Tag Archives: Islamic State

U.S. military says decisive action needed against Islamic State in Libya

PARIS (Reuters) – The top U.S. military officer said on Friday urgent and decisive military action was needed to halt the spread of Islamic State in Libya, warning the jihadist group wanted to use the country as a regional base.

Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, avoided detailing any recommendations he might make in Washington. His goals included better leveraging support in the region from allies, building up local forces capable of defending Libya, and strengthening its neighbors.

“You want to take decisive military action to check ISIL’s expansion and at the same time you want to do it in such a way that’s supportive of a long-term political process,” Dunford, using an acronym for Islamic State, told a small group of reporters.

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

The political chaos has also slowed the international community’s ability to partner with the loose alliances of armed brigades of rebels who once fought veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011.

Western powers hope stability will come via a new unity government announced on Tuesday, though two of its nine members have already rejected it.

“I think it’s pretty clear to all of us — French, U.S. alike — that whatever we do is going to be in conjunction with the new government,” Dunford said after talks with France’s military, which is active in parts of Africa battling Islamic extremists.

“My perspective is we need to do more,” Dunford said, He would weigh factors including the ability to identify the right forces on the ground to support.

He also suggested that the willingness among Libyans to have foreign military forces “in there, taking the fight to ISIL” would also be important in deliberations about the way forward.

He said he wanted to move soon, but acknowledged that, when it came to Libya, “quickly is weeks not hours”, adding that the U.S. military leadership owed President Barack Obama and the U.S. defense secretary ideas about the “way ahead” for dealing with the militant group.

The United States says it killed Islamic State’s senior leader in Libya, known as Abu Nabil, in a November air strike by F-15 aircraft.

It believes he was operating in Libya with the support of Islamic State’s core leadership in Iraq and Syria, in a likely sign of the country’s strategic importance to the group.

“So as I look at Libya, I look at Libya as an ISIL platform from which they can conduct malign activity across Africa,” Dunford said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; editing by Andrew Roche and John Stonestreet)

U.S. gives troops broader order to strike ISIS in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. military commanders have been given the authority to target Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Thursday, the first such order beyond Iraq and Syria, where the militants control parts of both countries.

The U.S. State Department said last week that it had designated Islamic State’s offshoot in Afghanistan, known as Islamic State-Khorasan, as a foreign terrorist organization.

U.S. forces could previously strike Islamic State in Afghanistan but it was under more narrow circumstances, such as for protection of troops.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, “seems to be waking up to the fact that more than a year into the U.S. military campaign, ISIL’s reach is global and growing.”

McCain told a hearing on Thursday that the authorization given by the White House was much needed and “many of us may be interested to know that we confined our attacks on ISIL to Iraq and Syria.”

ISIL is another name for the Islamist militant group, which has supporters and sympathizers around the world who have carried out bombings and gun attacks on civilians, notably in Paris in November and San Bernardino, California, in December.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, said there had been an adjustment to the authorization for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but he did not give details on when exactly it was given.

“As part of this mission, we will take action against any terrorist group that poses a threat to U.S. interests or the homeland, including members of ISIL-Khorasan,” Davis said.

Davis said there had been “some” strikes on the group in recent days.

The change in the authorization was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the State Department, Islamic State-Khorasan was formed in January 2015, based in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, made up of former members of the Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban.

U.S. Army General John Campbell, who leads international forces in Afghanistan, has said Islamic State had coalesced over the last five or six months in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces and had been fighting the Taliban for several months.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; editing by Grant McCool)

U.S. begins implementing restrictions on visa-free travel

United States officials have begun implementing new policies regarding the country’s Visa Waiver Program, the State Department announced Thursday.

The program allows citizens and nationals of 38 countries to visit the United States without obtaining a visa, provided they stay for fewer than 90 days.

Congress sought to reform the program in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks.

The new laws prevent anyone who has visited Iran, Iraq, Syria or Sudan since March 1, 2011, or holds citizenship in one of those four countries, from entering the United States through the Visa Waiver Program. They will now have to apply for a visa at a U.S. embassy, a process that includes an in-person interview.

