IS claims attack on Iranian parliament and shrine of Khomeiny

Suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the Iranian parliament and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran on Wednesday, killing at least 12 people in a twin assault. Islamic State claimed responsibility and released a video purporting to show gunmen inside the parliament building.
The attacks took place at a particularly charged time after Saudi Arabia and other Sunni powers cut ties with Qatar on Monday, accusing it of backing Tehran and militant groups."This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the U.S. president (Donald Trump) and the (Saudi) backward leaders who support terrorists. The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that they were involved in the brutal attack," a Guards statement said.
Saudi Attackers dressed as women burst through parliament's main entrance in central Tehran, deputy interior minister Mohammad Hossein Zolfaghari said, according to the Tasnim news agency.One of them detonated a suicide vest in the parliament, he said. About five hours after the first reports, Iranian media said four people who had attacked parliament were dead and the incident was over.

HRW: Iraqi Kurds destroy Arab homes and even villages in areas retaken from IS

 Human Rights Watch (HRW) notes that Iraqi Kurdisch peshmerga forces destroyed houses belonging to Arabs in areas the retook from IS in North Iraq / Kurdistan. It ought not to surprise anybody, after Iraq under Saddam for so many years sent Arabs northward with the intention to ''arabize'' Kurdish regions. But it still is disappointing. And of course totally illegal.  
The 80-page HRW report, “Marked With An ‘X’: Iraqi Kurdish Forces’ Destruction of Villages, Homes in Conflict with ISIS,”looked at destruction of homes between September 2014 and May 2016 in disputed areas of Kirkuk and Nineveh governorates, areas nominally under Iraqi government jurisdiction but under Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) control. The destruction, which took place after KRG Peshmerga forces routed Islamic State (also known as ISIS) fighters, targeted Arab homes while leaving Kurdish homes intact. KRG leaders have maintained that these are historically Kurdish areas that they intend to incorporate into the Kurdistan region.

Syrian rebels retake Dabiq from IS

The first issue of the IS-Magazine Dabiq

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, long a mainstay of Islamic State's propaganda, underscores the group's declining fortunes this year as it suffered battlefield defeats in Syria and Iraq and lost a string of senior leaders in targeted air strikes.
The group, whose lightning advance through swathes of the two countries and declaration that it had established a new caliphate stunned world leaders in 2014, is now girding for an offensive against Iraq's Mosul, its most prized possession.
The rebels, backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes, took Dabiq and neighboring Soran after clashes on Sunday morning, said Ahmed Osman, head of the Sultan Murad group, one of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions involved in the fighting.

IS attacks Shi'ite demonstration in Kabul, 80 dead, more than 230 wounded

 (Photo Al Jazeera)

Twin explosions tore through a demonstration by members of Afghanistan's mainly Shi'ite Hazara minority in Kabul on Saturday, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 230 in suicide attacks claimed by Islamic State.
Graphic television footage from the site of the attack showed many dead bodies lying on the bloodied road, close to where thousands of Hazara had been demonstrating against the route of a planned multi-million-dollar power line.
"Two fighters from Islamic State detonated explosive belts at a gathering of Shi'ites in the city of Kabul in Afghanistan," said a brief statement on the group's Amaq news agency.
The explicit reference to the Hazara's (from the eastern province of Nangarhar) Shi'ite religious affiliation marked a menacing departure for Afghanistan, where the bloody sectarian rivalry between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims typical of Iraq has been relatively rare, despite decades of war. Islamic State is an ultra hardline Sunni group.

Iraq retakes most of Falluja

Iraqi government vehicles in the centre of Falluja. (AP). 

Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced Friday that Iraqi forces have retaken most of Fallujah from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (IS, Daesh). However operations are still under way to flush out the armed group's remaining fighters in the city.
The government lost control of Fallujah in 2014, months before Daesh took Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, and other large parts of the country. "We promised you the liberation of Fallujah and we retook it. Our security forces control the city except for small pockets that need to be cleared within the coming hours," Abadi said in a brief address on state TV. "Fallujah has returned to the nation and Mosul is the next battle," Abadi also said on Twitter. "Daesh will be defeated," he added.
Earlier on Friday, Iraqi forces said they had entered the centre of Fallujah, nearly four weeks after the start of a US-backed offensive to retake the city 50km west of the capital, Baghdad. They took the government compound and the Iraqi flag is now raised on top of the building, symbolising government control

