Tag Archives: Mosul

The United Nations’ cultural agency wants to use the reconstruction of Iraq’s second city Mosul as a way to restore its credibility and show how a fraying multilateral order can be revived, its director general said on Monday. Officially entitled the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Paris-based Unesco …

The United Nations’ cultural agency, the UAE and Iraq have signed an agreement to finance the reconstruction of a landmark mosque in Mosul that was blown up last year by the Daesh group. Unesco announced Monday that the UAE will provide $50.4 million (Dh185 million) to finance the project, focusing …

Isis has been defeated in Iraq and Syria. The caliphate declared in 2014, which was once the size of Great Britain, is no more. Its de facto capitals, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, were captured after long and bloody sieges in the second half of 2017. But Isis was always …

Yezidi fighters in Iraq allegedly forcibly disappeared and killed 52 civilians from the Imteywit tribe in June 2017, Human Rights Watch said today. Relatives of victims told Human Rights Watch that on June 4, 2017, Yezidi forces detained and then apparently executed men, women, and children from eight Imteywit families …

By Patrick Markey for Reuters | MOSUL, IRAQ — Heavy rain slowed Iraqi government forces battling Islamic State on Thursday around Mosul’s Old City, where militants holed up in narrow alleyways and homes resisted with sniper fire, suicide attacks and car bombs. Troops from the federal police and elite Rapid …

By Ulf Laessing and Maher Chmaytelli for Reuters | MOSUL/BAGHDAD, IRAQ Fighting between Iraqi troops and Islamic State militants has cut water supplies across a large part of Mosul, where poorer families are already struggling to feed themselves, and a local official said the increasingly encircled city was in crisis. …

MOSUL, Iraq: Elite Iraqi troops battled ISIS in the streets of Mosul Friday as U.S.-backed forces in Syria pressed an advance on extremist bastion Raqqa after a sandstorm eased. The high winds in the desert which separates the Syrian Kurdish-Arab militia alliance from the extremists’ stronghold in the Euphrates Valley …

By Ahmed Rasheed and Rodi Said | BAGHDAD/AIN ISSA, SYRIA – Reuters —ISIS fighters targeted Iraqi troops with car bombs and ambushes in Mosul, stalling an army advance in their north Iraq stronghold, but faced attack on a new front on Sunday when U.S.-backed rebels launched a campaign for the Syrian …

By Rodi Said | AIN ISSA, SYRIA — A U.S.-backed alliance of Syrian armed groups has launched an operation to retake the northern city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State in Syria, the group said on Sunday. The new offensive ratchets up pressure on Islamic State at a …

By Babak Dehghanpisheh for Reuters | NEAR HAMMAM AL-ALIL, IRAQ — Iraqi troops advancing towards Mosul battled on Saturday for the last town left between them and the Islamic State stronghold to the north, which is already under assault from special forces fighting inside the city’s eastern districts. Saturday’s attack on Hammam …

By Stephen Kalin and Maher Chmaytelli | EAST OF MOSUL/BAGHDAD, IRAQ — An elite Iraqi army unit advanced towards the built-up area of the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul on Monday after two weeks of fighting to clear surrounding areas of the insurgents. Military commanders said that the U.S.-backed offensive …

By Stephen Kalin and Michael Georgy | ISIS militants have in recent days executed dozens of prisoners taken from villages the group has been forced to abandon by an Iraqi army advance on the city of Mosul, officials in the region said on Wednesday. Most of those killed were former …

By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali for REUTERS| WASHINGTON — The United States expects Islamic State to use crude chemical weapons as it tries to repel an Iraqi-led offensive on the city of Mosul, U.S. officials say, although adding that the group’s technical ability to develop such weapons is highly …

By Ahmed Rasheed and Michael Georgy | BAGHDAD/ERBIL — Residents of Mosul said Islamic State was using civilians as human shields as Iraqi and Kurdish forces captured outlying villages in their advance on the jihadists’ stronghold. The leader of Islamic State and one of its main explosives experts were reported …

By Angus McDowall and Tom Perry for Reuters | BEIRUT — Pro-Turkey’s Syrian rebels said they captured the village of Dabiq from Islamic State on Sunday, forcing the jihadist group from a stronghold where it had promised to fight a final, apocalyptic battle with the West. Its defeat at Dabiq, …

