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U.S. tells allies campaign to defeat Islamic State must be accelerated

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States pressed allies on Thursday to contribute more to a U.S.-led military campaign against Islamic State that it says must be accelerated, regardless of the fate of diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s civil war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter started talks on Thursday in Brussels with more than two dozen defense ministers, including from key ally Saudi Arabia, which renewed its offer potentially to send troops into Syria.

Carter’s push came a day after France delivered a rebuke to President Barack Obama, demanding that Washington show a clearer commitment to resolving the crisis in Syria where Russia is tipping the military balance in favor of President al-Bashar Assad.

The talks take place as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry leads a diplomatic push in Munich to rescue imperiled peace efforts, which are being held despite Russian bombing raids to bolster Syrian forces around the city of Aleppo.

Carter sought to draw a line between military and diplomatic efforts. “Our focus here is going to be on counter-ISIL and that campaign will go on because ISIL must be defeated, will be defeated, whatever happens with the Syrian civil war,” Carter told reporters, using an acronym for Islamic State.

“But it certainly would help to de-fuel extremism if the Syrian civil war came to an end.”

The United States hopes the face-to-face gathering of coalition defense ministers will allow it to secure more support for a military campaign that aims to recapture the Islamic State strongholds of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

WARPLANES, TRAINING, SURVEILLANCE

Carter plans to offer a long list of required military capabilities — which, beyond air power, include training Iraqi forces and help with intelligence and surveillance. Carter said countries that cannot contribute militarily can help in other ways, like by choking Islamic State financing.

“We’ll all look back after victory and remember who participated in the fight,” Carter said, addressing the coalition defense ministers, adding the campaign would move more swiftly “if all of the nations in this room do even more”.

He also predicted “tangible gains” on the ground in the coming weeks, vague terminology that could mean anything from territorial advances to strikes against militant leaders or infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia’s Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri, a military spokesman, said his country was ready to send troops into Syria if there was a consensus in the coalition. But he declined to elaborate, saying: “It is too early to talk about such options.”

“Today we are talking at the strategic level,” Asseri told reporters in Brussels.

Carter and U.S. defense officials also sought to manage expectations about the talks, since many ministers will not be able to make new commitments without first winning support from their parliaments. The timeline for the campaign to retake Raqqa and Mosul is also unclear.

The head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cautioned this week that Iraqi forces were unlikely to recapture Mosul this year, despite hopes by Baghdad.

Carter only said securing Raqqa and Mosul needed to happen “as soon as possible”. He also acknowledged the need to grapple with Islamic State’s spread beyond Syria and Iraq, particularly in Libya.

WASHINGTON FACES SCEPTICISM

Even if there is consensus on the military plan to fight Islamic State on Thursday, it is unlikely to diminish scepticism about broader U.S. policy in Syria, which has sought to limit America’s role in the civil war.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Wednesday questioned the commitment of the United States to resolving the Syrian war. Rebel groups say that while Washington has put pressure on them to attend peace talks, they see less help on the battlefield.

NATO ally Turkey has meanwhile, upbraided the United States for supporting Syrian Kurdish PYD rebels, saying Washington’s inability to understand the group’s true nature had turned the region into a “sea of blood”.

Eager to sidestep such friction, NATO allies have focused on grappling with the humanitarian fallout from Syria’s conflict at talks over the past two days.

NATO announced on Thursday it will seek to help slow refugee flows through the Aegean Sea with a maritime mission to target criminal people smuggling networks.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Robin Emmott, additional reporting by Sabine Seibold, editing by Peter Millership)

FBI director says investigators unable to unlock San Bernardino shooter’s phone content

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that federal investigators have still been unable to access the contents of a cellphone belonging to one of the killers in the Dec. 2 shootings in San Bernardino, California, due to encryption technology.

Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the phenomenon of communications “going dark” due to more sophisticated technology and wider use of encryption is “overwhelmingly affecting” law enforcement operations, including investigations into murder, car accidents, drug trafficking and the proliferation of child pornography.

