Tag Archives: Suicide Bomber

Islamic State cornered in Mosul as Iraq prepares victory celebrations

Members of Iraqi Federal Police carry a boy as they celebrate victory of military operations against the Islamic State militants in West Mosul, Iraq July 2, 2017.

By Stephen Kalin and Maher Chmaytelli

MOSUL/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Islamic State fighters were battling to hold on to the last few streets under their control in the Old City of Mosul on Monday, making a doomed last stand in their former Iraqi stronghold.

In fierce fighting, Iraqi army units forced the insurgents back into a shrinking rectangle no more than 300 by 500 meters beside the Tigris river, according to a map published by the military media office.

Smoke covered parts of the Old City, which were rocked by air strikes and artillery salvos through the morning.

The number of Islamic State (IS) militants fighting in Mosul has dwindled from thousands at the start of the government offensive more than eight months ago to a mere couple of hundred now, according to the Iraqi military.

Iraqi forces say they expect to reach the Tigris and regain full control over the city by the end of this week. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is expected to visit Mosul to formally declare victory, and a week of nationwide celebrations is planned.

Mosul is by far the largest city captured by Islamic State. It was here, nearly three years ago to the day, that it declared the founding of its “caliphate” over parts of Iraq and Syria.

With Mosul gone, its territory in Iraq will be limited to areas west and south of the city where some tens of thousands of civilians live.

“Victory is very near, only 300 meters separate the security forces from the Tigris,” military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told state TV.

Abadi declared the end of Islamic State’s “state of falsehood” on Thursday, after the security forces took Mosul’s medieval Grand al-Nuri mosque.

It was from here that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made his first and only video appearance, proclaiming himself “caliph” – the ruler of a theocratic Islamic state – on July 4, 2014.

 

SUICIDE ATTACKS

With its territory shrinking fast, the group has been stepping up suicide attacks in the parts of Mosul taken by Iraqi forces and elsewhere.

On Sunday, a male suicide bomber dressed in a woman’s veil killed 14 people and wounded 13 others in a displacement camp west of the capital Baghdad known as Kilo 60, security sources said. Islamic State claimed responsibility.

“The people who were attacked had fled to Kilo 60 for their safety. Many have traveled huge distances seeking help,” Lise Grande, the United Nations’ Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, said in a statement.

Islamic State said on Sunday it had carried out 32 suicide attacks in June in Iraq and 23 in Syria, of which 11 were on the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces attacking its stronghold of Raqqa.

Destroyed buildings from clashes are seen during the fight with the Islamic States militants in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq July 3,

Destroyed buildings from clashes are seen during the fight with the Islamic States militants in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq July 3, 2017. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah

Iraqi state television said thousands of people had fled Mosul’s densely-populated Old City over the past 24 hours.

But thousands more are believed trapped in the area with little food, water or medicine, and are effectively being used as human shields, according to residents who have managed to escape.

Months of grinding urban warfare have displaced 900,000 people, about half the city’s pre-war population, and killed thousands, according to aid organizations.

Baghdadi has left the fighting in Mosul to local commanders and is believed to be hiding near the Iraq-Syrian border, according to U.S. and Iraqi military sources.

The group has moved its remaining command and control structures to Mayadin, in eastern Syria, U.S. intelligence sources have said.

 

(Additional reporting by Khaled al-Ramahi in Mosul; writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

 

MI5 to review its handling of intelligence on Manchester bomber

Armed police officers stand next to a police cordon outside the Manchester Arena, where U.S. singer Ariana Grande had been performing, in Manchester, northern England, Britain, May 23, 2017. REUTERS/Andrew

By Costas Pitas

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s MI5 has begun an internal review of how it handled intelligence on Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who was known to the authorities but not under active investigation, a source told Reuters on Monday.

Interior minister Amber Rudd said the review was the “right first step” for the intelligence agency to take in the wake of the May 22 bombing that killed 22 people at a pop concert by U.S. singer Ariana Grande.

MI5 is subject to scrutiny by a committee of parliament, and it is highly unusual for British authorities to make public that the security service is conducting its own internal investigation into possible lapses.

“The review will look at what was known about Abedi, what decisions were made about the intelligence and what, if anything, could have been done differently,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“This is a review that would seek to answer whether there are lessons to be learned from how the Security Service handled the intelligence on Abedi.”

The source told Reuters that Abedi was not among the 3,000 people currently under active investigation by MI5, although he was one of around 20,000 people known to the agency, whose focus is on countering terrorism and espionage.

