeatedly raped by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, they said.

    Counter-terrorism officials made her family aware of the abuse in June, the BBC reports.

    Mueller was abducted while working in Aleppo, Syria, in 2013. IS said she was killed in a Jordanian air strike, but the U.S blames IS for her death.

    “We were told Kayla was tortured, that she was the property of Baghdadi. We were told that in June by the government,” her parents, Carl and Marsha, told ABC News.

    Baghdadi personally took the humanitarian aid worker to the home of another senior IS member – Abu Sayyaf – who was in charge of IS oil and gas until his death in a U.S special forces operation in May, ABC news, citing U.S officials, reports.

    The channel said he regularly visited the compound where she was being held and repeatedly assaulted her.

    Officials said they had obtained information about the abuse from at least two teenage Yazidi girls who were held hostage as sex slaves and found inside the Sayyaf compound at the time of the U.S attack.

  • Truck bomb kills 50 in Iraq

    More than 50 people have been killed after a truck bomb exploded in north-eastern Baghdad, Iraqi officials say.

    The blast tore through the crowded Jameela market in the predominantly Shia district of Sadr City.

    The Sunni jihadist group, Islamic State (IS), said it was behind the bombing and that it targeted Shia militiamen.

    It came after a top United States general said it should consider embedding American troops with Iraqi forces if progress was not made in the fight against IS.

    Raymond Odierno, the army’s outgoing chief of staff, told reporters that such forces would have a support rather than a combat role.

    The U.S has already sent some 3,500 military trainers and advisers to Iraq.

    Thursday’s bomb attack in Sadr City was one of the deadliest in the capital since Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi took office a year ago.

    A hospital official told the BBC at least 51 people were killed and 75 others injured.

     

     

  • Islamic State leader killed in Egypt

    Egyptian armed forces killed a leading member of the country’s Islamic State affiliate in a shootout outside his North Sinai home, the army spokesman said in a statement on Saturday.

    Selim Suleiman al-Haram, identified in the statement as a leader of the militant group known as Sinai Province, was asked to turn himself in by a group of soldiers that surrounded his house in the town of Sheikh Zuweid, the army said.

    He refused, opening fire on the troops and attempting to blow himself up before being shot dead, the army said.

    Egypt is battling an increasingly brazen insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of police officers and soldiers since the army toppled Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in 2013 after mass protests against his rule, Reuters says.

    President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has said militancy poses an existential threat to Egypt, the most populous Arab country.

    Sinai Province, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State, claimed responsibility last week for a bombing that the army said killed four soldiers near Rafah, a town on the border with the Gaza Strip.

    The group claimed responsibility earlier this month for a rocket attack on an Egyptian naval vessel near the coast of Israel and Gaza, less than a week after claiming a bombing in Cairo that heavily damaged the Italian consulate.

    It also assaulted several military checkpoints in North Sinai, in the fiercest fighting in the region in years.

  • Italian construction workers abducted in Libya

    Four Italian construction workers have been kidnapped in Libya, the Italian foreign ministry has said.

    They were abducted near a compound owned by Italian oil and gas group Eni in the western Mellitah area, the ministry said.

    Italy closed its embassy in Libya in February, calling on Italians to leave because of the dangers to foreigners, the BBC reports.

    The country is beset with warring factions four years after the civil war that ousted leader Muammar Gaddafi.

    The foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni told Italian media on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union foreign ministers that it was difficult to speculate about who was responsible for the abduction at this stage.

    The workers are employed by Bonatti, a company that builds for the oil, gas and energy sector, La Repubblica reports.

    The paper reports they were kidnapped on their way back from Tunisia on Sunday evening.

    Two rival governments are vying for legitimacy and territory in Libya and so-called Islamic State (IS) is among the armed groups operating in the country.

    Nine foreign oil workers were kidnapped by IS in March.

  • Cameron to U.S: UK will help destroy IS

    Cameron to U.S: UK will help destroy IS

    Britain is committed to working with the United States to destroy the “caliphate” set up by Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.

    Cameron told U.S TV network NBC he wanted the United Kingdom to do more but said he needed to “take Parliament with him.”

    MPs voted against proposed military action in Syria two years ago, the BBC reports.

    Meanwhile, Lord Richards, former chief of defence staff, called for a new “grand strategy” to defeat IS, saying the UK should get on a “war footing.”

    Cameron is due to use a speech on Monday to warn young Britons tempted to join IS fighters they will end up as little more than “cannon fodder.”

    “If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up. If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you,” he will say.

    Speaking about the UK’s possible role in fighting the group, Cameron told NBC: “I want Britain to do more. I’ll always have to take my parliament with me.

    Speaking with the BBC, Lord Richards said military leaders need to “look again” at the strategy to defeat IS, saying the current plan “won’t work in the time I think we have available.”