“We still have one of those killer’s phones that we have not been able to open,” Comey said in reference to the San Bernardino attack.

Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, launched the Islamic State-inspired attack with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, at a social services agency in the California city, leaving 14 dead.

Comey and other federal officials have long warned that powerful encryption poses a challenge for criminal and national security investigators, though the FBI director added Tuesday that “overwhelmingly this is a problem that local law enforcement sees.”

Technology experts and privacy advocates counter that so-called “back door” access provided to authorities would expose data to malicious actors and undermine the overall security of the Internet.

A study from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard released last month citing some current and former intelligence officials concluded that fears about encryption are overstated in part because new technologies have given investigators unprecedented means to track suspects.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to provide a declassified response to the Berkman study within 60 days. Clapper agreed to the request.

The White House last year abandoned a push for legislation that would mandate U.S. technology firms to allow investigators a way to overcome encryption protections, amid rigorous private sector opposition. But the issue has found renewed life after the shootings in San Bernardino and Paris.

Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the intelligence panel, have said they would like to pursue encryption legislation, though neither has introduced a bill yet.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz and Mark Hosenball; editing by Sandra Maler and G Crosse)

U.S. looks to shore up allies’ support to battle Islamic State

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States said on Tuesday it hoped allies demonstrate a willingness to ramp up their contributions to the fight against Islamic State and to deterring Russia in eastern Europe during high-level defense talks in Brussels this week.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he plans to outline America’s plan to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State to defense chiefs from more than two dozen allies at talks on Thursday.

The United States has long-standing concerns that many allies are not contributing nearly enough to combat the jihadist group that has spread beyond its self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria.

“I don’t think anybody’s satisfied with the pace of the (campaign), that’s why we’re all looking to accelerate it. Certainly the president isn’t (satisfied),” Carter told reporters traveling with him.

Washington has signaled the need for military and police trainers as well as contributions of special operations forces, including from Sunni Muslim Arab allies now expressing a new willingness to contribute.

“We have a very clear operational picture of how to do it. Now we just need the resources and the forces to fall in behind it,” he said, noting plans to capture Islamic State strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

A top U.S. intelligence official told Congress on Tuesday that an Iraqi-led operation to retake Mosul is unlikely to take place this year.

The U.S. strategy in Syria is likely to come under intense scrutiny after four months of Russian air strikes have tipped momentum toward President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s five-year-old civil war.

Defense chiefs were expected to discuss a major Syrian government offensive backed by Russia and Iran now underway near Aleppo that rebels say threatens the future of their insurrection.

DETERRING RUSSIA

On Wednesday, NATO defense ministers will begin outlining plans for a complex web of small eastern outposts, forces on rotation, regular war games and warehoused equipment ready for a rapid response force.

U.S. plans for a four-fold increase in military spending in Europe to $3.4 billion in fiscal year 2017 are central to the strategy, which has been shaped in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

“I’ll be looking for others in NATO to echo (us) in our investment,” Carter said.

Carter said the plan aimed to move NATO to a “full deterrence posture” to thwart any kind of aggression.

“It’s not going to look like it did back in Cold War days but it will constitute, in today’s terms, a strong deterrent,” Carter said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Iraq’s troubled finances slow efforts to rebuild Ramadi

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Strain on Iraq’s budget from falling oil prices is delaying the removal of Islamic State explosives in Ramadi and the restoration of basic services needed for displaced civilians to return to the western city.

The army declared victory in December over Islamic State (IS) after elite counter-terrorism forces seized the Anbar provincial capital’s main government building. On Tuesday those forces reclaimed strategic territory linking the city to a major army base nearby.

The recapture of Ramadi was the first major gain for the U.S.-trained army since it collapsed in the face of an assault by the ultra-hardline Sunni militants in 2014. Its recovery boosted Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in his quest to oust IS from Mosul, northern Iraq’s biggest city, later this year.

