Tag Archives: ISIS

German police conduct raids over possible Islamic State attack

BERLIN (Reuters) – German forces arrested two men on Thursday suspected of links to Islamic State militants preparing an attack in the German capital, police and prosecutors said, amid fears of another deadly attack on European soil.

Police and special forces raided four flats and two offices in Berlin and properties in the northern regions of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony.

“Specifically (the raids) concern possible plans for an attack in Germany, even more specifically in Berlin,” Martin Steltner, a spokesman for Berlin prosecutors, told Reuters TV.

Berlin police spokesman Stefan Redlich said the authorities were investigating four Algerian men. Police detained two men and a woman.

“Our understanding is that the four men accused could have planned to carry out such an attack together,” Steltner said.

German media reported that central Berlin landmarks and tourist attractions Checkpoint Charlie and Alexanderplatz were targets.

Redlich said the Berlin suspects worked in those two locations and that searches were carried out there. But he could not confirm that they were the targets.

Redlich and Steltner said police acted on a tip-off but gave no further details.

Security agencies have been monitoring the suspects since January, Funke Media Group said. The men behaved conspiratorially, changed their mobile phones multiple times and communicated via instant messaging services, it added.

The Tagesspiegel newspaper, citing security sources, said leading members of Islamic State (IS), who were responsible for the Paris attacks that killed 130 people in November, had given the order for an attack in Germany.

Prosecutors declined to comment on the report.

‘NO SMOKING GUN’

Police seized computers, mobile telephones and sketches in the raids, Steltner said, adding “we haven’t found the smoking gun”.

A couple was arrested in North Rhine-Westphalia and another man was arrested in Berlin, Steltner said. All were detained on existing warrants related to other matters.

The man detained in North-Rhine Westphalia was arrested in a shelter for refugees and arrived a short while ago in Germany claiming to be from Syria, Steltner said.

He is wanted by Algerian authorities, who believe he is a member of Islamic State, said Steltner. He is suspected of having military training in Syria.

The status of the other men was unclear, but Redlich said the two Berlin-based suspects were not refugees.

“In Berlin, the two persons we are investigating are not refugees,” Redlich added. “Both have jobs here and have been here a long time.”

German fears about an attack have risen since the Paris killings. Authorities canceled a friendly international soccer match in Hanover last year and closed stations in Munich at New Year due to security concerns.

(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers, Victoria Bryan and Paul Carrel in Berlin and Matthias Inverardi in Duesseldorf; Editing by Larry King and Katharine Houreld)

To silence propaganda, Iraq seeks to take Islamic State offline

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iraq is trying to persuade satellite firms to halt Internet services in areas under Islamic State’s rule, seeking to deal a major blow to the group’s potent propaganda machine which relies heavily on social media to inspire its followers to wage jihad.

Social media apps like Twitter and Telegram are scrambling to limit Islamic State’s cyber-activities. So far that has proven to be a cat-and-mouse-game, with the group re-emerging through other accounts with videos showing beheadings and extolling the virtues of living in a caliphate.

For Iraq then, the key is to stop the militant group from accessing the web at all – a feat, which if achieved, could sever a significant part of a propaganda campaign that has inspired deadly attacks in the West.

Mobile networks are largely inoperable in the Islamic State-held swathes of Iraq, areas which also have little fixed-line broadband infrastructure. Militants instead use satellite dishes to connect to the web, or illicit microwave dishes that hook them into broadband networks in government-held areas, three telecoms industry sources told Reuters.

There are many challenges for the Iraqi authorities: within the satellite Internet industry, no one assumes responsibility for identifying and vetting end users, the territory under Islamic State’s often shifts, and a complex web of middlemen makes it tough to pinpoint who is selling militants Internet capacity.

The group has control over or operates in parts of western Iraq and northern and central Syria which have a population of up to 5 million people, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, most of them in Iraq.

To connect to the web via a satellite, all that is required is a V-sat terminal – a small dish receiver and a modem – and an Internet subscription.

Islamic State uses “the V-sat system to access the Internet in areas it controls,” an Iraqi communications ministry official told Reuters. “What’s still difficult for us is controlling V-sat receivers which connect directly to satellites providing Internet services that cover Iraq.”

In the IS-held northern city of Mosul, V-sat units can be bought for about $2,000-$3,000 at a sprawling electronics market near the university.

The official said Iraq was in talks with satellite companies covering Iraq to halt Internet services to IS-controlled areas, adding that he had received “positive signals” from them, but “the process is complicated and needs more time and procedures.”

