Tag Archives: War

Islamic State to change tactics in coming months: CIA’s Brennan

CIA speaks against Islamic State

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, said on Thursday that the United States and its allies have made gains against Islamic State, but he expects the group to change its tactics to make up for lost territory.

“To compensate for territorial losses, ISIL (Islamic State) will probably rely more on guerrilla tactics, including high-profile attacks outside territory it holds,” Brennan testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Paul Simao)

Post-Islamic State Iraq should be split in three: top Kurdish official

Iraqi soldiers fighting ISIS

By Maher Chmaytelli and Isabel Coles

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Once Islamic State is defeated, Iraq should be divided into three separate entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed, with a state each given to Shi’ite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, a top Kurdish official said on Thursday.

Iraqi troops have expelled Islamic State from some key cities the militants seized in 2014, and are advancing on Mosul, the largest city under IS control. Its fall would likely mean the end of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.

But even if Islamic State was eliminated, Iraq would still be deeply divided. Sectarian violence has continued for years and a power-sharing agreement in Baghdad has only led to discontent, deadlock and corruption.

Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain “under one roof”.

“Federation hasn’t worked, so it has to be either confederation or full separation,” Barzani told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday in the Kurdish capital Erbil. “If we have three confederated states, we will have equal three capitals, so one is not above the other.”

The Kurds have already taken steps toward realizing their long-held dream of independence from Iraq, which has been led by the Shi’ite majority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, following a U.S.-led invasion.

They run their own affairs in the north and have their own armed forces, the Peshmerga, which have been fighting Islamic State militants with help from a U.S.-led coalition.

Sunnis should be given the option of doing the same in the provinces where they are in the majority in the north and the west of Iraq, said Barzani.

“What we are offering is a solution,” he said. “This doesn’t mean they live under one roof but they can be good neighbors. Once they feel comfortable that they have a bright and secure future, they can start cooperating with each other.”

His father has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence this year as the region is locked in territorial and financial disputes with the central government.

Baghdad has cut off payments from the federal budget to the KRG to try to force the Kurds to sell crude produced on their territory through the state oil marketing company and not independently. The Kurds also claim the oil region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, as part of their territory.

Barzani said that the Sunnis’ feeling of marginalization by the Shi’ite leadership had facilitated the takeover of their regions by Islamic State militants.

In addition, Iraq endured months of wrangling and chaos over a government reshuffle that was to curb corruption. In May, frustration over the delays culminated in the unprecedented breach by protesters of the Green Zone, which houses parliament, government offices and many foreign embassies.

Ahead of the battle for Mosul, Barzani said the city’s different communities should agree in advance on how to handle the aftermath. Mosul’s pre-war population of 2 million was mostly Sunni, but included religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Shi’ites, Yazidis, Kurds and Turkmen.

Almost all non-Sunnis fled the Islamic State takeover, along with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who could not live under the militants’ harsh rule or could not endure Baghdad’s financial blockade imposed on IS-held regions.

“I think the most important part is how you manage Mosul after Daesh is defeated,” he said, referring to an Arabic name of Islamic State. “We don’t want to see the gap of liberation and then a vacuum, which probably will turn into chaos.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that 2016 would be the year of “final victory” over Islamic State with the capture of Mosul.

The army, counter-terrorism forces and Shi’ite Muslim paramilitary fighters backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition are also in a major operation to retake the mainly Sunni city of Falluja, an hour’s drive from Baghdad.

(Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Islamic State committing genocide against Yazidis: U.N.

Suspected Yazidi mass grave

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday.

Their report, based on interviews with dozens of survivors, said that the Islamist militants had been systematically rounding up Yazidis in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, seeking to “erase their identity” in a campaign that met the definition of the crime as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

“The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing,” it said.

The 40-page report, entitled “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis”, sets out a legal analysis of Islamic State intent and conduct aimed at wiping out the Kurdish-speaking group, whom the Sunni Muslim Arab militants view as infidels and “devil-worshippers”.

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions.

“The finding of genocide must trigger much more assertive action at the political level, including at the (U.N.) Security Council,” Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the commission of inquiry, told a news briefing.

Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn said it had “detailed information on places, violations and names of the perpetrators”, and had begun sharing information with some national authorities seeking to prosecute foreign fighters.