But Ramadi’s hundreds of thousands of residents will not be able to go home until bombs are removed and infrastructure damaged by six months of fighting is rehabilitated – operations that require tens of millions of dollars Baghdad cannot spare.

“We know that the government has its back against the wall fiscally. In order to stabilize areas and to help displaced families go back, we’ve got to do more,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. She appealed to international donors for at least $40 million more for initial reconstruction efforts.

Iraq, with income nearly exclusively from oil, is struggling to pay its bills amid the fall in global crude prices. Anbar Governor Sohaib al-Rawi said his provincial government had not received its share of the federal budget in about two months.

“The local government has accumulated debts from last year which will be paid from this budget,” al-Rawi told reporters in Baghdad, declining to define the size of the debt.

Besides U.N.-funded activities, he said efforts to prepare Ramadi for the return of civilians were being financed “through local efforts” of provincial authorities, without providing details.

Unless additional funds are provided, it could take nine months for those efforts just to clear Tamim, a large district in southern Ramadi where the first phase of U.N. efforts will be conducted, according to Grande.

The United Nations also plans to rehabilitate health, water and energy infrastructure in the city, much of which was destroyed in fighting that included Islamic State bomb attacks and devastating U.S.-led coalition air strikes.

“The level of destruction in Ramadi is as bad as anything we have seen anywhere in Iraq,” said Grande. “Thousands of homes have to be rebuilt, thousands of buildings have to be rebuilt. The total cost of reconstruction in Ramadi is huge.”

STRATEGIC ADVANCE

Tuesday’s advance by Iraqi forces in Ramadi’s eastern farmlands boosted government efforts to close in on Falluja, the Islamic State stronghold located halfway to Baghdad and now besieged by the Iraqi army and allied, Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militias.

The ultra-hardline Sunni militants of IS swept through a third of Iraq in 2014, declaring a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, carrying out mass killings and imposing a draconian form of Islam, but have since been pushed back on various fronts.

A military statement broadcast on state television said the army, police and counter-terrorism forces had retaken several areas, including the town of Husaiba al-Sharqiya, about 10 km (6 miles) east of Ramadi.

“(Our forces) also managed to open the road from Ramadi to Baghdad that passes through al-Khaldiya,” the statement added, referring to a highway that links the city to the Habbaniya army base where U.S.-led coalition forces are located.

“All of Ramadi has now been liberated,” said al-Rawi, the Anbar governor, adding that the handover of authority to local police from the military was going smoothly. No civilians are currently living in the city, he added.

It has taken more than a month for the military to clear insurgents from the eastern rural outskirts. Militants are still holed up in some northern farmlands bordering the main east-west highway, according to security sources.

(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Stephen Kalin; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Dan Grebler)

U.S. military seeks to prepare Africa for shifting terror threat

THIES, Senegal (Reuters) – African forces began a U.S.-led counter-terrorism training program in Senegal on Monday amid what a U.S. commander said were rising signs of collaboration between Islamist militant groups across north Africa and the Sahel.

The annual “Flintlock” exercises started only weeks after an attack in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou left 30 people dead. The assault on a hotel used by foreigners raised concerns that militants were expanding from a stronghold in north Mali toward stable, Western allies like Senegal.

Al Qaeda (AQIM) fighters claimed responsibility for the attack, one of increasingly bold regional strikes in the Sahel, a poor, arid zone between the Sahara Desert and Sudanian Savanna that is home to a number of roving militant groups.

U.S. Commander for Special Operations Command Africa Brigadier General Donald Bolduc told reporters on Monday that increased collaboration between militant groups meant they have been able to strengthen and strike harder in the region.

“We have watched that collaboration manifest itself with ISIS becoming more effective in north Africa, Boko Haram becoming more deadly in the Lake Chad Basin (and) AQIM adopting asymmetrical attacks … against urban infrastructure,” he said. ISIS, or ISIL, is used for the militant group Islamic State.