Abu Dhabi state-owned Yahsat, both a satellite owner and provider of end-user connectivity through its consumer broadband brand YahClick, is the only company so far to cooperate with the ministry’s request, the official said.

Highlighting the complicated task, Reuters traced an IP address of an Islamic State fighter in Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria, which showed he was accessing the Internet using YahClick.

Yahsat would not directly comment on whether Islamic State had used its services, but said it complied with all laws and regulations. It has no official presence in Syria.

The company, among the biggest providers of satellite Internet in Iraq, relies on local agents to sell YahClick; three are listed on its website for Iraq, but other companies also sell the brand there.

“Anybody can become a reseller. It’s very informal and wholesalers probably want to keep it that way,” said the second industry source, who like the others declined to be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

Satellites owners such as Britain’s Avanti, France’s Eutelsat and Yahsat cover most of the Middle East.

These sell capacity to other companies, such as Abu Dhabi’s Wafa Technical Systems and Britain’s Bentley Walker, which then use this capacity to sell services and equipment to businesses and consumers. Like Yahsat, these firms rely on in-country partners to distribute and sell their products.

“In common with all satellite operators, Avanti does not maintain identity or accurate location detail on end user customers,” a company spokesman said, adding the firm complied with all laws and regulations where it operates.

V-sat units, which are potentially portable, transmit their location and so should be traceable. But no one in the industry seems willing to take on the responsibility to vet users.

Wafa and rival Bentley Walker, who buy satellite capacity and sell V-sat units, say they are unaware of who is ultimately using their services.

Wafa, which has about 2,500 V-sat units in Iraq, said in online adverts it could deliver to any Iraqi city including Mosul. “The re-sellers are the people who know the clients and where the end users are located,” said Kamal Arjundas, assistant director at the company.

Customers of Bentley Walker can still use its services even if the V-sat unit is in an area beyond state control, said sales manager Neil Denyer. As of July last year, the firm said its service covered over 1,500 sites in northern Iraq.

The company says it is Europe’s largest re-seller of satellite Internet equipment. It sells its own FreedomSat brand and those of other companies such as YahClick.

Denyer declined to identify the company’s Iraqi partners, citing political and commercial concerns, and later did not respond when asked whether Islamic State could be using his company’s products and services.

Wafa’s Arjundas also declined to identify its Iraqi partners and did not respond when asked about the militant group.

‘TWO HOPS TO MOSUL’

Even if Iraq cuts off Islamic State from satellite Internet, the group can remain online through illegal networks set up by businessmen in towns such as Kirkuk, Arbil and Duhok.

These entrepreneurs buy data capacity from fixed broadband providers, passing through many middlemen first. They connect this to microwave dishes, which have a range of about 40 kilometers to eventually reach end users in IS-controlled areas, said the three industry sources.

“It’s two hops via microwave dishes to Mosul,” said the third industry source.

“Their activities have very little chance of being detected. If you can buy a certain amount of capacity for $100 in Arbil and sell it on for $500, it’s good business.”

Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that rules over an autonomous area of northern Iraq have banned the sale of Internet capacity that could end up in Islamic State hands, but it is hard to enforce.

There are many microwave dishes pointing in all directions in Iraq. The vast networks that mostly provide Internet connectivity to civilian homes and businesses make it difficult to establish who is using them.

“If you close one (of the businesses) down, they reappear under another disguise in a matter of days. They’re very difficult to identify,” said the first industry source.

“It would take enormous resources, knowledge and competency which Baghdad or the KRG don’t have,” said the third source.

A moral quandary is whether IS-held areas should be denied Internet access thereby cutting off civilians living there, said Rafaello Pantucci, of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute think-tank. Some have used the Internet to relate the abuses they have suffered.

“Would cutting off such communications have a major impact in disrupting and degrading Islamic State’s operations, or would it mostly just make the lives of people living under Islamic State even more difficult?”

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Stephen Kalin in Baghdad and Eric Auchard; Editing by William Maclean, Yara Bayoumy and Pravin Char)

U.S. will act against Islamic State in Libya if needed, White House says

CATONSVILLE, Md. (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama will continue to be updated on the risks of the spread of Islamic State to Libya, and the United States will take action in the North African country to counter that threat if necessary, the White House said on Wednesday.

“If there is a need for the United States to take unilateral action to protect the American people, the president won’t hesitate to do that,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.

Earnest declined to comment on whether Obama had made any decisions on the possibility of sending ground troops into Libya, but said the president has “demonstrated a willingness to take decisive action,” even in Libya.