A White House fact sheet says 20 million people visit the United States under the Visa Waiver Program every year, and the program had utilized security checks designed to keep terrorists and other potential security threats out of the nation.

Those who sought to reform the program said there were shortcomings in that screening process, and Congress voted to approve the changes in December.

Representative Candice Miller (R-Michigan), who originally introduced the legislation, issued a statement when it was passed. She said the bill “improves our ability to identify and stop individuals who have traveled to terrorist hotspots to join ISIS and other like-minded organizations before they reach U.S. soil.”

In a news release, State Department officials said “the great majority” of people who use the Visa Waiver Program would not be affected by the changes.

The department added that Secretary of Homeland Security can waive the visa requirement for individuals who went to the aforementioned four countries on a case-by-case basis. People who traveled for diplomatic reasons, humanitarian work, military service or as a journalist may qualify for waivers.

Islamic State attack sets storage tanks ablaze at Libyan oil terminal

BENGHAZI/TRIPOLI, Libya (Reuters) – Islamic State militants set fire on Thursday to oil storage tanks in a fresh assault on Ras Lanuf terminal in northern Libya and the group threatened further attacks as they exploit a prolonged power vacuum in the large north African nation.

The chairman of the National Oil Corporation, Mustafa Sanalla, told reporters in Tripoli that Ras Lanuf – shut since December 2014 – would remain closed for a “long time” because of the damage inflicted on Thursday and in earlier attacks.

Libya remains dogged by violence and political turmoil nearly five years after the overthrow of veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi, with two rival governments and parliaments based in Tripoli and in the east as well as various armed factions vying for power and a share of the country’s oil wealth.

The Islamic State militants drove into the oil storage site early in the morning and clashed with security guards before retreating and firing from a distance to set four tanks on fire, NOC spokesman Mohamed al-Harari said.

A pipeline leading from the Amal oil field to the nearby Es Sider terminal, the biggest on Libya’s Mediterranean coast, was also targeted, said Mohamed al-Manfi, an energy official allied with Libya’s eastern-based government.

Ras Lanuf and Es Sider together have an export capacity of 600,000 barrels per day. They were processing about half of that before they were both closed in December 2014.

The NOC said the area was facing an “environmental catastrophe”, with huge columns of smoke billowing from the fires and damage to power lines supplying residential and industrial districts.

“Residents are trying to build a barrier to stop the oil and fire from reaching gas pipelines and water pipelines, and the main road,” the NOC’s Harari said.

Islamic State militants have managed to establish a foothold in the city of Sirte, which lies about 125 miles along the coast to the west of Ras Lanuf and Es Sider.

In a video posted on Islamic State’s official Telegram channel, fighter Abu Abdelrahman al-Liby said: “Today Es Sider port and Ras Lanuf and tomorrow the port of Brega and after the ports of Tobruk, Es Serir, Jallo, and al-Kufra.”

OIL PRODUCTION DISRUPTED

Libya’s current oil production stands at 362,000 barrels per day, he told Reuters. That is less than a quarter of a 2011 high of 1.6 million barrels per day, though production has not changed significantly in recent weeks.

Two weeks ago clashes between Islamic State and the Petroleum Facilities Guards who control the area around Es Sider and Ras Lanuf left seven oil storage tanks damaged by fire and at least 18 guards dead.

At least 1.3 million barrels of oil were lost as a result of the clashes and up to 3 million barrels could be at risk because of the latest attack, said NOC spokesman Harari.

The NOC sent a tanker to remove oil from the terminals in an effort to prevent further damage, but guards prevented it from loading, citing security concerns.

On Thursday the NOC blamed the “intransigence” of the Petroleum Facilities Guards in blocking the shipment for the further damage it suffered from the latest attack.

The guards are led by a federalist who has supported Libya’s eastern government, but analysts say their loyalties are uncertain within the country’s complex pattern of allegiances.