After joining fight against IS, Turkey attacked Kurdish bases and arrested some 600 people

 In massive operations Turkey arrested about 600 Kurds and IS-supporters all over Turkey on Friday and Saturday.(Photo AFP)

Turkey said on Saturday that its fighter jets hit militant camps of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq overnight, and Turkish ground forces struck the PKK and Islamic State fighters in northern Syria. The strikes against PKK targets are likely to be a major blow to the stalled Kurdish peace process.
Turkey also started a massive operation to arrest Kurds and IS sympathizers all over teh country. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said at a press conference on Saturday that in addition to 302 people detained on Friday, 288 more were detained in operations that took place in 22 provinces throughout the night and early on Saturday. “As of now, a total of 590 terror-linked people who pose potential threat to Turkey are under detention,” he said. Turkish police launched first raids on Friday targeting ISIL, the PKK and the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) in 13 provinces across Turkey and detained 297 suspects.
Early on Saturday police teams raided addresses in a number of provinces, including İstanbul, Ankara, Konya, Adana and Erzincan and detained many people. In Adana, 54 people were detained in an operation that targeted ISIL and the Patriotic Revolutionist Youth Movement (YDG-H) -- an affiliate of the PKK.

Tens of Egyptian military killed in coordinated attacks in Sinai

Egypt's president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi speaks at the funeral of the slain prosecutor general Hisham Barakat. (Photo Mena/Xinhua)

Islamic State militants launched a wide-scale coordinated assault on several military checkpoints in Egypt's North Sinai on Wednesday in which 50 people were killed, security sources said, the largest attack yet in the insurgency-hit province.It was the second high-profile attack in Egypt this week. On Monday, the prosecutor-general was killed in a car bombing in Cairo. President Sisi said he would bring in tougher legal measures in coming days after the killing of the prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, the most senior Egyptian official to die in such an attack in years.
The attacks raise questions about the government's ability to contain a Sinai-based insurgency that has already killed hundreds of police and soldiers.
Islamic State's Egyptian affiliate, Sinai Province, claimed responsibility for the Sinai attacks in a Twitter statement.
The army had said five checkpoints were attacked by about 70 militants and that soldiers had destroyed three landcruisers fitted with anti-aircraft guns. Without giving a breakdown, the army spokesman said the death toll among soldiers and attackers had increased.
The militants have previously carried out some big attacks that have killed scores of security personnel, but in general they have focused on smaller-scale attacks.
Wednesday's incident marks the biggest onslaught yet.

Suicide bomber kills 21 in Shi'ite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia

Chaos in the Imam Ali mosque in Qadeeh after the attack. (Reuters)

A suicide bomber killed 21 worshippers on Friday in a packed Shi'ite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia, residents and the health minister said, the first attack in the kingdom to be claimed by Islamic State militants.
It was one of the deadliest assaults in recent years in this part of Saudi Arabia. More than 150 people were praying when the huge explosion ripped through the Imam Ali mosque in the village of al-Qadeeh, witnesses said. A video posted online showed a hall filled with smoke and dust, with bloodied people moaning with pain as they lay on the floor littered with concrete and glass. More than 90 people were wounded, the Saudi health minister told state television.

Islamic State said in a statement that one of its suicide bombers, identified as Abu 'Ammar al-Najdi, carried out the attack using an explosives-laden belt that killed or wounded 250 people, U.S.-based monitoring group SITE said on its Twitter account. It said it would not rest until Shi'ites, which the group views as heretics, were driven from the Arabian peninsula.

ISIS kills 35 in Iraq and about 30 in Libya

 
Ethiopian Christians are marched on a Libyan beach to be decapitated  by ISIS (Photo AP, see also below)

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has killed at least 35 people in two separate mass killings in Iraq, according to local sources. The sources told Al Jazeera that the armed group, which controls large swathes of territory in western and northern Iraq, killed 24 of its Sunni critics in Kirkuk province, including seven elders from several different tribes. The men were said to be vocal opponents of the armed group, but were not allied to the government in Baghdad.
In a separate incident, the armed group posted pictures online on Monday purporting to show the killings of 11 men believed to be Shia fighters from the Popular Mobilisation Forces that formed after a call by Shia leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to fight ISIL.