Islamic State forces have attacked Libya’s oil infrastructure and established a foothold in the city of Sirte, exploiting a power vacuum in the country where two rival governments have been battling for supremacy.

Libya’s two warring administrations are expected to form a unity government.

Earnest said the United States would support the unity government on a range of national security measures, but it was too early to say what form that assistance would take.

“The more that we can bolster the capacity of the national unity government to govern that country, the better off we will be,” he said.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Richard Chang)

Walls and watchtowers rise as Turkey tries to seal border against Islamic State

ELBEYLI, Turkey (Reuters) – Slabs of concrete wall have sprung up and military patrols have intensified, but local people say this stretch of Turkey’s border facing Syrian territory under Islamic State control is still far from water-tight.

Ankara is under intense pressure from its NATO allies to seal off the 40-mile strip that stretches from just east of the Turkish town of Kilis to Karkamis, long a conduit for fighters, smuggled goods and war materiel.

Beyond a string of tiny villages nestled in undulating fig and olive groves lies the last stretch of Syrian territory on Turkey’s southern frontier that Islamic State militants still hold, following advances by rival Kurdish rebels.

European governments fear that their own citizens who have fought with the jihadists could still cross back into Turkey before heading home to stage attacks.

Likewise, the United States believes Turkey, which has NATO’s second largest army, must close the frontier if Islamic State is to be defeated in Syria.

Soldiers patrol in armored vehicles along a border delineated in some places by little more than razor-wire fence. Additional watchtowers and huts have appeared in recent months, and three-meter (10 foot)-high concrete slabs are being erected along some of the most vulnerable sections.

But the efforts by a nation which had long been criticized for failing to do more to prevent the passage of foreign fighters appear to have come too late to stop Islamic State networks developing inside Turkey.

Washington and Ankara have been discussing for months how to seal this stretch of border. Senior U.S. officials said last month they would offer Turkey technology including surveillance balloons and anti-tunneling equipment.

Border security is now undoubtedly tighter but, for those wanting to sneak over, not absolute – and help remains available for a price.

“It’s difficult, but not impossible,” said Ismail, a 37-year old who described himself as a trader, smoking a cigarette in a tea house near the village of Akinci.

“Let’s say you want to cross. You tell me where and when and I can call people who will make it happen,” he said. “But you would have to pay more.”

The military’s own figures suggest attempts to cross into Islamic State-held Syrian territory have continued, showing 121 people tried over the past 10 days alone. Almost half were children, and at least a dozen were foreigners.

Nevertheless, it is cracking down on those trying to spirit people over the border.

“The security is very tight now, soldiers give the smugglers no respite,” said Abbas, 51, a farmer near the Turkish border town of Elbeyli, as two soldiers carrying rifles passed by his house, walking toward their outpost a few hundred meters away.

Last year, Abbas was so alarmed by the numbers of people crossing illicitly into Syria under his nose that he emailed a government bureau, set up years ago for citizens to register complaints, queries and concerns. It receives more than a million inquiries a year and Abbas said he never heard back.

“It was literally a flood of people here,” he said, describing how some in his village made a fortune shuttling people back and forth to the border fence, often doing a dozen trips a night, until the flow largely stopped about a month ago.

Several residents in other border villages and towns confirmed security had been tightened, but emphasized that did not mean the two-way traffic had dried up.

KILLINGS IN TURKEY

Turkey launched what it called a “synchronized war on terror” last July, opening up its Incirlik air base to countries in the U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic State. Most of its own air strikes, however, have been against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants battling for Kurdish autonomy in its southeast.

Turkish tanks and artillery bombarded Islamic State positions in Syria and Iraq in the days after a suicide bomber blew himself up among groups of tourists in the heart of Istanbul last month, killing 10 Germans.

The security forces have also stepped up raids against Islamic State in cities across Turkey, detaining more than 1,000 alleged members and uncovering urban cells.

“We have never allowed Islamic State to use our territory to cross into Syria and we will not allow them … We see Islamic State as an extremely serious threat and we don’t want them on our border,” a senior government official told Reuters.

Turkey has increasingly become a target itself for the Sunni Muslim radicals. The Istanbul bombing followed a suicide attack in Ankara in October that killed more than 100 people and a bombing in the border town of Suruc last July, both of which were blamed on Islamic State fighters.

Diplomats and analysts say Ankara woke up late to the threat, allowing Islamic State to develop networks of sympathizers, a charge the government rejects.