(Additional reporting by Ali Abdelaty in Cairo and Aidan Lewis in Tunis; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Gareth Jones)

In Paris, military chiefs vow to intensify Islamic State fight

PARIS (Reuters) – Defense chiefs from the United States, France, Britain and four other countries pledged on Wednesday to intensify their fight against Islamic State, in an effort to capitalize on recent battlefield gains against the militants.

Islamic State lost control of the western Iraqi city of Ramadi last month, in a sorely needed victory for U.S.-backed Iraqi forces. But critics, including some in the U.S. Congress, say the U.S. strategy is still far too weak and lacks sufficient military support from Sunni Arab allies.

“We agreed that we all must do more,” U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a news conference after talks in Paris among the “core” military coalition members, which also included Germany, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands.

A joint statement by the Western ministers re-committed their governments to work with the U.S.-led coalition “to accelerate and intensify the campaign.”

The Paris setting for the talks itself sent a message, coming just over two months after the city was struck by deadly shooting and bombing attacks claimed by Islamic State.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian sounded an upbeat tone about the campaign, saying Islamic State was in retreat.

“Because Daesh is retreating on the ground and … because we have been able to hit its resources, it’s now time to increase our collective effort by putting in place a coherent military strategy,” he said.

British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said the goal was now to “tighten the noose around the head of the snake in Syria in Raqqa.”

Carter forecast that the coalition would need to ramp up the number of police and military trainers. He also emphasized preparations to eventually recapture the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State and the expanding role of U.S. special operations forces in Iraq and Syria.

COALITION NOT “WINNING”

Still, U.S. Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and other critics of U.S. President Barack Obama’s approach to the war effort say Islamic State still poses a potent threat.

“ISIL has lost some territory on the margin, but has consolidated power in its core territories in both Iraq and Syria,” McCain said at a Wednesday hearing on U.S. war strategy, using another acronym for Islamic State.

“Meanwhile, ISIL continues to metastasize across the region in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, and Egypt. Its attacks are now global, as we saw in Paris.”

Carter has sought to lay out a strategy to confront Islamic State, both by wiping out its strongholds in Iraq and Syria and by addressing its spread beyond its self-declared caliphate.

But U.S. officials have declined to set a timeline for what could be a long-term campaign that also requires political reconciliation to ultimately succeed.

Carter announced a meeting next month of defense ministers from all 26 military members of the anti-Islamic State coalition, as well as Iraq, in what he described as the first face-to-face meeting of its kind.

“Every nation must come prepared to discuss further contributions to the fight,” he said. “And I will not hesitate to engage and challenge current and prospective members of the coalition as we go forward.”

(Additional reporting by Marine Pennetier, editing by Larry King)

UN report details horrors affecting Iraqi civilians

The ongoing violence in Iraq killed nearly 4,000 civilians in just six months last year and thousands more are being held as slaves, according to a new report from the United Nations.

The report, a project of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was released Tuesday and shines a light on the extent of the toll that the Islamic State’s presence in Iraq is taking on the nation’s civilian population.

“The violence suffered by civilians in Iraq remains staggering,” the report reads. “The so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL) continues to commit systematic and widespread violence and abuses of international human rights law and humanitarian law. These acts may, in some instances, amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.”

The report indicates at least 3,855 civilians were killed between May 1 and October 31 of last year, pushing the total number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of 2014 to 18,802.

“Even the obscene casualty figures fail to accurately reflect exactly how terribly civilians are suffering in Iraq. The figures capture those who were killed or maimed by overt violence, but countless others have died from the lack of access to basic food, water or medical care,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a statement.

The report indicates at least 7,056 civilians were wounded in Iraq during the six-month window last year. In total, there have been at least 36,245 civilians wounded since the beginning of 2014.

Some 3.2 million people have been displaced within Iraq over the past two years, the UN report found.

The report documents reasons they may be fleeing their homes, including the Islamic State’s gruesome execution techniques.

