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Beatings will continue: Iraq and Syria Edition
[ARA News] ERBIL – Extremists of the Islamic State (ISIS) have forced a number of civilians in Mosul to take part in executing hostages from the Iraqi security forces, eyewitnesses and local activists reported.“Islamic State’s jihadis brought five hostages from the Iraqi security forces to the Bab al-Toub square in central Mosul to execute them in public on Thursday,” media activist Abdulla al-Malla told ARA News in Mosul. “The group then asked for volunteers from the audience to participate in the execution of the hostages, who were described by ISIS as ‘apostates’ and ‘enemies of the Caliphate’,” the source continued. “When nobody volunteered to help the militants in the execution, the group chose five men from the public and forced them to shoot the hostages in the head.” Speaking to ARA News, head of the Nineveh media center Raafat al-Zarari said that ISIS is trying to involve innocent civilians in its brutal acts in order to support its propaganda. “By showing civilians as partners in executing what the group considers as apostates and enemies, ISIS is actually trying to show that it still has a social incubator in Mosul and that people are supporting the group’s alleged Caliphate,” Zarari said. More than one million and a half of civilians are still stranded in the ISIS-held city of Mosul in Iraq’s northwestern Nineveh province, according to local activists. ISIS Snipers fire on refugees leaving Fallujah ISIS snipers are targeting humanitarian corridors established by Iraqi security forces to relieve suffering in the ISIS-held city of Fallujah, a Pentagon official said Friday. Baghdad-based military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said the shooters were preventing residents from escaping Fallujah, which is only about 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Baghdad and is facing major shortages of basic supplies including medicine. “We know that the Iraqis have attempted on several occasions to open up humanitarian corridors to allow some of those civilians to come out,” Warren told Pentagon reporters in a video call. “Those have met with generally not much success. ISIL has done things like set up snipers to cover down on those corridors, to kill people as they're trying to get out. So that has really discouraged their use,” he added, using an acronym for ISIS. Warren later said Iraqi forces had tried to set up three corridors, but these have been all but abandoned because of the snipers. “Word must have spread because no civilians have tried to use the corridors in the last few weeks,” he said. Anti-government fighters took control of Fallujah in early 2014 during unrest that broke out after security forces demolished a protest camp farther west, and it later became an ISIS stronghold. Warren said Iraqi security forces now “generally” surround Fallujah and have begun to slowly “chip away” at it. “This is the very first city that ISIL gained control of,” he said. “ISIL’s been there for more than two years, so they are dug in and dug in deep. This is a tough nut for us to crack here. This is a tough nut for the Iraqis to crack.” US forces are training and advising Iraqi partners as they try to repel ISIS jihadists from the country. The Pentagon says the ISIS group is losing ground, and the jihadists have suffered major defeats in Iraq, including the loss of the cities of Heet and Ramadi. But they remain in control of Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul and it is not clear when Iraqi troops will mount an assault to retake it. Warren said there was no “no military reason” for Iraqi forces to liberate Fallujah before they could tackle Mosul. About half of Iraq’s security forces are focused on protecting Baghdad, where IS fighters claimed responsibility for a string of suicide attacks this week. At least 94 people were killed in three blasts in Baghdad on Wednesday, the deadliest day in the Iraqi capital this year. al-Nusra fighters kill 19 civilians in Hama Al-Qaeda fighters and their allies shot dead 19 civilians from President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority in their own homes after seizing their village in central Syria, a monitor said Friday. Other villagers were kidnapped following the assault in which eight pro-regime militiamen were killed trying to defend Al-Zara in Hama province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “During the attack, they entered houses and opened fire on families, killing at least 19 civilians, including six women,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. State news agency SANA condemned the “massacre” of villagers in Hama, which like neighboring Homs province is mainly Sunni but has a significant Alawite minority. “Terrorist groups infiltrated Al-Zara and carried out a massacre as well as destruction and pillage,” it reported. The five-year civil war in Syria has enflamed sectarian resentment between the country’s Sunni majority and the Alawite minority that is the main prop of the Assad regime. The Alawites -- followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam who are mainly concentrated in the Mediterranean coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus -- are despised as heretics by the Sunni extremists of Al-Qaeda. Posted by: badanov 2016-05-14 |
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