“These networks are tapped into well-established al Qaeda networks inside Turkey … They were already there and they operated with little interference until March 2015,” Aaron Stein, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council said, nothing a marked increased in arrests thereafter.

Aside from the high-profile suicide bombings, Islamic State sympathizers have been able to carry out targeted attacks inside Turkish territory along the border in recent months.

Naji Jerf, a Syrian activist and documentary maker who made a film about Islamic State and had lived in Turkey’s southeastern city of Gaziantep since 2012, was gunned down on the street in broad daylight last December.

A couple of months earlier, two other Syrian activists who worked for Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), a campaign group against Islamic State, were shot in the head and beheaded in the nearby city of Sanliurfa.

Jerf and the two activists had appealed to the Turkish police after they received death threats, friends and fellow activists in Istanbul and Gaziantep told Reuters.

“Naji went to the police after somebody tried to break into his car,” said his friend Manhal Bareesh, a journalist based in Gaziantep but originally from Syria’s Idlib province.

“He suspected they were trying to plant a bomb in his car. But the Turkish police wrote a report and told him not to worry,” Bareesh said.

Three people have been detained in Gaziantep in relation to Jerf’s murder, according to local media, but the killings have alarmed the Syrian immigrant community.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and David Stamp)

Coalition aims to recapture ISIS ‘caliphate’ in Iraq, Syria

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State aims this year to recapture Iraq’s second city Mosul, working with Iraqi government forces, and drive the jihadis out of Raqqa, their stronghold in northeast Syria, Arab and Western officials say.

If it succeeds, the coalition will have struck a crippling blow against Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

The strategy is to regain territory at the heart of IS’s cross-border state, take both its “capitals”, and destroy the confidence of its fighters that it can expand as a Sunni caliphate and magnet for jihadis, according to these Arab and Western officials, few of whom were willing to speak on the record on a matter of such strategic sensitivity.

“The plan is to hit them in Raqqa in Syria and in Iraq at Mosul, to crush their capitals,” said an Iraqi official with knowledge of the strategy. “I think there is some speed and urgency by the coalition, by the U.S. administration and by us to end this year with the regaining of control over all territory.”

“Iraqi officials say 2016 will witness the elimination of Daesh (IS) and the Americans have the same idea – get the job finished, then they can withdraw and (President Barack) Obama will have a legacy,” said a diplomat in Baghdad, emphasizing the Iraqi part of the operation. “The day Mosul is liberated, Daesh will be defeated.”

The war against jihadi insurgents in this turbulent region has had its twists and turns but there is a palpable sense in Baghdad that the tide has turned against IS.

TWIN-PRONGED ANTI-IS STRATEGY

In the year after the jihadis’ summer 2014 surge back into Iraq from the bases they managed to build amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war, IS momentum as a rapid, flexible and brutal military force seemed unstoppable.

But in the past nine months IS has lost swathes of territory and strategic towns. In Iraq it was driven out of Tikrit and Sinjar in the north, the oil refinery town of Baiji in central Iraq, and Ramadi west of Baghdad in Anbar province, the heart of insurgency after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam.

In northern Syria, U.S.-allied Kurdish militia of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) have taken vital territory and border crossings below the frontier with Turkey, after breaking a long IS siege at Kobani and later taking Tel Abyad, north of Raqqa and a key supply line for the jihadi capital.

“Daesh are losing their ability to hold onto territory in Iraq and to stage the kind of complex attacks that allow them to hold the towns they seized,” said a U.S. official, adding that the recapture of Mosul would start in 2016.

Lieutenant-General Sean MacFarland, Baghdad-based head of the U.S.-led coalition, emphasized to a group of reporters last month the twin-pronged approach to operations against IS in Iraq, “in conjunction with something we might have going on over in Syria about the same time (and) see if we can put pressure on the enemy in two places at once and create a dilemma.”

Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi expert on IS who advises the Iraqi government on the group, points out that as a result of last year’s setbacks “out of seven strategic roads between Iraq and Syria they (IS) now have one; they cannot move with ease and Turkey has tightened the noose on them.”

IS is under pressure across many other fronts apart from its ability to deploy. The collapse in oil prices has dented its revenue from oil smuggled, now through a less permeable Turkish border, from captured Syrian and Iraqi fields.

COVERT OPERATIONS

Coalition air strikes recently incinerated a stockpile of cash from looting and kidnapping, taxation and extortion, forcing IS to cut wages. It is losing top cadres. More than 100 mid-level to senior leaders have been killed since May, according to coalition spokesman Colonel Steve Warren, who says that “works out to an average of one every two days”.

