Crisis In Iraq

Written by : Mohamed Abdel FattahIslamic State fighters in Syria have taken full control of Syria's ancient city of Palmyra, according to activists and a monitoring group said on Thursday. Deadly clashes had raged overnight between the Syrian government and Islamic State, with troops firing rockets from outside Palmyra in an attempt to block  Islamic State 's offensive. Islamic State launched an attack on Palmyra last week, causing material damage to residential areas while clashes left many dead and injured. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Thursday that according to its estimates, 462 people have been killed since IS began its offensive on Palmyra and nearby areas on May 13. It said the dead included 241 troops and pro-government gunmen, as well as 150 IS fighters. The rest were civilians, presumably killed by ISIS or in the crossfire. It was the first time that the Islamic State  militants seized an entire city from Syrian government forces; it won control of i...

Written by : Mohamed Abdel FattahThe so-called Islamic State, also known as Isis, seized Ramadi after government forces left their positions. Ramadi is the capital of Iraq's western Anbar province, which is dominated by Sunni Muslims. Militants said they had taken full control of the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on Sunday. It was the biggest victory for Islamic State in Iraq since security forces and Shi'ite paramilitary groups began pushing the militants back last year, aided by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition. IS in Iraq, the successor of al Qaeda in Iraq, is made up of Iraqi Sunnis and foreign Islamist fighters. ISIS has routinely defeated other rebel groups in neighboring Syria and claimed large swaths of that country’s territory. The militants almost took the Iraqi Kurdish capital city of Erbil in February, despite the fierce resistance of the vaunted fighters of the Kurdish Peshmerga. The loss of Ramadi, the capital of the western Anbar province, is a blow for both...

 Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah Nov 19,2014 A Dutch mother has returned to the Netherlands with her daughter after going to Syria to bring her back from the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. The mother, identified only as Monique, she went to ISIS-controlled Raqqa, found her daughter and brought her safely to Turkey, inspite Dutch police warned her not to go. The daughter, Aicha, ran away from home in February aged 18, and married Omar Yilmaz, a Dutch-Turkish jihadist who had once been in the Dutch military. Monique traveled to Syria in October to try and rescue her daughter, but it was in vain. Once Monique returned to the Netherlands, she received a “cry for help” from her daughter. “She wants to come home, but can not leave Raqqa without help”, says lawyer Landerloo. Monique asked Maastricht police to try and help in her quest to bring her daughter back to the Netherlands. However, they proved to be of little assistance, saying merely that it was too dangerous to travel t...

Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah Nov 16,2014 The Islamic State militant group released a video Sunday that shows American aid worker Peter Kassig was beheaded in Syria. The video did not show the beheading but showed a masked man standing with a decapitated head covered in blood lying at his feet. Speaking in English in a British accent, the man says: "This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen." President Barack Obama confirmed Kassig 's beheading, saying Kassig "was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity." Kassig,a 26-year-old from Indiana was captured in eastern Syria while delivering relief supplies to refugees whose lives had been upended by war, His friends say he converted to Islam in captivity and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman and quietly worked to secure the former U.S. Army ranger's release. The video, which was posted on websites used by the group in the past, appeared...

 Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah Oct 31, 2014 Dozens of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been crossed into the embattled Syrian border town of Kobane from Turkey on Thursday, to help push back Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants .who have defied U.S. air strikes and threatened to massacre its Kurdish defenders. The Iraqi peshmerga delegation crossed back into Turkey at nightfall after discussing with Syrian Kurds details of the expected deployment of a force According to the British-based monitoring group, a convoy carrying Peshmerga fighters arrived near the Turkish town of Suruc on Wednesday night. They, in turn, made contact with other Kurdish fighters who had flown in earlier that day. “The force is equipped with heavy guns including mortars, canons, rocket launchers, etc.,” the Guardian cites Safeen Dizayee, spokesman for the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government, as saying on Thursday. The Kurdish troops have set up a temporary camp in a farming depo...

 Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah Oct 30, 2014 Islamic state of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants executed 46 people and besieged 500 families in the Iraqi city of Heet, Al Arabiya News Channel’s correspondent to Anbar reported on Wednesday. ISIS militants targeted members of the Sunni Albu Nimr tribe, which had fought against them in Anbar, according to media reports. killing over 40 people on , including Iraqi army soldiers, in a city captured earlier in October. Anbar provincial council chairman Sabah Karhout said those killed were captured when the Islamic State group overran the town, located about 85 miles west of Baghdad, earlier this month The slayings took place on a main street in al-Bakir district in the town of Heet, which has been the scene of intense fighting by jihadis and local resistance groups in recent weeks. A photograph obtained by The Associated Press showed a line of the men's bodies by a small pool of blood as onlookers walked by. While ISIS did not claim ...