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Islamic State launches counterattacks on U.S.-backed forces and Syrian army

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

AMMAN (Reuters) – The Islamic State group launched a counter attack against fighters trying to capture the Syrian city of Manbij on Monday, inflicting heavy casualties on the U.S.-backed forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the militants said.

The monitor said the ultra-hard line militants won back three villages south of the besieged city in a surprise assault against fighters from the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces, in which at least 28 SDF fighters were killed.

Two years after IS proclaimed its caliphate to rule over all Muslims from swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, its many foes are advancing on a number of fronts in both countries, with the aim of closing in on its two capitals, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

The SDF were poised to enter Manbij nearly three weeks after the launch of a major assault to regain the city backed by U.S. air power and American special forces, to seal off the last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish frontier

The alliance, formed last year by recruiting Arabs to join forces with a powerful Kurdish militia, fought their way to nearly 2 km from the city center from the western side on Saturday before retreating. [L8N19A08E]

U.S-led coalition jets hit militants taking cover near the large wheat silo complex on the southern edge of the city that has been encircled by SDF forces.

An SDF spokesman said they succeeded in repulsing the militant attack and remained positioned on the outskirts of the city, most of whose residents remain trapped inside and where the militants have planted mines and dug in to defend it.

“The situation is under control. They have many bodies on the ground,” Sharfan Darwish, spokesman for the Syria Democratic Forces-allied Manbij Military Council, told Reuters.

“We are at the four gates to the city. The whole city is booby-trapped. After 20 days of the campaign, we have yet to storm the city,” he added, adding that some 2,000 people had succeeded in fleeing the city.

Separately further south, Islamic State militants were also able to roll back the Syrian army which had got as close as 10 km south of the strategic town of Tabqa, an Islamic State-held city on the Euphrates River, in Raqqa province.

The town, some 50 km (30 miles) west of Raqqa city, the militant’s defacto capital, appears to be the first target of a major Syrian army assault in Raqqa province backed by Russian air power that began earlier this month. [L8N18W058].

Tabqa dam and a major air base have been in militant hands since 2014.

Amaq news agency, which is affiliated to the militants, said suicide bombers had attacked Thawra oil field, south of Tabqa, which the Syrian army had captured earlier this week and regained it.

Eyad al Hosain, a Syrian journalist embedded with Syrian troops, confirmed to Reuters the militants had succeeded in gaining back areas they lost near the oil field. He did not give figures on army casualties.

“A very intense attack has targeted army and allied positions in Thwara field that led to the withdrawal of troops from areas they liberated… and their retreat,” al Hosain said.

Amaq also said militants seized a Syrian army checkpoint near a strategic junction which leads to Raqqa city that the Syrian government forces and their allies had taken control in the early phase of its Raqqa campaign. [L8N1923VR]

The monitor, which tracks violence across the country, said the militants had sent reinforcements and cited at least three hundred fighters heading to Tabqa from Raqqa.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi, Tom Perry in Beirut and Kinda Makieh in Damascus; Editing by Toby Chopra)

Mexico teacher protests buffet ruling party, eight killed in clashes

By Lizbeth Diaz and Natalie Schachar

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – At least eight people were killed in clashes in southern Mexico over the weekend when police and members of a teachers’ union faced off in violent confrontations, a senior state official said, piling fresh pressure on the country’s embattled ruling party.

Violence erupted on Sunday when police dislodged protesters blocking a highway in the southern state of Oaxaca, a hotbed of dissent from radical teachers’ groups opposed to education reforms pushed through by the government three years ago.

Speaking on local radio early on Monday, Jorge Ruiz, Oaxaca’s state secretary for public safety, said eight people died in two separate confrontations, raising the death toll in the clashes from a previous tally of six.

He said six people died near the town of Nochixtlan, about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of the city of Oaxaca, while two others were killed in related protests in Juchitan, in the southeast of Oaxaca state.

The violence is the latest in a series of setbacks to President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government, which has faced widespread criticism for its failures to crack down on graft and impunity, contain drug gang violence or jumpstart the economy.

It also deals a fresh blow to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), still smarting from a drubbing in regional elections earlier this month which put it on the back foot in the run-up to the next presidential election in 2018.