Iraqi army recaptures most of Tikrit

Tikrit

Iraqi government forces have made major advances against Islamic State (IS) militants in Tikrit, officials say.Army officials claimed on Tuesday that as much of 75% of the city had been recaptured, including the city centre and government headquarters, but not yet the palace of formere president Saddam Hussein.
There are about 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and police fighting to liberate the city, with support from about 20,000 Iran-backed Shia militias, known collectively as the Popular Mobilisation units, as well as local tribesman and residents. The Shia militias eralier said that theu=y would boycot fighting as long as the US was carrying out air strikes. Some of the militias, though, appear to have reversed this decision.
IS militants seized Tiqrit last summer. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Twitter that Tikrit, which was Saddam Hussein's hometown, had been "liberated" from IS occupation, but reports said fighting for large parts of the city was ongoing.

Attackers kill 20 tourists and three Tunisians in Tunisian Bardo museum

Update. The death toll of Wednesday's attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunishs has risen. Not 17 but 20 foreign tourists have been killd, as well as three Tunisians. Among the dead were Japanese, Italian, Spanish and British visitors.The attack has been praised by the Islamic State in an audio recording in which it called the attackers  "knights of the Islamic State" armed with machineguns and bombs.
The two gunmen were trained at a jihadist camp in Libya, the Tunisian government said. Interior ministry official Rafik Chelli said the two men had been recruited at mosques in Tunisia and traveled to Libya in September. The two dead militants were identified as Tunisians, Hatem al-Khashnawi and Yassin al-Abidi. Two local newspapers reported Abidi had spent time in Iraq and Libya, but officials did not confirm that. Tunisia's Prime Minister Habib Essid said Abidi had been under surveillance but "not for anything very special". (End of Update).

IS bulldozes ancient city of Nimrud

Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq, the government and a local tribal source said.
The destruction at Nimrud came a week after the radical Islamist militants released a video showing them destroying Assyrian era statues and sculptures in the city of Mosul, which they seized in June last year.
Islamic State members came to the Nimrud archaeological city and looted the valuables in it and then they proceeded to level the site to the ground," the tribal source from near Mosul, where ancient Nimrud is located, told Reuters.

Entrance of the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II

Egypt bombs IS in Libya after beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts

Egyptian Christians held captive by the Islamic State (IS) are marched by armed men along a beach said to be near Tripoli, in this still image from a video that appeared on February 15, 2015.

Egypt's air force bombed Islamic State targets inside Libya on Monday, a day after the group released a video appearing to show the beheading of 21 Egyptians there. The military said the dawn strike, in which Libya's air force also participated, hit Islamic State camps, training sites and weapons storage areas in Libya, where a civil conflict has plunged the country into near anarchy.
The 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, who had gone to Libya in search of jobs, were marched to a beach, forced to kneel and then beheaded, according to the video, broadcast via a website that supports Islamic State.

''Islamic State executed almost 2.000 people in six months''

The Islamic State militant group has killed 1,878 people in Syria during the past six months, the majority of them civilians, a British-based Syrian monitoring organization said on Sunday.Islamic State also killed 120 of its own members, most of them foreign fighters trying to return home, in the last two months, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The group has fought the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other insurgents and Kurdish forces since June.
Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian monitoring group, told Reuters that Islamic State killed 1,175 civilians, including eight women and four children.
He said 930 of the civilians were members of the Sheitaat, a Sunni Muslim tribe from eastern Syria which fought Islamic State for control of two oilfields in August.

Iranian official confirms airstrikes on IS in Iraq

A senior Iranian official has confirmed his country carried out air strikes in neighboring Iraq against Islamic State fighters at the request of Iraqi authorities, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported.
It quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Ebrahim Rahimpour as saying the strikes were not coordinated with the United States, which is also waging an air campaign against the radical Sunni Muslim militants who control large parts of north and west Iraq
The purpose of the strikes was "the defense of the interests of our friends in Iraq", the newspaper quoted Rahimpour as saying in an interview in London.
"We did not have any coordination with the Americans. We have coordinated only with the Iraqi government," he said. "In general, every military operation to help the Iraqi government is according to their requests."

UN-report: ''IS committed staggering violations in Iraq''

Islamic State road bloc on the Mullah Abdullah bridge in Kirkuk. (Photo Reuters)

Islamic State insurgents in Iraq have carried out mass executions, abducted women and girls as sex slaves, and used children as fighters in systematic violations that may amount to war crimes, the United Nations said on Thursday.
In a report based on 500 interviews, it also said Iraqi government air strikes on the Sunni Muslim militants had caused "significant civilian deaths" by hitting villages, a school and hospitals in violation of international law.
At least 9,347 civilians had been killed and 17,386 wounded so far through September, well over half of them since the Islamic insurgents also known as ISIL and ISIS began seizing large parts of northern Iraq in early June, the report said.