    He said the current strategy – of training and equipping local fighters to do the “hard work” – could prove successful, but warned the “scale of effort” going into it was “woefully insufficient.”

  • Boko Haram, IS, others increased global terror in 2014 – U.S

    Boko Haram, IS, others increased global terror in 2014 – U.S

    Boko Haram and extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan unleashed a savage rise in violence between 2013 and 2014, according to new statistics released by the State Department on Friday.

    Attacks largely at the hands of the Islamic State and Boko Haram raised the number of terror acts by more than a third, nearly doubled the number of deaths and nearly tripled the number of kidnappings.

    The figures contained in the department’s annual global terrorism report said that nearly 33,000 people were killed in almost 13,500 terrorist attacks around the world last year.

    That’s up from just over 18,000 deaths in nearly 10,000 attacks in 2013, it said.

    24 Americans were killed by extremists in 2014, the report said, while abductions soared from 3,137 in 2013 to 9,428 in 2014.

    The report attributed the rise in attacks to increased terror activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria and the sharp spike in deaths to a growth in exceptionally lethal attacks in those countries and elsewhere.

    Terror attacks took place in 95 countries in 2014, but were concentrated in the Mideast, South Asia and West Africa. Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria accounted for more than 60 percent of the attacks and, if Syria is included, roughly 80 percent of the fatalities, the report found.

    There were 20 attacks that killed more than 100 people each in 2014, compared to just two in 2013, according to the figures that were compiled for the State Department by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

    Among the 20 mass casualty attacks in 2014 were the December attack by the Pakistani Taliban on a school in Peshawar, Pakistan that killed at least 150 people and the June attack by Islamic State militants on a prison in Mosul, Iraq, in which 670 Shiite prisoners died.

    At the end of 2014, the prison attack was the deadliest terrorist operation in the world since September 11, 2001, according to the report.

  • IS militants kill five journalists in Libya

    Islamic State militants have slit the throats of five journalists working for a Libyan TV station in the eastern part of the country, an army commander said on Monday.

    The reporters had been missing since August, when they left the eastern city of Tobruk after covering the inauguration of the country’s elected parliament to travel to Benghazi. Their route took them through Derna, a militant Islamist hotspot, Reuters reports.

    Faraj al-Barassi, a district army commander in eastern Libya, said militants loyal to Islamic State were responsible for killing the journalists, whose bodies were found outside the eastern city of Bayda.

    “Five bodies with slit throats were found today in the Green Mountain forests,” Barrasi told Reuters, referring to a sparsely populated area east of Benghazi. He did not say when the five journalists were believed to have been killed.

    The reporters – four Libyans and one Egyptian – had been working for Barqa TV, an eastern television supporting federalism for eastern Libya, other journalists said.

    Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a group promoting press freedom, said the reporters had been kidnapped at an Islamic State checkpoint and were killed recently.

    “We are deeply shocked by this brutal slaughter,” said IFJ president Jim Boumelha. “ISIS (Islamic State) aims to horrify but we can only feel great sorrow and further resolve to see the killers held responsible for their crimes.”

    Militants loyal to Islamic State have exploited a security vacuum in Libya, where two governments and parliaments allied to host of armed groups are fighting each other on several fronts four years after the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi.

  • IS ‘abducts 90 Syrian Christians’

    IS ‘abducts 90 Syrian Christians’

    Islamic State (IS) has abducted dozens of Assyrian Christians from villages in north-eastern Syria, activists say.

    The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 90 men, women and children were seized in a series of dawn raids near the town of Tal Tamr.

    Some Assyrians managed to escape and made their way east to the largely Kurdish-controlled city of Hassakeh.

    It comes as Syrian Kurdish fighters backed by US-led air strikes continue to advance into IS-held territory.

    Hassakeh province is strategically important in the fight against IS because it borders both Turkey and areas controlled by the group in Iraq.

    Activists reported that IS fighters swept through a string of villages along the south bank of the Khabur river before dawn on Monday.

    Residents of villages on the north bank fled, with about 3,000 believed to have headed for Hassakeh and Qamishli, another city to the north-east.

    The militants have reportedly taken the male captives to nearby Abdul Aziz mountain, while the women are being held in the village of Tal Shamran, where activists say most of those captured came from.

    The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group that monitors the four-year conflict in Syria, said at least 90 Assyrians had been taken captive.

    Meanwhile Nuri Kino, the head of the group A Demand For Action, which focuses on religious minorities in the Middle East, said between 70 and 100 had been abducted.

    Islamic State’s online radio station, al-Bayan, reported yesterday that its members had seized “tens of Crusaders”.

    Osama Edward of the Sweden-based Assyrian Human Rights Network, who has relatives in the area, told the BBC that his wife’s elderly aunt and her cousin were among the hostages.

    “My wife tried to call her cousin’s house and there was somebody who picked up the phone and said: ‘This is not Akram’s house. This is the Islamic State’s house’.”