“The place where they were holding huge cash reserves was targeted and destroyed,” the diplomat told Reuters.

“Daesh will be defeated in Iraq. It is not a question of if but when,” added another senior Western diplomat in Iraq.

A top Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Mosul operation would require delicate collaboration between the U.S. air force, the Iraqi army, local Sunni tribal forces, and Peshmerga fighters from the self-governing Kurdistan Regional Government east of the city.

“Most likely, coalition special forces will be embedded with the Iraqi forces and the Peshmerga will close on Mosul from the north and east.”

In Syria, he said, the likely combination would involve coalition air strikes with special forces and U.S.-led covert missions operating alongside mainly Kurdish fighters of the YPG and other Syrian rebels. “They have some special forces on the ground in Syria in Hasaka, on the outskirts of Raqqa with the rebels,” the Iraqi official said.

An airstrip at Hasaka is being prepared by the United States for this purpose.

The official warned, however, of the need for coordination with Russia, which brought its air force to Syria last September to shore up the Iran-backed rule of President Bashar al-Assad, and is using an airstrip in Qamishli further north, but focusing most of its fire on mainstream and other Islamist rebels rather than IS.

This “competition between the two superpowers is really very, very dangerous”, he said. “There must be coordination (around) the complex operations that will take place.”

LIBYA, NEW IS DESTINATION

Yet even in the unlikely event that all these plans go like clockwork, that alone would not put an end to IS.

The group, IS experts say, has become expert at defensive warfare, and is spreading its tentacles from Europe to North Africa.

Inside the recaptured city of Ramadi the Iraqi army found a warren of underground tunnels the jihadi forces used for shelter, mobility and escape. Mosul, a far bigger city with one million people and a river on one side, is heavily defended and tunneled, with berms, trenches and hidden bombs.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the IS “caliph” still based near Mosul, has already begun to anticipate tactical reverses.

Arab and Western security sources say he has recently sent several hundred of his top lieutenants to Libya, to consolidate the existing IS bridgehead there amid the chaos of a splintering country, and to offset diminishing revenue in Syria and Iraq by creaming off Libyan oil resources.

Coalition dependence on Kurdish forces in both northern Syria and Iraq, and the Iraqi army’s reliance on Iran-backed Shi’ite militia up until the reconquest of Ramadi by regular forces, were and are being exploited by IS as a means to rally Sunni Arab grievances.

Battlefield success will count for little, officials and diplomats say, without political reconciliation and power-sharing to heal the wounds opened in the ethno-sectarian bloodletting that followed the overthrow of Saddam’s minority Sunni Arab rule in 2003.

AFTER MOSUL?

Islamic State, whose forerunner first emerged as a Sunni reaction to the U.S. installation of Shi’ite majority rule in Iraq, twisted the sectarian knife in the country.

But after the fall of Mosul, then prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, leader of the Shi’ite Islamist Dawa party, who had alienated the Sunnis by tearing up a power-sharing pact with them and the Kurds, was pushed aside. He was replaced by a more conciliatory Dawa leader, Haider al-Abadi.

Most observers give Abadi credit for trying to be more inclusive by negotiating oil revenue sharing with the Kurdistan Regional Government, proposing a National Guard, under which the different sects and ethnic groups would police their areas, and setting out a vision of a decentralized, federal Iraq.

Yet distrust of the Dawa is now so engrained it extends to Abadi. “The problem among the Shi’ites, especially in Dawa, is that there is a deep anti-Sunni feeling,” said one Iraqi leader.

But fear of a return to the Sunni domination of the Saddam era is widespread too, and fanned by IS.

“The National Guard law is rejected by the Shi’ites because the Sunnis will then have their own army and this will threaten the Shi’ite population even if they are dominant now,” said the Baghdad-based diplomat. “The Shi’ites fear the return of Sunni power.”

Yet Abadi has shown signs of independence, from his party and its Iranian patrons.

Baghdad is abuzz with the story of how the prime minister recently ejected Major General Qassem Soleimani from a national security council meeting. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander had until recently been photographed often on the frontlines in Iraq and Syria.

The critical question, however, is whether Abadi can build up the army and regular security forces enough to establish control over Shi’ite militias under the sway of Tehran, accused by Sunnis of human rights abuses when they spearheaded the attacks on Baiji, Tikrit and Diyala last year.

Even if Mosul works, Abadi will still have to move quickly to provide things his corrupt predecessors were unwilling or unable to give to Iraqi citizens in general and disgruntled Sunnis and Kurds in particular.