The four independent commissioners urged major powers to rescue at least 3,200 women and children still held by Islamic State (IS or ISIS) and to refer the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

“ROAD MAP FOR PROSECUTION”

“ISIS made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide,” said another investigator, Carla del Ponte.

“Of course, we regard that as a road map for prosecution, for future prosecution. I hope that the Security Council will do it because it is time now to start to obtain justice for the victims,” added del Ponte, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor.

Islamic State, which has proclaimed a theocratic caliphate – based on a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam – in areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, systematically killed, captured or enslaved thousands of Yazidis when it overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014.

At least 30 mass graves have been uncovered, the report said, calling for further investigations.

Islamic State has tried to erase the Yazidis’ identity by forcing men to choose between conversion to Islam and death, raping girls as young as nine, selling women at slave markets, and drafting boys to fight, the U.N. report said.

Yazidi women are treated as “chattel” at slave markets in Raqqa, Homs and other locations, and some are sold back to their families for $10,000 to $40,000 after captivity and multiple rapes, according to the report.

Militants have begun holding “online slave auctions”, using the encrypted application Telegraph to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls, “with details of their age, marital status, current location and price”,” it said.

“No other religious group present in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq has been subjected to the destruction that the Yazidis have suffered,” the report added.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

U.S. allies tighten grip around Islamic State stronghold in Syria

Syrian Democratic Forces manning anti-aircraft weapon

By John Davison and Ahmed Rasheed

BEIRUT/BAGHDAD – (Reuters) – U.S.-backed militia drew within firing distance of the last road into an Islamic State stronghold in northern Syria on Thursday, part of a wave of new offensives putting unprecedented pressure on the self-declared caliphate.

The effective encirclement of Manbij by a militia called the Syria Democratic Forces is part of an assault launched last week, backed by U.S. air power and American special forces, to seal off the last stretch of Syrian-Turkish frontier.

It marks the most ambitious advance by a group allied to Washington in Syria since the United States launched its military campaign against Islamic State two years ago.

Simultaneously, Russia is backing a separate advance by forces of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against Islamic State in another part of the country.

And in Iraq, at the opposite end of Islamic State territory, the Baghdad government has sent forces to try to storm the Islamic State bastion of Falluja, an hour’s drive from Baghdad.

Islamic State has also lost territory in recent weeks to Kurds in northern Iraq and anti-Assad rebels in Syria as its disparate enemies attack on a number of fronts.

But it demonstrated on Thursday it can still mount deadly attacks deep inside the territory of its foes. It claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed at least 24 people in Baghdad, and was presumed to be behind a suicide bombing that killed a Western-backed rebel leader in southern Syria.

A five-year-old multi-sided civil war in Syria and a weak government in Iraq have made it impossible to wage a single coordinated campaign against the militants. But Washington and other powers hope this year will see the tide turn against Islamic State, which has ruled over millions of people in Iraq and Syria since declaring its caliphate in 2014.

SDF SEIZES ALL ROADS INTO MANBIJ

In Syria, Washington has long lacked capable proxies on the ground, but has found its first strong allies in the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), formed last year by recruiting Arabs to join forces with a powerful Kurdish militia.

The SDF launched its new offensive last week against the city of Manbij, Islamic State’s main bastion near the Syria-Turkish border west of the Euphrates River.

The overall aim is to shut the Turkish-Syrian frontier, which has served for years as Islamic State’s only major route to the outside world for manpower and material, and more recently for followers returning to Europe to carry out attacks.

An SDF spokesman said on Thursday his group had reached the last road into Manbij from the west, having previously cut off supply routes from north, south and east.

“We have reached the road that links Manbij and Aleppo, from the west,” Sharfan Darwish, spokesman for the Syria Democratic Forces-allied Manbij Military Council, told Reuters.

A monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, confirmed that the SDF had advanced to within firing distance of the western road, positioned within a kilometer of it, and were now in effective control of all routes into the city. Civilians in the city and surrounding countryside were fleeing.

Darwish would not comment on whether the SDF was planning an assault on the city itself. He told Reuters on Wednesday forces was poised to enter, but were being cautious due to the civilian presence there.

In southern Syria, where a range of anti-Assad rebel groups include Western-backed nationalists, one of the founders of a rebel alliance called the Free Syrian Army’s Southern Front was killed by a suicide bomber suspected to belong to Islamic State.

