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Hezbollah to send more fighters to Syria’s Aleppo

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement said on Friday it will send more fighters to Syria’s Aleppo area, a battleground where it has suffered heavy losses fighting alongside Syrian government forces against insurgent groups.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said thousands of Hezbollah’s Sunni militant foes had recently entered Syria via the Turkish border with the aim of taking over Aleppo and its surrounding countryside.

“We are facing a new wave…of projects of war against Syria which are being waged in northern Syria, particularly in the Aleppo region,” Nasrallah said in a speech broadcast live on the group’s Al Manar TV.

“The defense of Aleppo is the defense of the rest of Syria, it is the defense of Damascus, it is also the defense of Lebanon, and of Iraq,” he said.

“We will increase our presence in Aleppo,” he said. “Retreat is not permissible.”

Shi’ite, Iranian-backed Hezbollah has long supported President Bashar al-Assad against mostly Sunni insurgents.

Aleppo has been a focus of intensified fighting in the months since peace talks in Geneva broke down and a ceasefire deal brokered by Washington and Moscow unraveled. Russia intervened in the five-year-old conflict in September with an air campaign to support Assad.

“It was necessary for us to be in Aleppo … and we will stay in Aleppo,” Nasrallah said.

Aleppo city is split between government and rebel control. Russian and Syrian warplanes have pounded a road leading from the rebel-held areas north towards the Turkish border. That major rebel supply line from Turkey to Aleppo city was effectively cut by government advances earlier this year.

A pro-Damascus source recently told Reuters government forces and their allies are trying to encircle rebels in the Aleppo area. Assad, for whom the recapture of Aleppo would be a strategic prize, has vowed to take back “every inch” of Syria from what he calls terrorists.

Russia’s intervention has helped government forces and their allies advance against insurgents, and separately against Islamic State, in some areas.

But some of those battles have been costly, including around Aleppo.

Islamist insurgents including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in May inflicted heavy losses on a coalition of foreign Shi’ite fighters including Iranians and Hezbollah members south of Aleppo.

Nasrallah said that 26 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in June alone, a rare acknowledgment of the toll their involvement is taking. Several of its senior military commanders have died in the Syrian conflict, alongside hundreds of fighters.

Nasrallah also denied Hezbollah was in imminent fiscal trouble as a result of a U.S. law targeting the group’s finances. The law, passed in December, threatens to bar from the American financial market any bank that knowingly engages with Hezbollah. It has ignited a standoff between Hezbollah, a dominant political force in Lebanon, and the Lebanese central bank.

(The story is refiled to change city to area in lead)

(Reporting by John Davison and Laila Bassam; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

U.S.-backed Syrian forces clash with Islamic State militants inside Manbij: monitor

AMMAN (Reuters) – U.S.-backed Syrian forces fought Islamic State militants on Thursday inside the city of Manbij for the first time since they laid siege to the militant stronghold near the Turkish border, a monitor said.

The British-based Observatory for Human Rights said heavy clashes were taking place in western districts of Manbij after the alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters swept into the city near the Kutab roundabout, almost 2km from the city center.

The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), including a Kurdish militia and Arab allies that joined it last year, launched the campaign late last month with the backing of U.S. special forces to drive Islamic State from its last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish frontier.

If successful it could cut the militants’ main access route to the outside world, paving the way for an assault on their Syrian capital Raqqa.

Manbij is in a region some 40 km (25 miles) from the Turkish border and since the start of the offensive on May 31, the SDF has taken dozens of villages and farms around it but had held back from entering the city with many thousands of people still trapped there.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Alison Williams)

Libyan forces take losses in battle for Sirte against Islamic State

By Aidan Lewis

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Libyan forces fighting Islamic State in its stronghold of Sirte said on Wednesday that 36 of their men had been killed and nearly 150 wounded in the previous day’s clashes, one of the heaviest tolls in their month-long campaign.

Islamic State militants had been fighting hard to defend the shrinking territory they still control in the residential center of Sirte, said Abdalla Binrasali, a spokesman at the forces’ media center in Misrata.

“The resistance was fierce and they were firing with everything they’ve got, mortars, rockets and rifles,” he said. “They fear that if they lose more ground they will be defeated.”