(Addtional reporting by Maher Chmaytelli and Stephen Kalin; editing by Janet McBride)

Kerry says ISIS pushed back in Iraq and Syria, but a threat in Libya

 

ROME (Reuters) – An international coalition is pushing back Islamic State militants in their Syrian and Iraqi strongholds, but the group is threatening Libya and could seize the nation’s oil wealth, U.S Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday.

Officials from 23 countries met in Rome to review the fight against Islamic State militants, who have created a self-proclaimed Caliphate across swathes of Syria and Iraq, and are spreading into other countries, notably Libya.

While Western officials worry about the growing threat posed by Islamic State in the former Italian colony, there was no suggestion that foreign powers were preparing to launch a major military offensive against them there for now.

Islamic State forces have attacked Libya’s oil infrastructure and established a foothold in the city of Sirte, exploiting a power vacuum in the North African country where two rival governments have been battling for supremacy.

“That country has resources. The last thing in the world you want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars of oil revenue,” Kerry said.

Under a U.N.-backed plan for a political transition, Libya’s two warring administrations are expected to form a unity government, but a month after the deal was agreed in Morocco, its implementation has been dogged by in-fighting.

Kerry said the two sides were “on the brink of getting a government of national unity”. Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said once it was in place, many countries would be prepared to respond to any request for help with security.

However, Kerry said the United States was opposed to deploying any of its ground forces into Libya and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius dismissed media speculation that Paris was poised to intervene in the oil-rich country.

“That is totally inexact,” he told reporters in Rome.

The United States is leading two different coalitions carrying out air strikes in Iraq and Syria that have targeted Islamic State, but the jihadist group has been left largely left untouched in Libya.

“We are still not at the victory that we want to achieve, and will achieve, in either Syria or Iraq and we have seen Daesh playing a game of metastasizing out to other countries, particularly Libya,” Kerry said, using a pejorative Arabic term for Islamic State.

INTERRUPTING ISLAMIC STATE

Defense ministers from the anti-IS group are due to meet in Brussels next week to discuss further options, while Kerry said he expected further consultations with allies at a security conference in Munich, Germany later this month.

While the Islamic State remained undefeated, it had suffered many setbacks, Kerry said, losing 40 percent of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and 20 percent of its lands in Iraq.

“Our advances .. are undeniable. We have launched nearly 10,000 air strikes, we have interrupted their finance mechanisms, they have had to cut the salaries of their fighters, we have interrupted their capacity to get revenues,” Kerry said.

The one-day Rome meeting took place as talks have begun in Geneva to try to end the five-year-old Syrian civil war, which has killed at least 250,000 people, driven more than 10 million from their homes and drawn in the United States and Russia on opposite sides.

While Washington has long said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has lost the legitimacy to lead, it has made clear that its first priority is to try to rein in Islamic State group.

“If you want to beat Daesh quickly, then get a negotiated deal to end the Syria war,” Kerry said.

Tuesday’s meeting also covered stabilizing areas such as the Iraqi city of Tikrit, which has been wrested from the group, as well as broader efforts to undercut its finances, stem the flow of foreign fighters and counter its messaging, officials said.

(Additional Reporting by John Irish in Geneva; Writing by Crispian Balmer and Arshad Mohammed; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Iraqis running out of food and medicine in besieged Fallujah

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of trapped Iraqi civilians are running out of food and medicine in the western city of Fallujah, an Islamic State stronghold under siege by security forces, according to local officials and residents.

The Iraqi army, police and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias – backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition – late last year imposed a near total siege on Fallujah, located 30 miles west of Baghdad in the Euphrates river valley.

The city’s population is suffering from a shortage of food, medicine and fuel, residents and officials told Reuters by phone, and media reports said several people had died due to starvation and poor medical care. Insecurity and poor communications inside the city make those reports difficult to verify.

Sohaib al-Rawi, the governor of Anbar province where Fallujah is located, appealed to the coalition to air-drop humanitarian supplies to the trapped civilians. He said this was the only way to deliver aid after Islamic State mined the entrances to the city and stopped people leaving.

“No force can enter and secure (the delivery) … There is no option but for airplanes to transport aid,” he said in an interview with al-Hadath TV late on Monday, adding the situation was deteriorating by the day.

Fallujah – a long-time bastion of Sunni Muslim jihadists – was the first Iraqi city to fall to Islamic State, in January 2014, six months before the group that emerged from al Qaeda swept through large parts of northern and western Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Since recapturing the city of Ramadi – a further 50 km to the west – from Islamic State a month ago, Iraqi authorities have not made clear whether they will attempt to take Fallujah next or leave it contained while the bulk of their forces head north toward Mosul, the largest city under the militants’ control.