Saleem Bakour, a colonel in the Syrian army who defected to the rebels, had led rebels in battle against Islamic State fighters who pushed south after being driven out of the city of Palmyra by Russian-backed government forces in March.

“The martyr was one of the toughest leaders who fought Daesh (Islamic State). We are committed to fighting them to the end,” Southern Front spokesman Issam el-Rayyes said.

BAGHDAD BOMBINGS

In Iraq, Islamic State claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed at least 24 people in Baghdad on Thursday. Such bombings have become frequent again in the capital in recent weeks, after months in which security there had improved despite Islamic State’s control of swathes of territory in the provinces.

The deteriorating security in the capital prompted Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to order an assault on Falluja, Islamic State’s closest bastion to the capital, two weeks ago. It began in earnest last week with troops sweeping into southern rural districts, and they entered the built-up areas of the city for the first time this week.

The Iraq assault on Falluja has the support of U.S. air power, but veers from Washington’s battle plan, which called for the government to focus its forces on Mosul, Islamic State’s de facto Iraqi capital further north.

Falluja, where U.S. forces fought the heaviest battles of their own 2003-2011 occupation of Iraq, has long been a stronghold of Sunni Muslim insurgents opposed to the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad.

Washington fears a sustained campaign in Falluja could bog down the army in hostile territory and delay the recapture of Mosul.

(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Andrew Roche)

Damascus Refugees run deadly gauntlet to fetch aid, food

A general view shows a deserted street at the beginning of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp

y John Davison

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Palestinians living in Yarmouk refugee camp on the southern outskirts of Damascus depend on food aid to survive the Syrian civil war. But collecting it can be lethal.

With Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front fighting each other for control of the camp, the United Nations has been unable to deliver food for more than a year and has to distribute it in neighboring areas instead.

On the journey to the collection point, tarpaulins hung between buildings offer the only protection in some areas keeping residents out of the sights of snipers, who often fail to distinguish between fighters and non-combatants.

Once the camp residents have run this gauntlet, they still have to get through an Islamic State checkpoint. This controls the way out to the nearby town of Yalda, where the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA and other groups hand out aid when they can.

One 22-year-old resident who called himself Mahmoud – although he said this was an alias due to the risk of reprisals by the militants – described via internet messages how he makes the trip three times a week.

“I leave my house, and about a kilometer away there’s the checkpoint,” he told Reuters. “Most streets in the camp are in the sights of snipers, from both sides – I have to watch out for them. Some streets I run down, some I can just walk.”

While tens of thousands have fled the camp since the war began, hundreds of residents still brave the same journey.

The camp has existed for decades, one of many set up in the region after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war for Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes. Today they largely accommodate descendents of the original refugees, although some Syrians displaced by the war have inhabited Yarmouk.

Yarmouk has been bombarded, besieged and isolated from the outside world since early in the multi-sided conflict, which is now in its sixth year. Government forces, rebels and jihadists have all fought for control of the camp that lies just a few kilometers (miles) from the heart of Damascus.

NO MAN’S LAND

Islamic State entered the densely built up Yarmouk in April last year, helped by Nusra Front fighters in a rare instance of cooperation between the jihadist rivals, capturing most of it.

Since then they have turned their guns on each other, and fighting in recent weeks has destroyed countless more homes as Islamic State tries to take areas held by Nusra Front.

“Things got worse recently. This is a fight taking place only inside the camp, not spreading out to another area – it’s concentrated,” said Mahmoud. Fighters were targeting houses and burning them, even with occupants still inside, to hamper advances by the other side, he added.

Across a strip of no man’s land from Islamic State territory, rebels fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army control Yalda.

“The route to Yalda is more or less dangerous depending on how heavy the clashes are. Lately, people living in the fighting hotspots have to move around behind tarpaulin curtains and banks of earth,” said Yousef, who like all the Yarmouk residents interviewed by Reuters also asked to use an alias.

“Last Thursday, someone got shot by a sniper,” said Yousef.

Mohammed, 30, who before the latest violence sold food from a street stall, said: “If someone leaves their house to get a bit of water, they might not come back. Getting bread, getting food, could cost someone their life.”