Brigades largely composed of fighters from Misrata launched a campaign to retake Sirte from Islamic State last month. They rapidly recaptured ground west of Sirte at the end of May, but their advance slowed as they closed in on the center of the coastal city.

On Tuesday fighting escalated and the brigades said they had taken control of parts of the “700” neighborhood, the broadcasting and electricity company headquarters and a mosque.

The “700” neighborhood is strategically important because Islamic State snipers have been positioning themselves on the district’s taller buildings.

The brigades based in Misrata are aligned with a U.N.-backed unity government that arrived in Tripoli in March. It is seeking to replace two other rival governments that were set up in Tripoli and the east in 2014, and to unite Libya’s many political and armed factions.

Islamic State took advantage of Libya’s political turmoil to establish a presence in several of the country’s towns and cities from 2014.

It took full control of Sirte, the hometown of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, last year, creating its most significant base outside Syria and Iraq. However, the jihadist group has struggled to retain territory elsewhere in Libya.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Tearful Nepal relatives of Kabul attack victims receive bodies

Family cries over Nepali soldiers killed in an attack

By Gopal Sharma

KATHMANDU (Reuters) – Sobbing and weeping relatives of 12 Nepali nationals who were killed when a suicide bomber struck a minibus in Kabul received the bodies of their loved ones on Wednesday after they were flown from Afghanistan.

The victims were security guards working at the Canadian embassy in Kabul and came under attack on the way to work early on Monday. Two Indian nationals were also killed in the attack which left seven Nepalis wounded.

“This is the most difficult job for me to receive him dead,” said Sanjita Kumari, wife of Jitendra Singh Thapa, who came to the airport in Kathmandu with her 4-month-old son, to receive her husband’s body. “But there is no alternative and I must face it,” Kumari told Reuters, her baby pressed to the chest as tears streamed down her face.

Thapa, a former Indian army soldier, had served as a security guard in Iraq before going to war-torn Afghanistan in February this year with a promise to come back in November.

Relatives of the victims like Kumari heard of Monday’s attack in the media. She prayed for her husband until being told by the recruitment agency that he was dead.

“This came as a shock to me,” the 30-year-old said.

She said Thapa wanted their baby to serve in the British Army that has been recruiting Gurkha soldiers from the foothills of Nepal for 200 years.

Prime Minister K.P. Oli paid tributes to victims by placing marigold garlands on the wooden coffins which were then handed over to the relatives for funerals.

Monday’s attack in Kabul was the latest in a surge of violence that highlights the challenges faced by the government and its Western backers, as Washington considers whether to delay plans to reduce the number of its troops in Afghanistan.

At least 8,000 Nepali nationals are working in Afghanistan, according to the labor department, but actual numbers could be higher as many cross over to India, which shares an open border with Nepal, and then travel on to Afghanistan.

Nepal allows its citizens to work in Afghanistan as security guards at the UN, foreign embassies and their missions.

“The government will study the situation in which Nepalis were targeted after which we will decide whether to continue this,” Labor Minister Deepak Bohara told Reuters.

(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Douglas Busvine)

Assad tasks minister with forming new government: Syria state media

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad tasked Electricity Minister Emad Khamis with forming a new government on Wednesday, state news agency SANA reported, without giving an immediate reason for the formation of a new cabinet.

SANA gave no details on why Khamis would replace Wael al-Halaki as prime minister, or whether Halaki would be included in the new administration or had left government. Halaki himself replaced a prime minister who defected to the opposition.

The Damascus-based government controls most of the war-torn country’s major population centers in the west, with the notable exceptions of Idlib, which is held by insurgents, and Aleppo, where it controls half of the city.

Kurdish forces are in control of vast areas along the Turkish border, and Islamic State holds Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in the east.

Parliamentary elections were held in government-controlled areas in April, which the opposition said were meaningless.

Syria’s conflict, which began as a peaceful uprising against Assad, is now in its sixth year and has drawn in military involvement from regional and world powers and allowed for the growth of Islamic State.

Damascus formed a new government more than a year into the war in 2012, but its prime minister at the time, Riad Hijab, fled Syria soon afterwards. Hijab is now a prominent member of the main Syrian opposition that attended failed peace talks this year.

