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Post by Admin on Jul 20, 2015 20:47:25 GMT
The death toll of a suspected suicide bombing near the Turkish border with Syria has risen to at least 30, officials have confirmed. The victims, mostly young students, had gathered in the mostly-Kurdish town of Suruc to make a statement to the local media regarding a trip they were planning to help rebuild the ravaged city of Kobani, Syria. Two Turkish officials have told Reuters the evidence they have suggests the attack was a suicide bombing carried out by Islamic State. The White House has condemned what it called a "heinous terror attack" in Turkey which left 30 people dead. The victims, mostly young students, had gathered in the mostly-Kurdish town of Suruc to announce plans to help rebuild the city of Kobani, Syria. We express our solidarity with the Turkish government and the Turkish people and reaffirm our undeterred resolve to the fight against the shared threat of terrorism. – JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN The death toll of a suspected suicide bombing near the Turkish border with Syria has risen to 30, officials have confirmed. The victims, mainly young students, had gathered in the town of Suruc to make a statement to the local media regarding a trip they were planning to help rebuild the ravaged city of Kobani, Syria. The ruins of the city, populated heavily by Syrian Kurds and lying just south of the border with Turkey, have become a symbol of Kurdish resistance after becoming the extremist group's biggest defeat last year since seizing control over large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
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Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2015 20:30:23 GMT
For months, Ankara had been reluctant to join the U.S.-led coalition against IS despite gains made by the extremist group on Turkey's doorstep. Now, Turkish warplanes are directly targeting IS locations — the latest bombing run coming early Saturday for a second straight day. Turkey then opened a second front on Kurdish rebel sites. The strikes against the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, muddle the U.S.-led fight against IS. The United States has relied on Syrian Kurdish fighters affiliated with the PKK while making gains against IS. U.S. officials declined to comment publicly on the Turkish strikes in northern Iraq. The Turkish jets hit shelters and storage facilities belonging to the PKK in seven areas in northern Iraq, including Mount Quandil where the group's headquarters are located, authorities said. It was Turkey's first aerial raid in northern Iraq against the PKK since Turkey embarked on peace talks with the Kurds in 2012. The PKK declared a cease-fire in 2013. Turkey's shift in policy toward the fight against IS also comes amid closer cooperation between Iran and the U.S. following a recent nuclear agreement. An analyst said the agreement threatened to lessen Turkey's strategic importance, prompting it to cooperate with the U.S.-led coalition against the extremists.
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Post by Admin on Jul 27, 2015 20:25:47 GMT
The US and Turkey are working together on military plans to clear the Islamic State (IS) group from parts of northern Syria, American officials say. They said an "Islamic State-free zone" would ensure greater stability along the Syria-Turkish border. The talks follow a major shift in Turkey's approach to IS in recent days. Turkey, which had been reluctant to intervene in Syria, has launched raids against IS and allowed US jets to use a Turkish base. The Turkish operations have led to tensions with Kurdish militia forces fighting IS in northern Syria. On Monday Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) said Turkish tanks had shelled their fighters near the key town of Kobane. Turkey said it was investigating the YPG's claim. On Monday the YPG said its forces had been attacked by Turkey in the Kurdish-held village of Zormikhar, west of Kobane, on Sunday evening. It added that one of its vehicles had also come "under heavy fire from the Turkish military east of Kobane". If the claims are true, this will complicate matters for the coalition against IS as Western powers are co-operating with Syrian Kurds against the jihadists, says the BBC's Mark Lowen in Istanbul. A Turkish official said its recent military operations sought "to neutralise imminent threats to Turkey's regional security" and were targeting IS in Syria and the PKK in Iraq. "We are investigating claims that the Turkish military engaged positions held by forces other than [IS]," the official said.