FRAGILE AID SUPPLY

Islamic State controls at least two-thirds of Yarmouk and has been trying to prise the rest from Nusra Front since April, monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that several civilians have been killed in recent weeks.

Many do not venture out. “Most people just sit at home … we’re stuck here and stuck in the camp,” said Abu Anas, a former manual laborer.

“There’s very little water, and little fuel. We chiefly rely on aid from UNRWA. It’s not much but it’s our best hope – every 20 days we get a parcel which is just about enough for a family.” These include around 4 kg (9 pounds) of lentils, 5 kg of sugar, 1 kg of pasta and tins of tomatoes, he said.

Fighting can close the checkpoint for days at a time. But if they can get through, Mahmoud, Yousef and their fellow residents also buy any extra provisions they can afford at market stalls in Yalda, before returning.

Even getting aid the few kilometers from Damascus to Yalda, through government and then rebel-held territory, requires painstaking talks with local authorities, community leaders and commanders of the warring sides.

“When we first had access to Yalda, just to get there the U.N. had to negotiate 17 separate agreements,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said. For at least a month beginning in April, UNRWA could not even reach Yalda, and warned that residents faced starvation until supplies resumed.

“Inside Yarmouk, the fighting forces have been using indiscriminately large munitions,” Gunness said. “For a U.N.-assisted population in the 21st century to find itself in this situation in the capital city of a U.N. member state is completely unacceptable.”

EXODUS

Frequent power and water supply cuts mean people have to rely on generators and drinking water sold from the back of trucks which residents bring in by a different route. Water from wells – many of them hard to reach because of the fighting – is polluted and can be used only for washing, Yousef said.

Among the thousands who have joined the exodus from Yarmouk, some have sought refuge inside Syria with others heading to neighboring countries or Europe.

An aid worker for the Jafra Foundation, which monitors human rights in Palestinian camps in Syria, said several hundred people had left Yarmouk in recent weeks alone.

The camp’s pre-war Palestinian population of 160,000 has plunged to between 3,000 and 6,000 residents. At least the same number of displaced from the camp also live in Yalda, he said.

Mahmoud, who said his mother was killed in shelling by government forces three years ago, will stay.

“My home is here and my dad lives here. When I go to Yalda, I feel like a displaced person,” he said. “Yarmouk is my camp, I can’t leave it.”

(editing by David Stamp)

Car bomb targeting police kills 11, wounds 36 in Instanbul

Fire engines stand beside a Turkish police bus which was targeted in a bomb attack in a central Istanbul district

By Humeyra Pamuk and Osman Orsal

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A car bomb ripped through a police bus in central Istanbul during the morning rush hour on Tuesday, killing 11 people and wounding 36 near the main tourist district, a major university and the mayor’s office.

The car was detonated as police buses passed, Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin told reporters, in the fourth major bombing in Turkey’s biggest city this year.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Kurdish militants have staged similar attacks on the security forces before, including one last month in Istanbul.

Security concerns were already hitting tourism and investor confidence. Wars in neighboring Syria and Iraq have fostered a home-grown Islamic State network blamed for a series of suicide bombings, while militants from the largely Kurdish southeast have increasingly struck in cities further afield.

President Tayyip Erdogan vowed the NATO member’s fight against terrorism would go on, describing the attack on officers whose jobs were to protect others as “unforgivable”.

“We will continue our fight against these terrorists until the end, tirelessly and fearlessly,” he told reporters after visiting some of the injured in a hospital near the blast site.

Sahin said the dead included seven police officers and four civilians and that the attack had targeted vehicles carrying members of a riot police unit. Three of the 36 wounded were in critical condition, he said.

The blast hit the Vezneciler district, between the headquarters of the local municipality and the campus of Istanbul University, not far from the city’s historic heart. It shattered windows in shops and a mosque and scattered debris over nearby streets.

“There was a loud bang, we thought it was lightning but right at that second the windows of the shop came down. It was extremely scary,” said Cevher, a shopkeeper who declined to give his surname. The blast was strong enough to topple all the goods from the shelves of his store.

The police bus that appeared to have borne the brunt of the explosion was tipped onto its roof on the side of the road. A second police bus was also damaged. The charred wreckage of several other vehicles lined the street.

GUNSHOTS

Several witness reported hearing gunshots, although there was confusion as to whether attackers had opened fire or whether police officers had been trying to protect colleagues.