Falih al-Essawi, deputy chief of Anbar’s provincial council, said Islamic State had turned Falluja into “a huge detention center”.

“Security forces managed to control almost all areas around Falluja. This victory has helped to reduce Daesh (Islamic State) attacks outside the city, but it cost too much because civilians now are paying the price,” he said from Ramadi, warning of a potential humanitarian disaster.

A doctor at a hospital in Fallujah said medicine and supplies were running low, especially for post-natal care.

“What is the sin of those born after living in their mothers’ womb without nutrition or protection except from God?” she said.

Spokesmen for the Iraqi army, police and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias besieging Fallujah were not immediately available to comment.

FREEZING WINTER

The U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State estimates there are around 400 fighters from the ultra-hardline Sunni militant group in Fallujah, though some military analysts put the figure at closer to 1,000.

The coalition, which includes European and Arab powers, dropped food and water in 2014 to members of Iraq’s minority Yazidi community trapped on Mount Sinjar by Islamic State – a humanitarian crisis that sparked the international air campaign.

A Baghdad-based spokesman for the coalition did not rule out a similar operation in Fallujah but said Islamic State’s control of the city made it more challenging.

“The thing about an air-drop is it’s very difficult to control who gets it,” said U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren. “The conditions have to be such that the people who you want to receive the supplies are actually able to receive them and there’s no evidence that that’s the case in Fallujah.”

Rawi, the provincial governor, said Islamic State was using civilians as human shields in Falluja like it did in Ramadi – a tactic that slowed the advance of Iraqi forces.

He said media reports of up to 10 deaths due to starvation and insufficient medical care were accurate, but local officials could not provide details.

The price of food in Fallujah’s markets has rocketed and bakeries have begun rationing bread, residents told Reuters. They said fuel had become scarce during the cold winter months when temperatures drop close to freezing.

One man, who like the other residents declined to be named, said the last time Islamic State distributed basic food items a few weeks ago, much of it had already gone off.

Lise Grande, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, described conditions in Falluja as “terrible”.

“We’re incredibly worried about the unconfirmed reports of people dying because of lack of medicine and widespread hunger,” she told Reuters.

The United Nations appealed on Sunday for $861 million to help Iraq meet a big funding gap in its 2016 emergency response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the war against Islamic State which has left 10 million people in need of urgent aid.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and Saif Hameed; Editing by Pravin Char)

Accused ISIS plotter in North Carolina charged with earlier murder

(Reuters) – A North Carolina man was indicted on Monday in the murder of a 74-year-old neighbor police said he killed months before federal authorities arrested him on allegations that he planned mass shootings to support Islamic State militants.

Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, of Morganton, North Carolina, is charged with murder in the December 2014 slaying of John Bailey Clark, said Burke County District Attorney David Learner.

Sullivan also faces seven federal charges related to supporting Islamic State and plotting murders, according to an 11-page federal indictment unsealed Monday. He faces trial on those charges later this month.

Islamic State is a militant group that controls parts of Syria and Iraq and has vowed attacks on the West.

“Justin Sullivan had elaborate plans to kill hundreds of innocent people to show his support for the terrorist organization, ISIL,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge John A. Strong.

The first-degree state murder charge is punishable by life in prison without parole or the death penalty.

The federal charges range in punishment from 20 years in prison for attempting help Islamic State to eight years for lying to a federal agency.

Attorneys for Sullivan could not be reached.

The FBI began tracking Sullivan in September 2014 after his parents, with whom he was living, told police he supported Islamic State and was destroying Buddhist objects at home.

In December, 2014, Clark was killed with the .22-caliber rifle later identified as one that Sullivan stole from his father and hid under their house, according to the indictment.

Beginning on June 6, 2015, Sullivan began talking about his Islamic State loyalties with an undercover federal agent Sullivan took for a fellow supporter.

“I liked IS from the beginning then I started thinking about death and stuff so I became Muslim,” Sullivan told the agent, according to the indictment.

Over the next two weeks, Sullivan told the agent that he wanted to kill hundreds or thousands with an assault rifle and silencer, and planned to practice killing with minor assassinations, the indictment said.

He instructed the agent to obtain weapons, had the agent make and mail him a silencer to use, planned to buy an AR-15 at a gun show and tried to buy hollow-point bullets.