By Lin Taylor for Reuters – Iraqi government forces, with air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition, launched an offensive on Monday to drive Islamic State from the northern city of Mosul, the militants’ last major stronghold in the country. The United States predicted Islamic State would suffer”a lasting …

By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Maher Chmaytelli for Reuters | BAGHDAD — Iraqi government forces, with air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition, launched an offensive on Monday to drive Islamic State from the northern city of Mosul, the militants’ last major stronghold in the country. Helicopters released flares overhead …

By Ahmed Rasheed FOR REUTERS | BAGHDAD – ISIS has crushed a rebellion plot in Mosul, led by one of the group’s commanders who aimed to switch sides and help deliver the caliphate’s Iraqi capital to government forces, residents and Iraqi security officials said. Islamic State (IS) executed 58 people …

The Levant News — ISIS attacks have increased this year, particularly in Iraq and Syria as the group responds to substantial territorial losses, a US-based analysis firm IHS said on Sunday. There were 891 attacks during the first quarter of 2016 in neighbors Iraq and Syria, more than in any …

  By SIMON TOMLINSON FOR MAILONLINE Hundreds of former ISIS sex slaves have joined an all-female battalion to launch a massive assault against their abusers in Iraq. The Yazidi women – who call themselves the ‘Force of the Sun Ladies’ – have taken up arms in the quest for revenge …

THE LEVANT EXCLUSIVE – Translated by Imen Khemiri–The Islamic State (ISIS) arrested 54 people, including women, in Mosul, in Nineveh Province in northern Iraq on charges of spying, according to a security source. Ahmed Jabouri, a police officer in Nineveh, said that ISIS group arrested 54 inhabitants of Mosul and …

By Shenaz Kermalli for Meftah.org – There’s something to be said about how we respond to horrific images. Each video released by ISIS seems to get more intense in its vulgarity, more creative in its manipulation of hostages and more sophisticated in its audiovisual production. Prior to its most recently …

Source: Associated Press – BAGHDAD: “Sleeper cells” made up of former Iraqi police officers and soldiers are tipping off authorities to ISIS positions in the northern city of Mosul, a prominent lawmaker has told the Associated Press. The comments by Hakim al-Zamili, the head of parliament’s security and defense committee, …

By Rowena Mason – Source: The Guardian – Islamic State (Isis) will not be pushed out of Iraq for another year or two because the country’s armed forces are not ready or equipped to fight back on the ground yet, the foreign secretary has said. In the runup to a …

THE LEVANT – Kurdish troops backed by US warplanes launched a bid  to recapture Mosul dam, Iraq’s largest, from jihadists. Witnesses said the air strikes started early in the morning and reported that fighting was ongoing in the afternoon. Peshmerga forces lost control of the dam on 7 August as IS …

THE LEVANT  – Sunni militants from the Islamic State group that controls large parts of Iraq have blown up a Shiite shrine in the city of Mosul, an official and witnesses said on Saturday. Jihadists destroyed the Nabi Shiyt (Prophet Seth) shrine in Mosul, the de facto Iraqi capital of the “caliphate” …

Prince El Hassan bin Talal In recent days, we have read with horror about Christians being asked to leave the city of Mosul within 24 hours. We have also heard about the desecration of Christian holy spaces and their symbols — the bombing of churches and a cross being removed from …

 Foreign Affairs Minister Gebran Bassil Friday condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, and ISIS’ against Iraq’s Christians, as “war crimes,” saying that the government has approved the ministry’s request to the ICC to launch probes into the recent events. For the first time in its diplomatic history, Lebanon sent requests to the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to …

THE LEVANT EXCLUSIVE – Sources in Mosul have confirmed that ISIL – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – is working toward changing the region demographic by bringing families loyal to its ideology to Mosul, hoping to drawn residents’ opposition and seize complete control over all minds and bodies. …

THE LEVANT – The last Christian in Mosul, Iraq fled the city on July 19 at noon, according to reports. Hundreds of thousands of Christians evacuated weeks ago because of increasing violence at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and thousands more left after the …

The-Levant – One night last week, ISIL terrorists in an SUV with tinted windows pulled up at the home of a former Iraqi army officer, one of the men they see as an obstacle to their goal of establishing a caliphate from Iraq to the Mediterranean. As the retired major-general …