Assad ally Russia said last week there were U.S. proposals to incorporate parts of the opposition into the current Syrian government. Washington denied any such proposals and insists Assad must leave power.

The war has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced more than 11 million, half Syria’s pre-war population.

It has damaged the economy, causing the Syrian pound to lose more than 90 percent of its value.

(Reporting by John Davison and Lisa Barrington; Editing by Alison Williams)

Colombia to agree bilateral ceasefire with rebels this week: president

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia will reach agreement on a bilateral ceasefire at peace talks with leftist FARC rebels this week, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Tuesday, in what he said would mark a key advance in the negotiations to end 50 years of war.

Santos said this week the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels will complete the more than three-year-old negotiations by July 20.

“If the negotiators make a final effort to finish the definitive point that is a ceasefire and the end to hostilities, we will have taken a fundamental step in attaining peace,” Santos said in a speech at an education event in Bogota.

“I appeal to God that he gives us the strength to finish these accords this very week, because we have almost completed them.”

Government sources said the agreement would likely not mean the ceasefire would begin right away, but rather that the announcement would lay out the details of a ceasefire set to begin when a final peace deal is signed.

A ceasefire accord will likely include details on how the rebels will demobilize, the sources said, and FARC leader Rodrigo Londono, better known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, may sign the accord with Santos on Thursday or Friday.

The two sides have reached agreements on more than half a dozen topics but have yet to agree terms for the ceasefire or on how exactly a referendum for Colombians to approve the peace deal will be organized.

The FARC called a unilateral ceasefire nearly a year ago and the government responded by halting air strikes on rebel camps.

Negotiators missed a self-imposed deadline for signing a deal in March, and Santos has come under fire over the past week for comments about the referendum he has promised will take place to approve a deal.

Timochenko took to Twitter earlier on Tuesday to say he was against announcing a date by which the talks would finish.

“Practice has demonstrated that setting dates hurts the process, even more when there isn’t an accord,” the rebel leader tweeted. “Although we are advancing, we aren’t there yet.”

Latin America’s longest war has killed some 220,000 people and displaced millions of others since 1964. Tens of thousands have gone missing.

(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb, additional reporting by Monica Garcia; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraqi camps overwhelmed as residents flee Falluja fighting

By Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi government-run camps struggled on Sunday to shelter people fleeing Falluja, as the military battled Islamic State militants in the city’s northern districts.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the jihadists on Friday after troops reached the city center, following a four-week U.S.-backed assault.

But shooting, suicide bombs and mortar attacks continue.

More than 82,000 civilians have evacuated Falluja, an hour’s drive west of Baghdad, since the campaign began and up to 25,000 more are likely on the move, the United Nations said.

Yet camps are already overflowing with escapees who trekked several kilometers (miles) past Islamic State snipers and minefields in sweltering heat to find there was not even shade.

“People have run and walked for days. They left Falluja with nothing,” said Lise Grande, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. “They have nothing and they need everything.”

The exodus, which is likely to be many times larger if an assault on the northern Islamic State stronghold of Mosul goes ahead as planned later this year, has taken the government and humanitarian groups off guard.

With attention focused for months on Mosul, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in May that the army would prioritize Falluja, the first Iraqi city seized by the militants in early 2014.

He ordered measures on Saturday to help escapees and 10 new camps will soon go up, but the government does not even have a handle on the number of displaced people, many of whom are stranded out in the open or packed several families to a tent.

One site hosting around 1,800 people has only one latrine, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

“We implore the Iraqi government to take charge of this humanitarian disaster unfolding on our watch,” the aid group’s country director Nasr Muflahi said.

“WE JUST WANT OUR MEN”

Iraq’s cash-strapped government has struggled to meet basic needs for more than 3.4 million people across Iraq displaced by conflict, appealing for international funding and relying on local religious networks for support.

Yet unlike other battles, where many civilians sought refuge in nearby cities or the capital, people fleeing Falluja have been barred from entering Baghdad, just 60 km (40 miles) away, and aid officials note a lack of community mobilization.