The violence has tarnished the reputations of two of the party’s leading contenders for the 2018 ticket: Education Minister Aurelio Nuno and Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, whose brief includes domestic security.

Rocio Nahle, the leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party’s parliamentary coordinator, said Nuno should resign over the violence, but blamed Osorio Chong as well.

“Pena Nieto will go down in history as one of the worst presidents in terms of violating human rights,” she told Reuters.

‘INSUFFICIENT’ ACCOUNTABILITY

The violence came as Christof Heyns, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said on Monday that police accountability in Mexico was insufficient.

“Extrajudicial executions and excessive use of force by security agents persist,” Heyns said in a U.N. report.

The unrest has escalated since police arrested the leader of the local teachers’ union earlier this month. Ruben Nunez, head of one of the most combative factions of Mexico’s CNTE union, Oaxaca’s Section 22, was detained on suspicion of money laundering.

The CNTE has led efforts to resist federal education reforms, particularly its mandate to carry out teacher evaluations. Miguel Zurita, a CNTE representative in Oaxaca, said that when police arrived to dislodge Sunday’s protest near Nochixtlan, they were unwilling to enter into a dialogue.

“What we lived through yesterday was something brutal, something that has no name,” he said. “They arrived armed and they arrived shooting.”

The Mexican government, however, defended its handling of the protests.

In a statement, the National Security Commission denied federal forces had used firearms against protesters, saying images circulating online of police with rifles were faked.

Enrique Galindo, the head of Mexico’s federal police, said masked individuals who were not affiliated to the teachers’ union were behind much of the violence, lobbing Molotov cocktails and shooting at police and civilians.

(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay; editing by Simon Gardner and G Crosse)

U.S. to reveal details of Orlando nightclub gunman’s 911 calls

(Reuters) – U.S. authorities were due on Monday to release partial transcripts of 911 calls made during last week’s mass shooting by a gunman who slaughtered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, before being killed by police.

Omar Mateen, 29, is said to have paused during a three-hour siege to telephone emergency dispatchers three times and to post internet messages from inside the Pulse nightclub professing his support for Islamist militant groups.

The FBI was due to hold a news conference near the club at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to provide an update on the investigation and to release the partial transcripts of the 911 calls.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said they would include the “substance of his conversations” recorded as Mateen carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but not any pledge of loyalty he is alleged to have made to the Islamic State militant group.

Authorities have said preliminary evidence indicates Mateen, who worked as a security guard, was a mentally disturbed individual who acted alone and without direction from outside networks.

Lynch, who is due to visit Orlando on Tuesday, told CNN on Sunday that investigators have been focused on building a full profile of Mateen, a New York-born U.S. citizen and Florida resident of Afghan descent, who has been described by U.S. officials as “self-radicalized” in his extremist sympathies.

The Pulse massacre, which also left 53 people wounded, led to a week of national mourning and soul-searching over access to firearms and the vulnerability to hate crimes of people in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

While in Orlando, Lynch will meet with investigators, as well as survivors and loved ones of the victims.

The massacre has triggered an effort to break a long-standing stalemate in Congress over gun control.

The Senate was set to vote on Monday on four competing measures – two from Democrats and two from Republicans – to expand background checks on gun buyers and curb gun sales for people on terrorism watch lists.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 presidential election, has said he shares the goal of keeping guns out of the hands of people on watch lists.

Trump said on Monday he was referring to security staff, not patrons, when he said that if more people had been armed in the nightclub, fewer would have died.

(Reporting by David Lawder in Washington and Roselle Chen in Orlando; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott)

Separate bomb attacks kill at least 22 in Afghanistan

Officials cleaning the site of the bombing June 20 2016

By Mirwais Harooni

KABUL (Reuters) – More than 20 people were killed in separate bomb attacks in Afghanistan on Monday, including at least 14 when a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying Nepali security contractors in the capital Kabul, officials said.

A Reuters witness saw several apparently dead victims and at least two wounded being carried out of the remains of a yellow bus after the suicide bomber struck the vehicle in the capital.