When his parents questioned him about the silencer, he tried to hire the agent to kill them, the indictment said.

He was arrested in late June 2015 and remains in federal custody, authorities said.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein and Karen Brooks; Editing by David Gregorio)

Pentagon to hike spending request to fund fight versus Islamic State

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s administration will seek a significant increase in funding for the fight against Islamic State as part of its 2017 defense budget request, U.S. officials say, in another possible sign of U.S. efforts to intensify the campaign.

The fiscal year 2017 Pentagon budget will call for more than $7 billion for the fight against Islamic State, a roughly 35 percent increase compared with the previous year’s request to Congress, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter is due to disclose his spending priorities for the $583 billion 2017 defense budget on Tuesday in an address to the Economic Club of Washington. The White House plans to release Obama’s full budget proposal for fiscal 2017, which begins Oct. 1, on Feb. 9.

Carter in his speech is expected to cite his intent to increase the administration’s request for funds to battle Islamic State, officials say, although it was unclear how much detail he would offer.

He was also expected to touch on other budget priorities, including plans to increase spending to reassure European allies following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, and the need for the United States to maintain its military edge over China and Russia.

Carter’s budget will underscore the need for Washington to fund a new Air Force bomber awarded last year to Northrop Grumman Corp, a replacement for the Ohio-class submarines that carry nuclear weapons, and to start replacing a fleet of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to a source briefed on the plans.

The proposed budget will also seek to boost spending for several key priorities, including increased cybersecurity, electronic warfare and increased security for crucial U.S. satellites, the source said.

Lockheed Martin Corp, maker of the F-35 fighter jet, Boeing Co and other big weapons makers are anxiously awaiting details about the budget and how it will affect their programs.

Senior defense officials have said that $15 billion in cuts required under a two-year budget agreement with Congress last year would largely come from procurement accounts since personnel costs and operations costs were harder to cut.

One official noted that spending on the Islamic State fight was expected to be drawn from the roughly $59 billion Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, a separate budget that supplements the larger, $524 billion base budget for fiscal year 2017.

Still, key details on the more than $7 billion request were unclear, including whether the funding applied to operations outside Iraq and Syria.

The disclosure about plans for an increased spending request to combat Islamic State came as the Obama administration seeks to intensify its campaign, looking to capitalize on recent battlefield gains against the militants in Iraq.

Carter has called a meeting later this month in Brussels with defense ministers from all 26 military members of the anti-Islamic State coalition, as well as Iraq. He is asking them to come prepared to discuss further contributions to the fight.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Andrea Shalal; Editing by James Dalgleish)

U.S. weighs options to speed Iraq’s fight to retake Mosul

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is willing to deploy Apache attack helicopters and advisers to help Iraq retake the city of Mosul from Islamic State as it considers options to speed up the campaign against the militant group, a top U.S. general said on Monday.

U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, have said they want to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State militants, and have called on allies to increase their military contributions to efforts to destroy the group in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. Army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, the head of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said he is looking to retake Mosul as quickly as possible, but did not say whether he agreed with Iraqi estimates that it could be wrested from Islamic State control by the end of this year.

“I don’t want to put a date out there,” MacFarland said. “I would like to get this wrapped up as fast as I possibly can.”

Past steps to speed up the campaign have included the deployment of dozens of U.S. special operations forces in northern Syria, and an elite targeting force to work with Iraqi forces to go after Islamic State targets.

It could also include deployment of more military and police trainers, including from the United States. MacFarland said the U.S.-led coalition has trained more than 17,500 Iraqi soldiers, and about 2,000 police, with another 3,000 soldiers and police in training now.

MacFarland said the proposals he is drawing up do not necessarily require the commitment of more U.S. troops, who have largely stayed away from the front lines of combat. Instead, coalition partners could contribute troops, he said.

“As we extend operations across Iraq and into Syria … there is a good potential that we’ll need additional capabilities, additional forces to provide those capabilities and we’re looking at the right mix,” MacFarland said.

The United States is also ready to send Apache attack helicopters and deploy advisers to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces retake Mosul if requested, MacFarland said. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in December that the United States was ready to send the advisers and helicopters if requested by Iraq to help in the fight to retake Ramadi, but Iraqi officials did not ask for the extra help.

Iraqi forces retook Ramadi, a provincial capital just a short drive west of Baghdad, late last year.

“We can’t inflict help on somebody, they have to ask for it, they have to want it, and we’re here to provide it as required,” MacFarland said. “Everything that the secretary said is really still on the table.”

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)