The BBC said MI5 was alerted at least three times to the  ‘extremist views’ of Abedi, a 22-year-old who grew up in Manchester in a family of immigrants from Libya. It was not possible to confirm that report.

“This is an ongoing investigation so I’m not going to be drawn into comments on the actual man who committed this crime,” Rudd told BBC television, declining to say what was known about Abedi and when.

Last week’s attack, the deadliest in Britain since 2005, was claimed by Islamic State. It drew particular revulsion because of the targeting of children – the youngest victim was just eight years old, and nine of the others were teenagers.

Balloons and floral tributes for the victims of the attack on the Manchester Arena are seen in St Ann's square in Manchester, Britain, May 24, 2017.

FILE PHOTO: Balloons and floral tributes for the victims of the attack on the Manchester Arena are seen in St Ann’s square in Manchester, Britain, May 24, 2017. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo

Earlier on Monday, police made a 16th arrest as part of the case.

Britons head to the polls in 10 days’ time to elect a new government, with security and police cuts having risen to the top of the political agenda since the bombing last Monday.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives have seen their poll lead cut in the wake of the attack and after a U-turn over their social care plans for the elderly.

Surveys suggest May – who as a former interior minister oversaw the police and domestic intelligence agency – might not win the landslide predicted just a month ago.

It was not clear whether the authorities became aware of Abedi during May’s tenure as interior minister between 2010 and 2016.

British security services have thwarted 18 militant plots in the UK since 2013, including five since an attack in central London in March, when a man mowed down pedestrians in a car and then stabbed a policeman at the entrance to parliament, a source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters last week.

(Additional reporting by Sangameswaran S in Bengaluru; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Mark Trevelyan)

Russian metro bomb suspect a Muslim born in central Asia: investigators

People leave candles in memory of victims of a blast in St.Petersburg metro, at Tekhnologicheskiy institut metro station in St. Petersburg, Russia, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Grigory Dukor

By Denis Pinchuk and Hulkar Isamova

OSH, Kyrgyzstan/ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – A Russian suicide bomber originally from mainly Muslim Kyrgyzstan detonated the explosives in a St Petersburg train carriage that killed 14 people and wounded 50, authorities said on Tuesday.

The suspect had radical Islamist links, Russian media cited law enforcement officials as saying, raising the possibility Monday’s attack could have been inspired by Islamic State, which has not struck a major city in Russia before. So far, no-one has claimed responsibility for the blast.

Kyrgyz officials identified the suspect as Akbarzhon Jalilov, born in the city of Osh in 1995, and Russian officials confirmed his identity, saying he had also left a bomb found at another metro station before it went off.

Biographical details pieced together from social media and Russian officials suggested Jalilov was an fairly typical young St Petersburg resident with an interest in Islam as well as pop music and martial arts but no obvious links to militants.

His uncle, Eminzhon Jalilov, told Reuters by telephone that his nephew was a mosque-attending Muslim, but that he was “not a fanatic”.

The explosion in the middle of Monday afternoon occurred when the train was in a tunnel deep underground, amplifying the force of the blast. The carriage door was blown off, and witnesses described seeing injured passengers with bloodied and blackened bodies.

State investigative authorities said fragments of the body of the suspect had been found among the dead, indicating that he was a suicide bomber.

“From the genetic evidence and the surveillance cameras there is reason to believe that the person behind the terrorist act in the train carriage was the same one who left a bag with an explosive device at the Ploshchad Vosstaniya station,” they said in a statement.

Russia has been on alert against attacks in reprisal for its military intervention in Syria, where Moscow’s forces have been supporting troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad against Western-backed armed groups as well as the hardline Islamic State (IS) which grew out of the conflict.

IS, now under attack by all sides in Syria’s multi-faceted war, has repeatedly threatened revenge and been linked to recent bombings elsewhere in Europe.

If it is confirmed that the metro bomber was linked to radical Islamists, it could provoke anger among some Russians at Moscow’s decision to intervene in Syria, a year before an election which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win.

PREVIOUS BOMBING

Officials said they were treating the blast as an act of terrorism, but there was no official confirmation of any link to Islamist radicals.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was cynical to say the bombing in St Petersburg was revenge for Russia’s role in Syria. He said the attack showed that Moscow needed to press on with its fight against global terrorism.

A page on social media site VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, belonging to someone with the same name and year of birth as Jalilov, included photos of him relaxing with friends in a bar, smoking from a hookah pipe. He was dressed in jackets and a baseball cap.

