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U.S.warships will make a power move by blocking weapons delivered by Iran to Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Three weeks ago, McClatchy made worldwide headlines with a remarkable scoop: recent U.S. missile strikes on Al-Qa'ida forces in Syria, the so-called Khorasan Group, explicitly targeted a French national who was a defector from his country's intelligence services. Citing unnamed European intelligence officials, the article provided considerable detail, though it did not name this mystery...

PANKISI GORGE, Georgia -The mother of martyrs, a woman in her fifties, is delicately beautiful and visibly in pain. She covers her hazel eyes and sobs over a photo album as the call to prayer echoes throughout the Georgian village of Jokolo, just south of the Chechen border.

A London rapper identified as a possible suspect for "Jihadi John", the masked Isil executioner, appeared in a television news report during the 2011 London riots, breaking into a live interview to lambast the police. "The police are protecting the police," he says. "They're not protecting the people."

But the identity of "Jihadi John" remained a mystery -- until Thursday, when two U.S. officials and two U.S. congressional sources confirmed it. The man, the officials said, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Londoner. The officials, who've been briefed on the matter, spoke to CNN after a Washington Post report first revealed Emwazi's identity.

The US-led coalition has carried out air strikes against the Islamic State group in northeastern Syria, where the jihadists have launched a new offensive and kidnapped 220 Assyrian Christians. The raids on Thursday struck areas around the town of Tal Tamr in Hasakeh province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, without giving information on possible casualties.

Libya's legally installed government has sent fighters to confront the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the northern city of Sirte. Sources told Al Jazeera that the Tripoli-based government deployed Misrata's 166 battalion, backed by rebels, to tackle ISIL in Sirte.

After the fall of Gaddafi a power vacuum allowed rival militias to thrive. Now, Libya has become a proxy war for other Arab nations. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Algeria on one side and Qatar and Turkey on the other. 

Any doubts that Libya has pivoted to a proxy war have been eliminated with the recent bombings outside UAE and Egyptian embassies as a backlash against their role in the regional "tug of war" on Thursday.  

The UN is pushing for sanctions to put pressure on Libyan factions and militias to take part in political negotiations. These sanctions would target individual groups rather than the foreign backers involved in the proxy war and would freeze their assets and impose travel bans. US officials have introduced the possibility of using their own sanctions separate from the UN for a few reasons: UN sanctions move slowly if not at all, Washington could impose them whenever they wish. The US places more emphasis on the importance on external actors in the conflict than domestic groups, explaining that these countries are actually intensifying the conflict.