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Post by Admin on Jul 31, 2015 20:19:47 GMT
If he is dead, Mullah Omar joins the growing ranks of his jihadist comrades who have been killed, not least among them bin Laden himself. Also on Wednesday, Pakistani authorities have reported the death, in a shootout, of Malik Ishaq, a notorious Pakistani jihadist and the leader of Lashkar-e-Jangvi, a murderously sectarian group. Earlier this month, it was the turn, in a U.S. drone stroke in Libya, of a Tunisian terrorist called Abu Iyadh, who also spent years in Afghanistan at bin Laden’s side, thanks to Mullah Omar’s peculiar notion of hospitality. But Mullah Omar’s death is being confirmed at the same moment that ISIS—which, in its viciousness and its ability to spread, is something like the perfect storm of jihadism—has begun to make attempted inroads onto the Taliban’s turf in Afghanistan, and has established a presence in a strategic province bordering Pakistan. Despite Taliban warnings to ISIS not to interfere in Afghanistan, the group is believed to be recruiting and planning for an expansion there. A few weeks ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a veteran Islamist and a Taliban rival, proclaimed his group’s allegiance to ISIS, and urged his fighters to attack the Taliban. (Coincidentally or not, the Afghan government and the Taliban recently held a round of face-to-face peace talks.) The secretive Mullah Omar was a veteran of the Afgan mujahideen’s anti-Sovet jihad of the nineteen-eighties. He was missing an eye from a battle wound, and had become a self-taught religious scholar. He became a more widely known figure only in the early nineteen-nineties, when the mujahideen were fighting among themselves for power, and he was named as the leader of the obscure Taliban. The Taliban were an army of religious students who stormed out of Pakistan and into southern Afghanistan in 1994, vowing to do battle against “immoral and corrupt” mujahideen commanders. They quickly conquered the southern city of Kandahar, and two years later seized the country’s capital, Kabul. By then, Mullah Omar—who was rarely photographed—had appeared outside Kandahar’s venerable Ahmed Shah mosque wearing a sacred cloak that was said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad. He was proclaimed Keeper of the Faithful by his gaggle of devout armed followers, most of whom, like himself, were ethnic Pashtuns and Sunni Muslims. They were also characterized by their lack of formal schooling, their xenophobia, and their fervent insistence on a strict interpretation of Sharia law. When his followers went to Kabul, Mullah Omar stayed behind in Kandahar, taking up residence in a rambling walled compound outside the city center, where he held forth in oracular fashion and otherwise spent his time with his several wives, children, and a favorite cow that he would reportedly spend hours with, petting it fondly. In one of their very first acts in Kabul, Taliban fighters stormed the United Nations compound in Kabul and seized the former Afghan President, Mohammad Najibullah, who had taken refuge there since his overthrow, in 1992. The Taliban beat him, castrated him, dragged him behind a jeep, shot him, and then hanged him. This act set the tone for the Taliban’s subsequent rule: they massacred members of the Hazara minority for being Shiites, banned women from working in hospitals or any public offices, and kept girls out of schools; they banned public music, the sale of CDs, and kite flying. Kabul’s sports stadium became an execution ground. In March, 2001, Mullah Omar’s men blew up the two giant stone Buddhas of Bamiyan, archaeological treasures that were fifteen hundred years old. Mullah Omar had allowed the wealthy Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden to return to Afghanistan in 1996—he had earlier been a presence during the Soviets’ Afghan war—and establish training camps and bases for jihadists from around the world. The two established a terrorist alliance that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. Mullah Omar’s house in Kandahar was targeted and mostly destroyed by American bombing raids in the autumn of 2011, but he had escaped and gone into hiding. On a visit there a few weeks after the Taliban fled Kandahar, I visited his home and noticed that, while much of it had been pulverized, there was a core of the flat-roofed house that was untouched. The intact rooms had twelve-foot-thick concrete walls. Just outside the home stood a smaller house, which had a similar roof. It, too, was intact. Local residents told me that they believed it had been built especially for visits to Mullah Omar by “the Sheikh,” as bin Laden was known.
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Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2015 20:25:00 GMT
Three relatives of the late al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden were among four people killed when a private jet crashed on landing in southern England, British police confirmed Saturday. The Hampshire Police force said formal post-mortems were still being conducted, but the victims were believed to be "the mother, sister and brother-in-law of the owner of the aircraft, all of whom are from the bin Laden family." It said all three were Saudi nationals who were visiting Britain on vacation. The plane's Jordanian pilot also died. Arab media and NBC News named the relatives as Osama Bin Laden's stepmother Rajaa Hashim, his sister Sana bin Laden and her husband Zuhair Hashim. Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain, Prince Mohammed Bin Nawaf Bin Abdel-Aziz, offered his condolences to the wealthy bin Laden family, which owns a major construction company in Saudi Arabia. "The embassy will follow up on the incident and its circumstances with the concerned British authorities and work on speeding up the handover of the bodies of the victims to the kingdom for prayer and burial," the ambassador said in a statement tweeted by the embassy. Police said the Embraer Phenom 300 executive jet crashed into a parking lot and burst into flames while trying to land at Blackbushe Airport in southern England Friday afternoon.
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