“We were told that it was police trying to keep people away from the blast scene,” said Mustafa Celik, 51, who owns a tourism agency in a backstreet near the blast site. He likened the impact of the explosion to an earthquake.

“I felt the pressure as if the ground beneath me moved. I’ve never felt anything this powerful before,” he told Reuters.

U.S. Ambassador John Bass condemned the “heinous” attack and said on Twitter the United States stood “shoulder to shoulder” with Turkey in the fight against terrorism.

Turkey has suffered a spate of bombings this year, including two suicide attacks in tourist areas of Istanbul blamed on Islamic State, and two car bombings in the capital, Ankara, which were claimed by a Kurdish militant group.

That has hit tourism in a nation whose Aegean and Mediterranean beaches usually lure droves of European and Russian holidaymakers. Russians stopped coming after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane over Syria last November.

The number of foreign visitors to Turkey fell by 28 percent in April, the biggest drop in 17 years.

“Business hasn’t been very good anyway. We’re now expecting fast check-outs and we think it will get worse,” said Kerem Tataroglu, general manager of the Zurich Hotel, less than 300 meters from where Tuesday’s blast happened.

While attacks by Islamic State have tended to draw more attention in the West, Turkey is equally concerned by the rise in attacks by Kurdish militants who had previously concentrated for the most part on the southeast.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged an armed insurgency against the state since 1984, claimed responsibility for a May 12 car bomb attack in Istanbul that wounded seven people. In that attack, a parked car was also blown up as a bus carrying security force personnel passed by.

(Additional reporting by Murat Sezer, Ayla Jean Yackley, Ece Toksabay; Writing by Daren Butler and David Dolan; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Andrew Heavens)

Islamic State faces major assaults on two fronts in Iraq, Syria

Iraqi security forces and Shi'ite fighters fire artillery towards Islamic State

By Maher Nazeh and Phil Stewart

SOUTHERN OUTSKIRTS OF FALLUJA, Iraq/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State insurgents faced major assaults on two fronts in both Iraq and Syria on Wednesday in what could prove to be some of the biggest operations to roll back their caliphate since they proclaimed it in 2014.

In Syria, U.S.-backed militia with thousands of Arab and Kurdish fighters were reported to have captured villages near the strategically-important Turkish border after launching a major operation to cut off Islamic State’s last access route to the outside world.

In Iraq, Prime Minister Haider Abadi ordered his troops to slow an advance at the gates of Falluja, Islamic State’s closest redoubt to the capital Baghdad, to limit harm to civilians, two days after the army poured into rural areas on the city’s outskirts.

Both operations are unfolding with the support of a U.S.-led coalition that has been targeting the ultra-hardline Sunni Muslim militants, who proclaimed a caliphate to rule over all Muslims from territory in the two neighboring countries.

The Syrian operation includes American special forces operating in advisory roles on the ground. In Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition has provided air support to government forces who are also assisted by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia.

While there is no indication that the two advances were deliberately timed to coincide, they show how a variety of enemies of Islamic State have been mobilizing in recent months in what Washington and other world powers hope will be a decisive year of battle to destroy the group’s pseudo-state.

“LAST FUNNEL”

The Syrian operation, which began on Tuesday after weeks of preparations, aims to drive Islamic State from the last stretch of the frontier with Turkey it controls.

“It’s significant in that it’s their last remaining funnel” to Europe, a U.S. military official told Reuters. Islamic State has used the border for years to receive material and recruits from the outside world, and, more recently, to send militants back to Europe to carry out attacks.

An 80-km stretch of terrain north of the town of Manbij is the only part of the Turkish frontier still accessible to the militants after advances by Kurdish fighters and President Bashar al-Assad’s government elsewhere.

A small number of U.S. special operations forces will support the push on the ground to capture the “Manbij pocket”, acting as advisers some distance back from the front lines, U.S. officials said, discussing the plans on condition of anonymity.

“They’ll be as close as they need to be for the (Syrian fighters) to complete the operation. But they will not engage in direct combat,” the first official said.

The operation will also count on air power from the U.S.-led coalition, which pounded Islamic State positions near Manbij with 18 strikes on Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group that reports on the conflict there with a network of sources on the ground, said Islamic State had been pushed out of 16 villages near Manbij. U.S.-led air strikes in support of the ground operation had killed 15 civilians including three children near Manbij in the last 24 hours, the Observatory said.