A Reuters reporter visited a house in Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan, which neighbors said was the family home of Jalilov. The home, a modest but well-maintained one-storey brick building, was empty.

Neighbors said Jalilov was from a family of ethnic Uzbeks, and that while they knew his parents they had not seen the young man for years. They said his father worked as a panel-beater in a car repair shop.

“They are a very good family. Always friendly, never argue. And they have good kids,” one of the neighbors, Mirkomil Akhmadaliyev, told Reuters.

Later on Tuesday, Jalilov’s mother appeared but refused to speak to reporters, saying she needed to retrieve something and hurry back to a security service office.

Osh is part of the Fergana Valley, a fertile strip of land that straddles Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan which is mainly populated by ethnic Uzbeks. It has a tradition of Islamist radicalism and hundreds of people have set out from the area to join Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

A blast at a nightclub in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve that killed 39 people involved a suspect from the same part of central Asia. The bomber in that attack said he had been acting under the direction of IS militants in Syria.

Jalilov’s uncle said his nephew moved to Russia in 2012. He is registered at an upscale apartment in the north of St Petersburg, according to a source in the Russian authorities, and he has a Daewoo Nexia car registered in his name.

A man who said he was a representative of the apartment’s owner told Reuters that Jalilov had never actually lived there, but had given the address as his residence in official documents.

His VKontakte page included links to a site featuring sayings from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth century preacher on whose teaching Wahhabism, a conservative and hardline branch of Islam, is based. But there were no links to Islamist militants.

PUTIN VISIT “NOTEWORTHY”

Russia’s health minister Veronika Skvortsova said on Tuesday that the death toll from the blast, which hit at 2:40 p.m. (1140 GMT), had risen to 14, with 50 wounded.

St Petersburg television showed footage of the corpse of a man they said was the perpetrator. The man, with a close-cropped beard, resembled footage of a young man wearing a blue beanie hat and a jacket with a fur-lined hood captured on closed circuit television identified by Russian media as a suspect.

“It has been ascertained that an explosive device could have been detonated by a man, fragments of whose body were found in the third carriage of the train,” Russia’s state investigative committee said in a statement.

“The man has been identified but his identity will not be disclosed for now in the interests of the investigation,” the statement added.

President Putin, who was visiting St Petersburg at the time of the blast, went to the site late on Monday.

The Kremlin said it was “noteworthy” that Putin had been in the city. It did not elaborate, but said such attacks on Russia were a challenge for every citizen, including the president.

Two years ago, Islamic State said it had brought down a plane carrying Russian tourists home from a Red Sea resort. All 224 people on board the flight were killed.

Monday’s blast raised security fears beyond Russian frontiers. France, which has itself suffered a series of attacks, announced additional security measures in Paris.

(Additional reporting by Svetlana Reiter, Katya Golubkova, Polina Nikolskaya, Sujata Rao, Alexander Winning and Maria Tsvetkova in MOSCOW and Olga Dzyubenko in BISHKEK, writing by Philippa Fletcher; editing by Christian Lowe and Sonya Hepinstall)

Suicide Bomber kills at least 70 at Pakistan Hospital

First responders and volunteers transport an injured man away from the scene of a bomb blast outside a hospital in Quetta

By Gul Yousafzai

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber in Pakistan killed at least 70 people and wounded dozens more in an attack on mourners gathered at a hospital in Quetta, according to officials in the violence-plagued southwestern province of Baluchistan.

The bomber struck as more than 100 mourners, mostly lawyers and journalists, crowded into the emergency department to accompany the body of a prominent lawyer who had been shot and killed in the city earlier in the day, Faridullah, a journalist who was among the wounded, told Reuters.

Abdul Rehman Miankhel, a senior official at the government-run Civil Hospital, where the explosion occurred, told reporters that at least 63 people had been killed, with more than 112 wounded, as the casualty toll spiked from initial estimates.

“There are many wounded, so the death toll could rise,” said Rehmat Saleh Baloch, the provincial health minister.

Television footage showed scenes of chaos, with panicked people fleeing through debris as smoke filled the hospital corridors.

The motive behind the attack was unclear and no group had yet claimed responsibility, but several lawyers have been targeted during a recent spate of killings in Quetta.

The latest victim, Bilal Anwar Kasi, was shot and killed while on his way to the city’s main court complex, senior police official Nadeem Shah told Reuters. He was the president of Baluchistan Bar Association.

The subsequent suicide attack appeared to target his mourners, Anwar ul Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Baluchistan government, said.

“It seems it was a pre-planned attack,” he said.

Police cordoned off the hospital following the blast.