It cites many reports of public beheadings and several instances in which civilians were thrown from rooftops, as well as one incident in which militants forced nine people to lay down in a Mosul street and then ran them over with a bulldozer in front of a crowd of onlookers.

Some civilians who weren’t killed or injured are being sold into slavery, the report found.

The agencies behind the report wrote they believe the Islamic State currently holds roughly 3,500 people in slavery, many of whom are women the terrorist group is holding as sex slaves.

The Islamic State is also abducting children and training them to become soldiers, according to the report, and captured between 800 and 900 children in one single incident in Mosul.

But Iraqi civilians are facing threats to their safety from other organizations, the UN reported.

The report documents a series of acts allegedly carried out by pro-government forces, including abductions, illegal killings and evictions of people who were trying to escape violence. The acts may represent a violation of international humanitarian law, the UN agencies said in the report.

“This report lays bare the enduring suffering of civilians in Iraq and starkly illustrates what Iraqi refugees are attempting to escape when they flee to Europe and other regions. This is the horror they face in their homelands,” Hussein said in a statement.

Indonesia looks to stop militants overseas from returning home, planning attacks

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesian President Joko Widodo is considering a regulation that would prohibit Indonesians from joining radical groups overseas, in an effort to prevent a deadlier attack than last week’s militant assault on Jakarta.

At a meeting on Tuesday at the palace, top political and security officials agreed to review anti-terrorism laws, which currently allow Indonesians to freely return home after fighting with Islamic State in Syria.

Security forces fear that returning jihadis could launch a much more calculated attack than the amateurish assault militants launched on Thursday using two pistols and eleven low-yield homemade bombs. Eight people were killed in the attack, including the four attackers.

“We’ve agreed to review the terrorism law to focus on prevention,” parliamentary speaker Zulkifli Hasan told Reuters.

“Currently there is nothing in the law covering training. There is also nothing currently covering people going overseas (to join radical groups) and returning. This needs to be broadened.”

Proposed revisions would also tighten prison sentences for terrorism offences, he said.

Chief security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters the new regulation would allow suspects to be temporarily detained.

“The point is to give police the authority to preemptively and temporarily detain (a suspect) while they get information to prevent future incidents,” Pandjaitan said, adding the detention could last up to two weeks.

Widodo said discussions on the new regulation, which would be a stop-gap measure until parliament can revise its anti-terrorism law, were still at “an early stage”.

“This is very pressing. Many people have left for Syria or returned,” he said, but did not say when a decision would be made.

Roughly 500 Indonesians are believed by authorities to have traveled to the Middle East to join Islamic State. About 100 are believed to have returned, most of whom did not see frontline combat.

Indonesian Police Chief Badrodin Haiti told Reuters in an interview Monday that the country was bracing for the return of these more experienced fighters, who may be capable of carrying out far more sophisticated operations than last week’s attack, which was hampered by poor training and weapons.

Thursday’s bombings and shootings in the heart of Jakarta were the first attack in Indonesia attributed to Islamic State. The last major militant attacks in the country were in 2009, when suicide bombers struck two luxury hotels in the city.

Even if the new revisions are imposed, Indonesia would still have weaker anti-terrorism laws than some of its neighbors.

Malaysia last April passed a law reintroducing detention without trial, three years after a similar measure was revoked. Australia has in recent years passed measures banning its citizens from returning from conflict zones in Syria and the Middle East, while making it easier to monitor domestic communications.

(Additional reporting by Jakarta bureau; Editing by Randy Fabi)

Indonesian prisons a breeding ground for Islamic militancy

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Afif was an inmate in a high-security Indonesian jail when he transformed from aspiring radical Islamist to soldier for Islamic State, ready to sacrifice his life for a group based thousands of miles away in the Middle East.

His journey ended with his death last week on a busy intersection in central Jakarta, after the gun and suicide bomb attack he launched with three other militants that brought Islamic State’s brand of violence to Southeast Asia for the first time.

Afif’s graduation from jailbird to jihadi shines a light on a prison system where staff shortages, overcrowding and corruption have allowed extremists to mingle and emerge as determined killers in the name of Islam.