The assault is being carried out by an alliance known as the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), which is composed of a powerful Kurdish militia called the YPG, and Arab combatants that have allied themselves with it.

The group, set up last year, is the main ground force to receive U.S. backing in Syria, where Washington opposes Assad’s government and has had difficulty finding capable allies on the ground in the past.

U.S. officials stressed that most of the fighting near Manbij would be carried out by Arabs, an emphasis apparently aimed at Turkey, which considers the Kurdish YPG to be foes.

“After they take Manbij, the agreement is the YPG will not be staying … So you’ll have Syrian Arabs occupying traditional Syrian Arab land,” the first U.S. official said.

However, the Observatory described much of the fighting so far as carried out by Kurds.

The operation is taking place ahead of an eventual push by the U.S.-backed Syrian forces toward Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital, which, alongside Iraq’s northern city of Mosul is one of two main objectives to bring down the caliphate.

U.S. President Barack Obama has authorized about 300 U.S. special operations forces to operate on the ground inside Syria to help coordinate with local forces. In a reminder of the risks, one U.S. service member was injured north of Raqqa over the weekend, the Pentagon said.

A five-year-long, multi-sided civil war in Syria, in which global powers back enemy sides, has made it impossible to coordinate a single campaign against Islamic State there.

The U.S.-backed advance comes some weeks after Assad government troops, with Russian and Iranian support, recaptured the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State.

FALLUJA PAUSE

In Iraq, where Abadi’s Shi’ite-led government enjoys military backing both from the United States and Washington’s regional adversary Iran, the decision to pause at the gates of Falluja postpones for now what is expected to be one of the biggest battles ever fought against Islamic State.

“It would have been possible to end the battle quickly if protecting civilians wasn’t among our priorities,” Abadi told military commanders at the operations room near the front line in footage broadcast on state television. “Thank God, our units are at the outskirts of Falluja and victory is within reach.”

Falluja has been a bastion of the Sunni Muslim insurgency against both the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government and U.S. troops, who fought the biggest battles of their 2003-2011 occupation there. Islamic State fighters, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, raised their flag in the city in 2014 before sweeping through Iraq’s north and west.

Abadi first announced plans to assault Falluja 10 days ago. But with 50,000 civilians still believed trapped inside the city, the United Nations has warned that militants are holding hundreds of families in the center as human shields.

After heavy resistance from Islamic State, the troops have not moved over the past 48 hours, keeping positions in Falluja’s mainly rural southern suburb of Naimiya, according to a Reuters TV crew reporting from the area.

Explosions from shelling and air strikes as well as heavy gunfire could be heard on Wednesday morning in the city that lies 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad.

Falluja is the second-largest Iraqi city still under control of the Sunni militants after Mosul. Abadi’s initial decision to assault Falluja seems to have gone against the plans of his U.S. allies, who would prefer the government concentrate on Mosul.

“You do not need Falluja in order to get Mosul,” a spokesman for a U.S.-led anti-IS coalition, U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, said in a phone interview 10 days ago when the government first announced its plans to recapture Falluja.

However, Falluja is Islamic State’s closest bastion to Baghdad and is believed to be the base from which militants have staged a campaign of suicide bombings in the capital, increasing pressure on Abadi to act to improve security.

FLEEING CIVILIANS SCREENED

Although most of Falluja’s population is believed to have fled during six months of siege, 50,000 people are still thought to be trapped inside with little food.

“The city is inaccessible for assistance and market distribution systems remain offline,” the United Nations’ World Food Programme said. “The only food available does not come from the markets, but from the stocks that some families still have in their homes.”

The military has been detaining men and boys older than 12 who leave the city, to screen them for Islamic State fighters.

“Don’t treat us like we are Daesh,” said 54-year-old Mahdi Fayyadh, among hundreds of families who escaped the city and were now taking shelter in a school.

Fayyadh, who lost a leg to diabetes while under Islamic State’s rule due to a lack of medication, said he fled the city with 11 family members after the assault began. Relatives helped him walk on crutches until they reached army lines, when the other men in the group were taken away.

“I already lost a leg,” Fayyadh said, a battered pair of crutches leaning against his shoulder. “I ask all the good people to not treat us like they (the militants) treated us.”