Many Iraqis consider Falluja an irredeemable bulwark of Sunni Muslim militancy and regard anyone still there when the assault began as an Islamic State supporter. A bastion of the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion, it was seen as a launchpad for bombings in Baghdad.

The participation of Shi’ite militias in the battle alongside the army raised fears of sectarian killings, and the authorities have made arrests related to allegations that militiamen executed dozens of fleeing Sunni men.

Formal government forces are screening men to prevent Islamic State militants from disguising themselves as civilians to slip out of Falluja. Thousands have been freed and scores referred to the courts, but many others remain unaccounted for, security sources told Reuters.

At a camp in Amiriyat Falluja on Thursday, Fatima Khalifa said she had not heard from her husband and their 19-year-old son since they were taken from a nearby town two weeks earlier.

“We don’t know where they are or where they were taken,” she said. “We don’t want rice or cooking oil, we just want our men.”

(Additional reporting by Saif Hameed in Amiriyat Falluja; Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Alexander Smith)

Iraqi forces take Falluja government building from Islamic State: state TV

By Thaier al-Sudani

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi forces recaptured the municipal building in Falluja from Islamic State militants, the military said on Friday, nearly four weeks after the start of a U.S.-backed offensive to retake the city an hour’s drive west of Baghdad.

The ultra-hardline militants still control a significant portion of Falluja, where the conflict has forced the evacuation of most residents and many streets and houses remain mined with explosives.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition backing Baghdad’s quest to recover large swathes of western and northern Iraq from Islamic State told Reuters that government forces were “close (to the building) but don’t have control yet”.

A military statement said the federal police had raised the Iraqi state flag above the government building and were continuing to pursue insurgents.

A Reuters photographer in a southern district of Falluja said clashes involving aerial bombardment, artillery and machine gun fire were continuing. Clouds of smoke could be seen rising up from areas closer to the city center.

Heavily armed Interior Ministry police units were advancing along Baghdad Street, the main east-west road running through the city, and commandos from the counter-terrorism service (CTS) had surrounded Falluja hospital, the statement said.

Sabah al-Numani, a CTS spokesman, said on state television that snipers holed up inside the hospital, considered a nest of militants, were resisting but the facility was expected to be retaken within hours.

Government forces, with air support from the U.S.-led coalition, launched a major operation on May 23 to retake Falluja, an historic bastion of the Sunni Muslim insurgency against U.S. forces that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, and the Shi’ite-led governments that followed.

The city is seen as a launchpad for recent Islamic State (IS) bombings in the capital, making the offensive a crucial part of the government’s campaign to improve security.

U.S. allies would prefer to concentrate on Islamic State-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city that is located in the far north of the country.

Enemies of Islamic State have uncorked major offensives against the jihadists on other fronts, including a thrust by U.S.-backed forces against the city of Manbij in northern Syria.

The offensives amount to the most sustained pressure on IS since it proclaimed a caliphate in 2014.

MASS DISPLACEMENT

Islamic State has begun allowing thousands of civilians trapped in central Falluja to escape and the sudden exodus has overwhelmed displacement camps already filled beyond capacity.

More than 6,000 families left on Thursday alone, according to Falluja Mayor Issa al-Issawi, who fled the IS seizure of Falluja two years ago. He told Reuters on Friday: “We don’t know how to deal with this large number of civilians.”

The number of displaced people as of Thursday surpassed 68,000, according to the United Nations, which recently estimated Falluja’s total population at 90,000, only about a third of the total in 2010.

Witnesses said Islamic State had announced via loudspeakers that residents could leave if they wanted, but it was unclear why the group changed tact after clamping down on civilian movement only a few days ago.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which has been providing aid to displaced people, said escapees reported a sudden retreat of IS fighters at key checkpoints inside Falluja that had allowed civilians to leave.

Humanitarian needs were expected to increase dramatically in the coming hours, swamping the resources of foreign aid groups and the government as they struggle with funding shortfalls.

“Aid services in the camps were already overstretched and this development will push us all to the limit,” said NRC country director Nasr Muflahi.

Islamic State, which by U.S. estimates has been ousted from almost half of the territory it seized when Iraqi forces partially collapsed in 2014, has used residents as human shields to slow the military’s advance and help avoid air strikes.