Security officials say Afif, also known as Sunakim, was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking part in a militant training camp in the province of Aceh, where Islam is generally practiced in a stricter form than other parts of Indonesia.

Once behind bars, he refused to follow deradicalization programs, the officials added.

Akbar Hadi, spokesman for the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, declined to comment on whether Afif’s activities were monitored after he was released last August.

Police said he planned the Jakarta siege with the three other attackers, one of whom was also a former convict. Four civilians died in the attack along with the militants.

A report by the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) last year said that 26 prisons across Indonesia housed about 270 “convicted terrorists”, but Islamic State supporters accounted for only a small minority of them.

National Police Chief Badrodin Haiti told Reuters that at least five jailed militants were believed to have been in communication with the plotters in the lead-up to the attack.

COURIERS, CELL PHONES

While inside Jakarta’s Cipinang prison, Afif was one of some 20 convicts heavily influenced by fellow convict and firebrand Islamist cleric Aman Abdurrahman, experts said.

From behind bars, Abdurrahman heads an umbrella organization formed last year through an alliance of splinter groups that support Islamic State.

“They shared the same cells, they prayed together, they cooked together,” said Taufik Andrie, Jakarta-based executive director of the Institute for International Peacebuilding.

Abdurrahman regularly spread “takfiri” doctrine, a belief among Sunni militants who justify their violence by branding others as infidels, through his sermons and lectures.

Abdurrahman was moved to a maximum security prison in Nusakambangan in Central Java in 2013, but continued to communicate with Afif and a growing group of around 200 followers using couriers and cell phones.

A lawyer for Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, another high-profile radical inmate at Nusakambangan, told Reuters it is easy to convey messages to the outside world from inside prison.

“Any kind of visitor is allowed and even if they don’t exchange any cell phones, there is still an exchange of information and the visitor can interpret that,” said Achmad Michdan.

SOCIAL MEDIA A KEY TOOL

Experts say radical inmates like Abdurrahman still get away with disseminating sermons by email, Facebook, and hard copies. Despite being behind bars, Abdurrahman was able to make an online pledge of allegiance to Islamic State in 2014.

“Those with more radical thinking can also hold religious sermons on a regular basis and it is very easy to convey radical ideas to others,” said Farihin, a former militant who participated in a government deradicalization program during his time in a prison in Palu on the island of Sulawesi.

Indonesia’s counter-terrorism chief, Saud Usman Nasution, told Reuters in November that prison officials were unable to halt this type of communication because of overcrowding.

“We are aware that there is a problem with convicts being allowed to communicate using the Internet and cell phones. There is definitely room for improvement,” said Ministry of Law and Human Rights spokesman Hadi, adding that inmates cannot be forced to join deradicalization programs.

Experts say access to social media and messaging apps like Telegram is a large part of the problem.

Police believe the alleged mastermind of the Jakarta attack, an Indonesian fighting with Islamic State in Syria called Bahrun Naim, used social media to communicate his radical ideas to followers in Indonesia.

He may also have transferred thousands of dollars to accounts here, police said.

Since the attack, Indonesia has blocked websites and sent letters to social media networks Twitter, Facebook and Telegram, asking them to take down radical content.

(Additional reporting by Aubrey Belford; Editing by John Chalmers and Mike Collett-White)

Islamic State presses attack to capture more land in eastern Syria

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Islamic State captured ground from Syrian government forces near the eastern city of Deir al-Zor on Monday, a group monitoring the war said, pressing a three-day assault which state media says has killed 300 people.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there was still no word on the fate of over 400 people it reported kidnapped when IS began to attack government-held areas of the city on Saturday. State media has made no mention of the abductions.

Deir al-Zor is the main city in a province of the same name. The province links Islamic State’s de facto capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa with territory controlled by the militant group in neighboring Iraq.

Islamic State, in control of most of Deir al-Zor province, has laid siege since March to remaining government-held areas in the city of Deir al-Zor.