U.S. officials caution that territorial gains will not spell the end of Islamic State, which has established itself outside of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, spreading to Libya, Afghanistan and beyond.

“It would be premature to say that the gains in Syria, even if they’re sustained, will spell defeat for ISIL, any more than the pummeling of al Qaeda in Pakistan has meant the end of that group,” said one of the U.S. officials.

(Additional reporting by John Davison in Beirut, Maher Chmaytelli and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

NATO likely to designate cyber as operational domain of war

A NATO flag flies at the Alliance headquarters in Brussels during a NATO ambassadors meeting on the situation in Ukraine and the Crimea region

BERLIN (Reuters) – NATO members will likely agree during a summit meeting in Warsaw next month to designate cyber as an official operational domain of warfare, along with air, sea, land and space, a senior German defense ministry official said Wednesday.

Major General Ludwig Leinhos, who heads the German military’s effort to build up a separate cyber command, told a conference at the Berlin air show that he expected all 28 NATO members to agree to the change during the coming Warsaw summit.

Leinhos, who previously held a senior job at NATO headquarters, said he also expected NATO members to agree to intensify their efforts in the cyber security arena.

The United States announced in 2011 that it viewed cyberspace as an operational domain of war, and said it would respond to hostile attacks in cyberspace as it would to any other threat.

Evert Dudok, a senior official with Europe’s largest aerospace company Airbus Group SE, called for adoption of Europe-wide or global standards in the cyber arena.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal)

U.S. allies target Islamic State in Falluja

File photo of Iraqi soldiers firing a rocket toward Islamic State militants on the outskirt of the Makhmour south of Mosul

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and its allies said they targeted Islamic State on Wednesday with two dozen strikes in Iraq, including four near Falluja, where Iraqi forces have launched a recent effort to retake the city from the militant group.

The strikes in the city west of Baghdad hit three Islamic State tactical units and two tunnels used by the group as well as four vehicles, an artillery piece, a weapons cache and three fighting positions, the coalition leading the operations said in a statement released on Thursday.

Other strikes included five near Mosul, another city where Iraqi forces, with support from the coalition, are working to retake control in the country’s northern region. Targets near the cities of Habbaniya, Haditha, Hit, Qayyara, Sinjar, Sultan Abdalla and Tal Afar, the Combined Joint Task Force said.

Separately, in Syria, five U.S.-led strikes near four cities also hit five Islamic state fighting units, among other targets, it said.

(Reporting by Washington newsroom Editing by W Simon)

Nearly 1000 killed in attacks on health workers in 2014-15

Candles are pictured outside the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Nearly 1,000 people were killed in attacks on health centers worldwide over the past two years, almost 40 percent of them in Syria, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday in its first report on the growing scourge.

The United Nations agency documented 594 attacks resulting in 959 deaths and 1,561 injuries in 19 countries with emergencies between January 2014 and December 2015.

Syria, torn by civil war since 2011, had the most attacks on hospitals, ambulances, patients and medical workers, accounting for 352 deaths. The Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Iraq, Pakistan and Libya, followed.

Some 62 percent of all attacks were deemed intentional and many led to disruption of public health services.

“This is not an isolated issue, it is not limited to war zones, it is not accidental. The majority of these are intentional,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, executive director of WHO’s emergency program, told a news briefing.

“It is also not stopping and it has real complications for what we are trying to do. It is getting more and more difficult to deploy people into these places, it is getting more and more difficult to keep them safe when they are there and it is getting more and more difficult to ensure they survive, let alone recover in crises.”

The casualty figures include 42 killed and 37 wounded in a U.S. air strike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last October.

A U.S. military report last month said that the incident did not amount to a war crime but was caused by human error, equipment failure and other factors, but MSF has called for an independent inquiry.

WHO said 53 percent of the attacks were perpetrated by states, 30 by armed groups and 17 percent remain unknown.

“One of the most important rules of war you is that you don’t attack health care facilities, health care providers, the sick, the disabled. So these attacks do represent gross violations of international humanitarian law,” said Rick Brennan, WHO director of emergency risk management and humanitarian response.

“Violations of international humanitarian law, if proven, can be considered war crimes and the perpetrators can be taken to the International Criminal Court,” he said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)