IS executes human rights activist in Mosul

Samira al-Naimi

The Islamic State (IS) captured and executed lawyer and human rights defender Samira Saleh Al-Naimi in the city of Mosul, Iraq, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) reported. The centre received reports that on the evening of 22 September 2014, a group of masked armed men who belong to IS opened fire and killed her in a public square in the very heart of Mosul. She was kidnapped by IS from her home last week after she described as “barbaric” the widespread damage that IS inflicted on ancient features of her city.
Samira Saleh Al-Naimi was a prominent lawyer and human rights defender and famous for her activities that include defending detainees and supporting the disadvantaged families in the city.

US and allies kill tens of IS and Nusra militants in bombing raids in Syria

The United States and its Arab allies early Tuesday launched bombing raids against Islamic State militants in Syria, opening up a new front in the battle against the jihadist group after more than a month of US air strikes in Iraq. Military officials have said the US would target militants’ command and control centres, re-supply facilities, training camps and other key logistical sites.
The strikes were aimed at the Islamic State's stronghold of Raqqa as well as near the Iraq border, with targets including weapons supplies and buildings used by the group, a US official told Reuters on Tuesday. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which gathers information from a network of activists on the ground, tens of ISIL fighters were killed or wounded in the strikes on Raqqa and surrounding areas.  "More than 20 members of ISIL were killed in strikes on two of the organisation's positions in Raqqa province. The strikes completely destroyed the two positions as well as vehicles stationed there," the monitoring group said.
Airstrikes were also carried out against positions of al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate Al-Nusra Front, the observatory said, adding that multiple attacks targeted an area in western Aleppo province, killing at least seven people, both fighters and civilians.

HRW: IS execute three times more people in Tikrit than previously thought

Still from an IS video. The man between the lines is Ali, one of HRW´s witnesses. 
 
Human Rights Watch has found new evidence that the Islamic State (IS) in Tikrit after it seized the city in June 2014, in fact carried out three times more executions than earlier was estimated. Information from a survivor and analysis of videos and satellite imagery has confirmed the existence of three more mass execution sites, bringing the total to five, and the number of dead to between 560 and 770 men, all or most of them apparently captured Iraqi army soldiers.
Islamic State fighters took control of Tikrit on June 11. The next day it claimed to have executed 1,700 “Shi’a members of the army,” posting videos of hundreds of captured men in civilian clothes, who it claimed had surrendered at the nearby Iraqi Speicher military base.
Photos later posted on social media showed IS fighters loading captives in civilian clothes onto trucks and forcing them to lie in three shallow trenches with their hands bound. Some images showed masked gunmen firing weapons at these men.
Based on an analysis of satellite imagery and photographs available at the time, Human Rights Watch concluded on June 27 that two of the trenches were in a field about 100 meters north of the Water Palace in Tikrit. The location of the third trench was not identified.After analyzing a recently released Islamic State video of the execution of detainees and satellite imagery, Human Rights Watch has identified three new execution sites from that period, with an additional death toll of between 285 and 440. The locations of two of the sites have been precisely identified based on the imagery and witness evidence, while the location of the third site remains approximate based on the account of a survivor.

Iraqi Kurds retake another town form IS a day after Amerli was freed

 
The shaded area is territory held by IS. (Map Daily Mail)

Iraqi Kurdish forces and Shiite militiamen retook the town of Sulaiman Bek from militants on Monday, removing a key stronghold they have held for over 11 weeks, officials said. Fighting to retake the village of Yankaja, also located in Salaheddin province, northeast of Baghdad, is ongoing.  Sulaiman Bek is located near Amerli, where thousands of mainly Shiite Turkmen civilians were trapped by a jihadist. Iraqi forces backed by thousands of volunteers on Sunday broke this siege the Islamic State.
Thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga forces also took part in the operation on Saturday to lift the IS-imposed blockade of the town, which is located about 180 km north of Baghdad. Iraqi planes have been targeting the militants positions since the forces started mobilizing against the extremists there.The residents of the town are facing a shortage of food and water and the humanitarian condition has been described as dire. UN had earlier warned that Shia Turkmen residents of the volatile town who are besieged by the IS could be massacred if urgent action was not taken to rescue them.