This is the third day of IS attacks on the towns of Ayyash and Begayliya, which lie to the northwest of Deir al-Zor city on the approach from Raqqa.

IS has now taken control of areas in the south and west of Begayliya, and has seized the Saeqa military camp near the town of Ayyash, the Observatory said.

A Syrian official source told Reuters the Syrian army repelled the attacks but IS is continuing the offensive.

Speaking to Al Mayadeen television news early on Monday, Deir al-Zor’s governor said the security situation in Begayliya was “excellent”.

Syria’s state news agency SANA said on Sunday that at least 300 people, including women and children, had been killed during the attacks in Deir al-Zor.

The Observatory says around 400 people said to have been kidnapped have been taken to countryside to the west of the city, closer to Raqqa.

The United Nations has warned that around 200,000 besieged residents in Deir al-Zor face severe food shortages and sharply deteriorating conditions.

The Syrian government has dropped some basic commodities into the city in recent weeks, and Russia said on Friday it had dropped 22 tonnes of aid to the besieged part of the city.

The Syrian foreign ministry said on Monday it had written to the United Nations condemning the attack. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, also condemned the attacks by IS in a statement on Monday.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Mariam Karouny; Editing by Tom Perry and Dominic Evans)

Israel says ISIS could attack it and Jordan after Syria setbacks

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Islamic State’s battleground setbacks in Syria have increased the chance of an attack by the insurgents or their allies on Israel and Jordan, Israel’s military chief said on Monday. 

While focused on shoring up its Syrian and Iraqi fiefdoms, Islamic State has in recent months stepped up attacks abroad and issued public threats to include Israel among its targets.

Lieutenant-General Gadi Eizenkot, chief of Israel’s armed forces, said that with Russia intervening last year to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the insurgents’ advance had been largely arrested.

An exception to this, Eizenkot said, was in the southern Syrian border nexus with Israel and Jordan.

“The successes against ISIS raise the probability, in my eyes, that we will see them turning their guns both against us and against the Jordanians,” he told a conference hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Institute for International Security Studies.

Islamic State itself does not have a strong presence on Syria’s south-west border region, but one of several Islamist forces in the area, the Yarmouk Martyrs’ Brigade, is believed by its opponents to be linked to the ultra-hardline militant group.

It has fought rival insurgent forces from Syria’s al Qaeda offshoot, the Nusra Front, and Ahrar al-Sham for control of territory next to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and close to northern Jordan.

“In their strategic logic, there is a certain logic in connecting Israel with Jordan,” Eizenkot said, and in the border area “they are not experiencing what the organization and other global jihadi groups are experiencing inside Syria”.

A voice recording release on social media three weeks ago and attributed to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi warned that Israel was a target.

Jordan, one of two Arab countries to have signed peace treaties with Israel, has largely weathered the upheaval in much of the Middle East over the past five years, though it has absorbed major refugee influxes from Syria and Iraq, another neighbor wrecked by Islamic State insurgents. 

Jordan has low-key military backing from the United States and Israel, cooperation that the parties rarely discuss publicly.

Israel has formally kept out of the almost five-year-old Syrian civil war, though it has launched occasional bombing raids to thwart suspected transfers of advanced arms by Assad’s government to allied Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.

Hezbollah, which fought Israel’s technologically superior military to standstill in the 2006 Lebanon war, remained a major threat and stood to receive boosted support from its Iranian patron thanks to the lifting of international sanctions against Tehran, Eizenkot said.

But he also described Hezbollah as cautious to open a new front with Israel, noting that while the Shi’ite militia had gained combat experience reinforcing Syrian government forces against Sunni Islamist-led rebels, it had also suffered losses.

Some 1,300 Hezbollah guerrillas had been killed and almost another 5,000 wounded in Syria, out of a regular fighting force of 20,000 and a reservist force of 20,000-25,000, Eizenkot said.

Hezbollah generally does not publish details on its casualties, and says it is ready to fight Israel again.

(Editing by Dominic Evans)