Defence Ministry spokesman Naseer Nuri said the surge in displaced people was “proof that (Islamic State) has lost control over the city and its residents”.

(Additional reporting by Saif Hameed and Stephen Kalin in Baghdad; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Air strikes shatter Russian attempt at Syria Aleppo truce

By Lisa Barrington and Suleiman Al-Khalidi

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Air strikes hit rebel-held parts of Syria’s Aleppo city on Thursday just hours into a 48-hour ceasefire announced by Russia to try to curb weeks of intense fighting as government forces battle for control of the whole city.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad, announced the brief truce in the northern Syrian city on Thursday but did not say which parties had agreed to it. There has been no public comment from Assad’s government or factions fighting his forces on the truce announcement.

However the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said aerial strikes hit neighbourhoods in the opposition-held sector and that there were reports of one death and some injuries.

Rebels had also fired rockets into government-held territory in Aleppo, the Observatory said, and fighting and air strikes continued in the surrounding countryside.

Bebars Mishal, a civil defence chief working in rebel-held Aleppo told Reuters that strikes on residential areas had caused fires and damage. “The truce was supposed to have come into effect at 12 midnight, but now there is no truce,” he said.

The international focus in Syria in recent weeks has partly shifted to the conflict with Islamic State, as government forces and their enemies have made gains at the expense of the ultra-hardline Islamist militants on several fronts.

But the separate hope of foreign powers – that the wider civil war could also be resolved – has broken down.

Hundreds of people have been killed in Aleppo since peace talks broke off, as Assad seeks to regain control of the city which was Syria’s largest before the conflict erupted in 2011 and is now split between rebel and government sectors.

Russian-backed Syrian forces have sought for months to control all supply routes into the city. An escalation in air and artillery strikes in the past two weeks on the last supply route, the Castello road, has put hundreds of thousands of people under effective siege.

Mercy Corps, which runs the largest non-governmental aid operation inside Syria, said the increased bombardment had effectively cut aid to rebel-held areas of Aleppo for the longest period since the war began, driving up food prices and choking efforts to ease the plight of residents.

AIR STRIKE SHUTS HOSPITAL

The Observatory said fierce fighting between government forces and rebels took place overnight near the road, with heavy government shelling of the area. A witness said jets and helicopters were seen continuously in the skies above the Castello road since dawn.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said an air strike had put one of Aleppo’s biggest hospitals out of service. It was not immediately clear if strikes had hit the 64-bed MSF-supported Omar Bin Abdulaziz hospital directly or nearby, and the extent of damage was not known.

Despite the ongoing violence, U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland described the announcement of the Aleppo truce as a “first step” in addressing humanitarian needs.

He said recent progress in getting aid to besieged towns elsewhere in Syria gave some hope for improvement, and said several countries including Russia felt a “psychological barrier has been broken” with recent aid breakthroughs.

But he said the opening for aid “could end tomorrow” and that not one siege had yet been lifted.

Fighting has flared across the country since the demise of a U.S.- and Russian-brokered February ceasefire that underpinned the peace talks.

Syrian state media said rebels in Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, had used “poisonous substances” on government troops, causing respiratory problems, on Wednesday, without specifying the type of chemical used.

The spokesman for Jaish al Islam, a dominant rebel faction in the area, said the government was lying. He said the government was the party using chemical weapons, saying it was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in the same area in 2013.

The government describes all factions fighting against it as terrorists, although only two groups — Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — are proscribed by the United Nations.

John Brennan, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said Russia and Syria had been fighting both groups, but “a large proportion of their strikes are directed against what we consider to be the legitimate Syrian opposition that are trying to save their country from Bashar al-Assad”.

Speaking at a rare public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan said Islamic State had tens of thousands of fighters around the world, far more than al Qaeda at its height, but he expected the group to rely increasingly on “guerrilla tactics” to make up for battlefield losses and constrained finances.

Islamic State militants have committed genocide against the Yazidi minority in Syria and Iraq, an independent U.N. Commission of Inquiry said.

Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognised genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Beirut, Patricia Zengerle and Jonathan Landay in Washington DC, and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Writing by Tom Miles; Editing by Dominic Evans)

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