Hours later, a bomb planted in a motorbike killed at least eight civilians and wounded another 18 in a crowded market in the northern province of Badakhshan, said provincial government spokesman Naveed Frotan. The casualty count could rise, he said.

The attacks are the latest in a surge of violence that highlights the challenges faced by the government in Kabul and its Western backers as Washington considers whether to delay plans to cut the number of its troops in Afghanistan.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said on Twitter that 14 people had been killed and eight wounded in the attack in Kabul. Police were working to identify the victims, he said.

The casualties appeared to include Afghan civilians and Nepali security contractors, Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi said, after police and emergency vehicles surrounded the scene in the Banae district in the east of the city.

He said the suicide bomber had waited near a compound housing the security contractors and struck as the vehicle moved through early morning traffic. Besides the bus passengers, several people in an adjacent market were also wounded in the attack during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the Kabul attack in a statement from the Islamist group’s main spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, on Twitter. However it denied responsibility for the attack in Badakhshan.

Islamic State, which is bitterly opposed by the Taliban, said it carried out the Kabul attack but Zabihullah Mujahid dismissed the claim as “rubbish”.

“By organizing this attack, we wanted to show Americans and NATO military officials that we can conduct attacks wherever, and whenever, we want,” the Taliban spokesman said.

The Nepal government was still working through its embassy in Pakistan, which also oversees Afghanistan, to verify reports that its citizens were involved in the attack, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bharat Paudel said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his condolences to his two South Asian neighbors after the attack.

“We strongly condemn the horrible tragedy in Kabul. Our deep condolences to people and governments of Afghanistan and Nepal on loss of innocent lives,” Modi said on Twitter.

Another explosion in Kabul later on Monday morning wounded a provincial council member and at least three of his bodyguards, Kabul police spokesman Basir Mujahid said. It was thought a bomb had been attached to the lawmaker’s car, he said.

The attacks underlined how serious the security threat facing Afghanistan remains since former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month and was replaced by Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

The blasts follow a deadly suicide attack on a bus carrying justice ministry staff near Kabul last month and a separate attack on a court in the central city of Ghazni on June 1.

The Taliban claimed both those attacks in revenge for the execution of six Taliban prisoners.

(Reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi; Additional reporting by Gopal Sharma in KATHMANDU and Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Paul Tait and Clarence Fernandez)

South China floods kill 22, with more rain forecast

BEIJING (Reuters) – Severe floods in southern China have killed at least 22 people and left 20 missing since Saturday, the government said, with the rains expected to continue for the next three days.

About 200,000 people from eight southern provinces and regions, including Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Yunnan, Zhejiang and Anhui, had been forced to evacuate, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said on its website.

Storms had pushed water levels in rivers to dangerous levels, leading to crop damage and the collapse of 10,500 houses, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Estimated economic losses were 7.34 billion yuan ($1.1 billion), it said.

Three days of heavy rain last week had already killed 14 people, Xinhua said on Friday.

China has frequently been devastated by natural disasters, particularly by floods and earthquakes. Flooding, an annual problem, has been exacerbated by urban sprawl and poor drainage infrastructure in many cities.

Chinese officials had warned of the potential for record floods this year due to a strong El Nino weather pattern, which warms sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific and has been linked to serious crop damage, forest fires and flash flood and drought around the world.

(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Boko Haram shoot dead 18 women at funeral in northern Nigeria

YOLA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants have shot dead 18 women at a funeral in Nigeria’s northeast, rampaging through a village, setting houses on fire and shooting at random, witnesses and local government officials said on Friday.

The attack took place at about 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) on Thursday in the village of Kuda in Adamawa State. Resident Moses Kwagh told Reuters that people waited until three hours after the attack and had then counted 18 women’s bodies.

Some women were still missing, he said.

A police source confirmed the attack but said it was not yet clear how many people had been killed. The military did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmaker Emmanuel Tsamdu told Reuters: “I am yet to get the details on how it happened and the real number of people killed. I have sent hunters to go to the area and get me the details because people are afraid to go to the village.”

Kuda is close to the Sambisa Forest, a vast colonial-era game reserve where Boko Haram militants hide in secluded camps to avoid the Nigerian military. The village was attacked by Boko Haram militants in February.