Bolduc said that cooperation had increased as Islamic State exploited a power vacuum in Libya to expand its self-declared caliphate, which takes up large areas in Syria and Iraq.

“We know in Libya that they (AQIM and ISIS) are working more closely together. It’s more than just influence, they (AQIM) are really taking direction from them,” he said.

Not all security experts agree that there are emerging alliances between Islamist militant groups. Some argue that competition between groups has led to more attacks.

This year’s program, which opened on a dusty airstrip in Senegal’s central city of Thies, involves around 1,700 mostly African special operation forces. Western partners including France and Germany are among more than 30 countries participating.

Nathan Broshear, spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, said the exercises were called Flintlock, after a type of firearm, to symbolize readiness for any threat.

Bolduc stressed the importance of regional cooperation and intelligence-sharing and said the United States would help Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon set up a joint intelligence center by the middle of next year.

The United States already supports a regional task force against the Nigeria-based group Boko Haram.

The Ouagadougou attack and a hotel attack in Mali’s capital in November led to a greater emphasis on preparing for urban attacks this year through training to increase cooperation between military forces and police.

At the request of African partners, the exercises will also include anti-Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) training.

The program, an annual event since 2005, will run from February 8 through 29. Some exercises will also be held in Mauritania.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

U.S. defense intelligence chief predicts increased Islamic State attacks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State is likely to “increase the pace and lethality” of its transnational attacks, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vincent Stewart said on Monday.

Speaking to a security conference, Stewart linked his warning to the extremist movement’s establishment of “emerging branches” in Mali, Tunisia, Somalia, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

“And it wouldn’t surprise me to see them further extend” operations from the Sinai Peninsula deeper into Egypt, he said.

“Last year, Daesh remained entrenched on Iraqi and Syrian battlefields and expanded globally to Libya, Sinai, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Caucasus,” Stewart said, using a derisive Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “Daesh is likely to increase the pace and lethality of its transnational attacks.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Landay. Editing by Warren Strobel and Eric Beech)

Mass deaths in Syrian jails amount to crime of ‘extermination’, U.N. says

GENEVA (Reuters) – Detainees held by the Syrian government are being killed on a massive scale amounting to a state policy of “extermination” of the civilian population, a crime against humanity, United Nations investigators said on Monday.

The U.N. commission of inquiry called on the Security Council to impose “targeted sanctions” on high-ranking Syrian civilian and military officials responsible for or complicit in deaths, torture and disappearances in custody, but stopped short of naming the suspects.

The independent experts said they had also documented mass executions and torture of prisoners by two jihadi groups, the Nusra Front and Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. These constituted war crimes and in the case of Islamic State also crimes against humanity, it said.

The report, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention”, covers March 10, 2011 to November 30, 2015. It is based on interviews with 621 survivors and witnesses and evidence gathered by the team led by chairman Paulo Pinheiro.

“Over the past four and a half years, thousands of detainees have been killed while in the custody of warring parties,” the Commission of Inquiry on Syria said.

The U.N. criticism of the Damascus government comes at a time when its forces have been advancing with the aid of Russian air strikes. A Moscow-backed government assault near the city of Aleppo this month marks one of the biggest momentum shifts in the five year war and helped torpedo peace talks last week.

Pinheiro, noting that the victims were mostly civilian men, told a news briefing: “Never in these five years these facilities that are described in our report have been visited and we have repeatedly asked the government to do so.”

There was no immediate response by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has rejected previous reports.

“Prison officials, their superiors throughout the hierarchy, high-ranking officials in military hospitals and the military police corps as well as government were aware that deaths on a massive scale were occurring,” Pinheiro said.

“Thus we concluded there were ‘reasonable grounds’ – that is (the threshold) that we apply – to believe that the conduct described amounts to extermination as a crime against humanity.”