Aside from a long-running separatist insurgency, and sectarian tensions, Baluchistan also suffers from rising crime.

In January, a suicide bomber killed 15 people outside a polio eradication center in an attack claimed by both the Pakistani Taliban and Jundullah, another Islamist militant group that has pledged allegience to Islamic State in the Middle East.

Quetta has also long been regarded as a base for the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership has regularly held meetings there in the past.

In May, Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed by a U.S. drone strike while traveling to Quetta from the Pakistan-Iran border.

(Writing by Asad Hashim; Editing by Paul Tait and Simon Cameron-Moore)

Suicide attacker kills six Jordanian troops at Syria border

Injured soldier transported to nearby hospital

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

AMMAN (Reuters) – Six Jordanian border guards were killed by a suicide bomber who drove a car at speed across the border from Syria and rammed it into a military post on Tuesday, security officials said.

The explosives-laden vehicle blew up a few hundred meters from a camp for Syrian refugees in a remote and desolate area where the borders of Iraq, Syria and Jordan meet, a Jordanian army statement said.

The southeastern desert area is close to where Islamic State militants are known to operate, according to a security source who requested anonymity. The source said the attack appeared to be a well planned military operation. No group has claimed responsibility.

The army said a number of other vehicles used in the attack at around 5.30 a.m. (2230 EDT) were destroyed and that 14 other people were wounded. The suicide bomber drove out from behind a berm and dodged gunfire to reach the military post, it added.

It was the first such assault targeting Jordan from Syria since Syria’s descent into conflict in 2011 and followed an attack on June 6 on a security office near the Jordanian capital Amman in which five people, including three Jordanian intelligence officers, were killed.

The incidents have jolted the Arab kingdom, which has been relatively unscathed by the instability that has swept the Arab world since 2011, including the expansion of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

In a rare move, the chief of staff of the Jordanian army General Mishal al Zibn declared the northern and northeastern border strip with Syria a closed military zone, an order that went into effect immediately.

“Any vehicle and personnel movement within these areas that move without prior coordination will be treated as enemy targets and dealt with firmly and without leniency,” the army statement said.

International relief workers said the Jordanian authorities had also suspended all humanitarian aid to the area and that this could put the lives of refugees at risk. This was not immediately by the Jordanian authorities.

IRON FIST

Jordan’s King Abdullah said the perpetrators would not go unpunished and that his security forces would deal with “an iron fist” with any group that sought to harm the country’s security or borders, a palace statement said.

Jordan is a staunch ally of the United States and is taking part in the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State in Syria, where the jihadist group still controls large areas of territory including much of the east.

Jordan has kept tight control of its frontier with Syria since the outbreak of the war in its neighbor.

Washington condemned the deadly attack as a “cowardly terrorist act” and said it would continue “unwavering support” for the Jordanian army, a statement from the U.S. embassy said.

Since the start of the Syria conflict, Washington has spent tens of millions of dollars to help Amman set up an elaborate surveillance system known as the Border Security Programme to stem infiltration by militants from Syria and Iraq.

The Rakban crossing targeted on Tuesday is a military zone far from any inhabited area, and includes a three-km (two-mile) stretch of berms built a decade ago to combat smuggling. The border is heavily guarded by patrols and drones.

U.S. Patriot missiles are stationed in the kingdom, however, and the U.S. army has hundreds of trainers in the country.

It is the only area where Jordan still receives Syrian refugees, some 50,000 of whom are stranded in Rakban refugee camp in a de facto no-man’s land some 330 km (200 miles) northeast of Amman.

REFUGEES STRAIN KINGDOM

The population of the camp has since last year grown from several thousand to over 50,000 people as the fighting in Syria intensified, relief workers say.

Jordan has been a big beneficiary of foreign aid because of its efforts to help refugees but has drawn criticism from Western allies and aid agencies over the humanitarian situation at Rakban, diplomats say.

Earlier waves of Syrian refugees had an easier time, with some walking just a few hundred meters to cross into Jordan. Jordan sealed those border crossings in 2013.

The United Nations refugee agency said late last year Jordan should accept the new wave of refugees — their numbers have risen, aid officials say, since Russia started air strikes last September — and move them to established camps closer to Amman.

Jordan, which has already accepted more than 600,000 U.N.-registered Syrian refugees, is resisting. It says Islamic State militants may have infiltrated their ranks as most of them come from Islamic State-held areas in central and eastern Syria, and has allowed only a trickle of refugees, mostly women and children, in recent months.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Tom Perry and Timothy Heritage)