Under President Muhammadu Buhari’s command and aided by Nigeria’s neighbors, the army has recaptured most of the territory seized by Boko Haram, but the group still regularly stages guerrilla attacks.

“When we said that Boko Haram is still in this place some people sit in Abuja and claim that there is no more Boko Haram, but see what has happen,” Kwagh said.

(Reporting by Emma Ande; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Islamic State committing genocide against Yazidis: U.N.

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday.

Their report, based on interviews with dozens of survivors, said that the Islamist militants had been systematically rounding up Yazidis in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, seeking to “erase their identity” in a campaign that met the definition of the crime as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

“The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing,” it said.

The 40-page report, entitled “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis”, sets out a legal analysis of Islamic State intent and conduct aimed at wiping out the Kurdish-speaking group, whom the Sunni Muslim Arab militants view as infidels and “devil-worshippers”.

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions.

“The finding of genocide must trigger much more assertive action at the political level, including at the (U.N.) Security Council,” Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the commission of inquiry, told a news briefing.

Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn said it had “detailed information on places, violations and names of the perpetrators”, and had begun sharing information with some national authorities seeking to prosecute foreign fighters.

The four independent commissioners urged major powers to rescue at least 3,200 women and children still held by Islamic State (IS or ISIS) and to refer the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

“ROAD MAP FOR PROSECUTION”

“ISIS made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide,” said another investigator, Carla del Ponte.

“Of course, we regard that as a road map for prosecution, for future prosecution. I hope that the Security Council will do it because it is time now to start to obtain justice for the victims,” added del Ponte, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor.

Islamic State, which has proclaimed a theocratic caliphate – based on a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam – in areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, systematically killed, captured or enslaved thousands of Yazidis when it overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014.

At least 30 mass graves have been uncovered, the report said, calling for further investigations.

Islamic State has tried to erase the Yazidis’ identity by forcing men to choose between conversion to Islam and death, raping girls as young as nine, selling women at slave markets, and drafting boys to fight, the U.N. report said.

Yazidi women are treated as “chattel” at slave markets in Raqqa, Homs and other locations, and some are sold back to their families for $10,000 to $40,000 after captivity and multiple rapes, according to the report.

Militants have begun holding “online slave auctions”, using the encrypted application Telegraph to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls, “with details of their age, marital status, current location and price”,” it said.

“No other religious group present in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq has been subjected to the destruction that the Yazidis have suffered,” the report added.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Boy’s body found after gator attack at Florida Disney resort

By Barbara Liston

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) – Police using boats, divers and a helicopter on Wednesday recovered the body of a 2-year-old boy who was grabbed by an alligator in front of his family during a vacation at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, officials said.

The child was snatched by the alligator as he played at the water’s edge on Tuesday night and dragged into a lagoon despite his parents’ effort to save him.

Officials told a news conference the boy’s body had been found and was intact.

The alligator was believed to be between 4 and 7 feet (1.2 and 2 meters) long. Wildlife officials earlier caught and killed five alligators from the lagoon to examine them for traces of the boy but found no evidence they were involved, said Nick Wiley, head of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The resort closed its beaches and recreational marinas on Wednesday as search teams had scoured the Seven Seas Lagoon, a man-made lake reaching 14 feet (4.2 meters) in depth.

The family, which was vacationing from Nebraska, was not named.

The dozens of sheriff’s deputies and wildlife officials searching for the boy on Wednesday, numbering as many as 60, had used sonar technology, helicopters and a team of divers.

There are signs prohibiting swimming at the lagoon but the boy was grabbed while his family relaxed nearby on the shore, authorities said.

The boy’s father rushed into the water and suffered minor cuts on his arm as he fought to wrestle his child from the alligator’s grasp, said Jeff Williamson, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

“The father did his best,” he said. “He tried to rescue the child, however, to no avail.”

Authorities said the boy’s mother tried to rescue him too. A lifeguard on duty also was unable to reach the toddler in time.

Alligators are not uncommon in the Seven Seas Lagoon, Wiley said. Alligators have killed five people in Florida in the last 10 years, according to official state data.