NAMES KEPT IN U.N. SAFE

Tens of thousands of detainees are held by the government atany one time, and thousands more have “disappeared” after arrest by state forces or gone missing after abduction by armed groups, the report said.

Through mass arrests and killing of civilians, including by starvation and denial of medical treatment, state forces have “engaged in the multiple commissions of crimes, amounting to a systematic and widespread attack against a civilian population”.

There were reasonable grounds to believe that “high-ranking officers”, including the heads of branches and directorates commanding the detention facilities and military police, as well as their civilian superiors, knew of the deaths and of bodies buried anonymously in mass graves.

They are thus “individually criminally liable”, the investigators said, calling again for Syria to be referred to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a decision that only the Security Council can take.

“It depends on the political will of states. Apparently for Syria now, there is none – there is total impunity, unfortunately,” said panel member Carla del Ponte.

“We are still waiting for a green light for international justice,” she said.

“The Security Council doesn’t do anything and can’t do anything because of the veto”, she added, a reference to Russia, Assad’s ally, which has repeatedly used its power as a permanent Council member to block resolutions against Damascus.

Over the past four years, the investigators have drawn up a confidential list of suspected war criminals and units from all sides which is kept in a U.N. safe in Geneva. Pinheiro said “we have included new names” but gave no details.

Del Ponte disclosed that the U.N. investigators have provided judicial assistance to various authorities in response to 15 requests for information on foreign fighters in Syria.

She declined to identify the countries involved, but later told Reuters: “These are low-level and middle-level perpetrators because they are foreign fighters, not high-ranking.”

The Nusra Front, which is allied to al Qaeda, and Islamic State, which has proclaimed a “caliphate” in swathes of Syria and Iraq, have committed mass executions of captured government soldiers and subjected civilians to “illicit trials” by Sharia courts which ordered death sentences, the report said.

“Due to their exclusive control of large territories and its centralized command and control structure the so-called ISIS established detention facilities as far as we know are in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Aleppo. Serious violations were documented in these facilities, including torture and mass executions,” Pinheiro said.

“Accountability for these and other crimes must form part of any political solution,” the investigators said, five days after U.N.-sponsored peace talks were suspended without any result.

DEAD BODIES

Raneem Matouq, daughter of prominent lawyer Khalil Matouq missing since Oct 2012, said she had been held for two months in 2014 at Military Security Damascus Branch 227 after being arrested for her own “peaceful activism” while a student.

Inmates at the detention facility, estimated to hold several thousand, have died as a result of torture, disease and appalling prison conditions, including chronic lack of food, according to the U.N. report.

“I was with 10 other girls in a room one-and-a-half metres long by two meters long. For guys it was a room the same scale but they had 30-40 men, with dead bodies,” Matouq told Reuters on a visit to Geneva last week with Amnesty International.

“It was full of insects, we were sleeping on the floor, there was no toilet,” she said. “We were allowed to go to the toilet three times a day, we called it ‘the picnic’ because we could walk outside.

“Sometimes we would find dead bodies inside the toilet (area). It was so horrible, they were all men.”

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by Ralph Boulton and Peter Graff)

German spy agency says ISIS sending fighters disguised as refugees

BERLIN (Reuters) – Islamic State militants have slipped into Europe disguised as refugees, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said on Friday, a day after security forces thwarted a potential IS attack in Berlin.

Hans-Georg Maassen said the terrorist attacks in Paris last November had shown that Islamic State was deliberately planting terrorists among the refugees flowing into Europe.

“Then we have repeatedly seen that terrorists … have slipped in camouflaged or disguised as refugees. This is a fact that the security agencies are facing,” Maassen told ZDF television.

“We are trying to recognize and identify whether there are still more IS fighters or terrorists from IS that have slipped in,” he added.

The Berliner Zeitung newspaper cited Maassen on Friday as saying that the BfV had received more than 100 tip-offs that there were Islamic State fighters among the refugees currently staying in Germany.

German fears about an attack have risen since the Paris killings. On Thursday, German forces arrested two men suspected of links to Islamic State militants preparing an attack in the German capital.

Authorities also canceled a friendly international soccer match in Hanover last year and closed stations in Munich at New Year due to security concerns.

Maassen, however, warned against alarm.

“We are in a serious situation and there is a high risk that there could be an attack. But the security agencies, the intelligence services and the police authorities are very alert and our goal is to minimize the risk as best we can,” he said.

(Reporting by Caroline Copley; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

ISIS committing ‘genocide’ against Christians, EU Parliament says

The European Parliament has labeled the Islamic State’s actions against Christians and other religious and ethnic groups as genocide, calling for world powers to hold the group responsible.

The parliament on Thursday adopted a resolution that states the Islamic State “is committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis, and other religious and ethnic minorities who do not agree with” its radical religious beliefs, adding the actions of the insurgency “are part of its attempts to exterminate any religious and ethnic minorities from the areas under its control.”

The resolution also accuses the Islamic State of “egregious human rights abuses, which amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.” The genocide label carries some added weight, though, because the United Nations has adopted a treaty devoted to punishing and preventing it.

The treaty, implemented in 1948, defines genocide as certain actions “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The actions include murdering the group’s members, or inflicting serious bodily or mental harm upon them.

The parliament’s resolution calls for the United Nations Security Council to ask the International Criminal Court to launch an official investigation into the genocide allegations.

It was approved one week after the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a group concerned with human rights, adopted a similar resolution that stated the Islamic State has “perpetrated acts of genocide and other serious crimes punishable under international law.”

Lawmakers and advocacy groups have called for the United States to declare the Islamic State’s actions as genocide, though the country has yet to take that step. Resolutions to that effect have been introduced in the House and Senate, but they have not been adopted.

The European Parliament’s resolution details several of the Islamic State’s actions against civilians, notably Christians and Yazidis, as the group captured large parts of Syria and Iraq.

The resolution states the Islamic State killed some 5,000 Yazidis and forced some 2,000 women into marriages, slavery or human trafficking. Others have been forced to convert to Islam.

The Islamic State also kidnapped more than 220 Assyrian Christians last February, according to the resolution. While some of them have since been released, the fate of most remains unknown.

The resolution charges that more than 150,000 Christians fled their homes on Aug. 6, 2014, as the Islamic State gained territory in Ninevah Province. Some of those who did not escape were captured, and the Islamic State executed some and enslaved others. The Islamic State still controls Mosul, leaving thousands of Christians displaced without any of their possessions.

According to ADF International, a religious freedom advocate, the number of Christians living in Syria and Iraq has dropped from 2.65 million to 775,000 in recent years. The organization’s director of EU advocacy, Sophia Kuby, said it welcomed the European Parliament’s resolution.

“It was high time that the EU responded to the undeniable evidence of this genocide, which includes assassinations of church leaders, torture, mass murders, kidnapping, sexual enslavement, systematic rape of Christian and Yazidi girls and women, and the destruction of churches, monasteries, and cemeteries,” Kuby said in a statement.

Last month, Open Doors USA released a report that said Christian persecution had reached “unprecedented” levels and warned that it would likely continue to increase.

The nonprofit group released a list of the top 50 countries where Christians face the most persecution. Middle Eastern countries occupied five of the top 10 spots, and Islamic extremist groups were a source of persecution in four others.

In December, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent group that makes recommendations to the government, urged officials to designate Christians, Yazidis and other groups victims of Islamic State’s genocide.

No such declaration has been made.

“The hallmark of genocide is the intent to destroy a national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, in whole or in part,” the commission’s chairman, Robert P. George, said in a statement at the time. “ISIL’s intent to destroy religious groups that do not subscribe to its extremist ideology in the areas in Iraq and Syria that it controls, or seeks to control, is evident in, not only its barbarous acts, but also its own propaganda.”

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