Wiley said the wildlife commission works with the resort to remove “nuisance alligators” – classed as those which have lost their fear of humans – whenever they are reported.

Disney has operated in the area for 45 years and never had this type of incident occur before, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings told a news conference.

“Disney has a wildlife management system that is in place and they have worked diligently to ensure that their guests are not unduly exposed to the wildlife here in this area,” he said.

The Walt Disney World Resort is the world’s most-visited theme park. About 20.5 million people visited the park’s Magic Kingdom in 2015, according to the Themed Entertainment Association.

(Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee, Laila Kearney, Amy Tennery and Jeffrey Dastin in New York, and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by W Simon, Bill Trott and Bill Rigby)

IOM urges effort to identify migrants who have died

Migrants are seen on a capsizing boat before a rescue operation by Italian navy ships

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – At least 60,000 migrants have died making their way to new countries over the last 20 years, and their families rarely learned of their fate, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday.

In a report entitled “Fatal Journeys”, the agency called on authorities to ensure the missing are identified and their families traced.

The estimated toll includes a record 5,400 migrants believed to have died in 2015 trying to cross borders, and a further 3,400 who have perished already this year, the IOM said.

Of last year’s deaths, 3,770 occurred in the Mediterranean where boats capsized en route to Europe. Others died in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea and along the U.S.-Mexico border, it said.

“Something in the region of 60,000 migrants across the world have died over the last 20 years,” Frank Laczko, director of IOM’s global migration data analysis centre, told a Geneva news briefing by telephone from Berlin.

The death rate is particularly high in southeastern Asia, where migrants are trying to reach Thailand and Malaysia.

“The volume of people making those crossings is perhaps lower but the death rate is similar to the Mediterranean death rate,” he said, noting it was one in 23 along the central Mediterranean route this year.

However, a separate IOM report said the Central Mediterranean route is probably much more deadly than thought, because “reports of large numbers of bodies being washed up on the shores of North Africa indicate that shipwrecks occur without leaving any traces.”

Families are left wondering if their relatives are alive or dead, the IOM said. Without legal proof of death, it may be difficult for spouses to remarry or for families to inherit property.

Fewer than half of the 387 migrants who died when their boats capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013 have been officially identified, it said. In the United States, a cemetery in Arizona contains the remains of at least 800 unidentified individuals believed to be migrants.

“Missing migrants tend to be a low priority for many authorities around the world, because they are often an irregular situation, they may be undocumented and difficult to identify,” Laczko said.

Little is known either about the deaths of migrants travelling north overland from sub-Saharan Africa.

At present there is no established common practice for collecting information on migrant deaths between states, or even sometimes between different jurisdictions in the same country, the report said.

“Above all, international and regional databases are needed, in which data that is collected nationally can be stored securely and accessed transnationally,” it said.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by John Stonestreet and Hugh Lawson)

Venezuela lootings, food protests leave three dead

People line up expecting to buy food outside a supermarket in Caracas

CARACAS (Reuters) – The recent wave of lootings and food riots in crisis-hit Venezuela has left three people dead in the last week, authorities and a rights group said.

The state prosecutor’s office is investigating the deaths of a 21-year-old man in eastern Sucre state on Saturday, another 21-year-old man in the Caracas slum of Petare on Thursday, and a 42-year-old woman in the western state of Tachira last Monday.

All three suffered gunshot wounds during chaotic scenes outside supermarkets, which have become a flashpoint for violence and looting amid scarcities of basics across the South American OPEC member country, according to local rights group Provea.

A policeman has been arrested over the Tachira death.

With basics such as flour and rice running short, crowds chanting “We want food!” are thronging supermarkets daily, presenting a major problem for the struggling leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro.

More than 10 incidents of looting are occurring daily, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local monitoring group.

Venezuela’s political opposition is pursuing a recall referendum in an effort to remove the socialist Maduro from office.

Maduro, 53, won election to succeed Hugo Chavez in 2013. The government accuses its opponents of deliberately stirring up trouble and seeking a coup.

(Reporting by Sarah Dagher and Girish Gupta; editing by Andrew Cawthorne, G Crosse)

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