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nfyffe

Ambushes, Mines And Booby Traps: ISIS Militants Change Tack - 1 views

www.npr.org/...aps-isis-militants-change-tack

shared by nfyffe on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • nfyffe on 22 Oct 14
     
    At a front-line outpost - a few sandbags, soldiers and grenades perched on the brow of a hill - the Iraqi Kurdish soldiers known as Peshmerga are looking out toward the town of Jalula, maybe three miles away. A few months ago, the so-called Islamic State seized Jalula in eastern Iraq.
cbrock5654

Turkey to allow Peshmerga, not PKK, to enter Kobane | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...not-pkk-enter-kobane-392991687

Peshmerga PKK Kurds Kobane IS

shared by cbrock5654 on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • cbrock5654 on 10 Nov 14
     
    After mounting domestic and international political pressure, the Foreign Minister of Turkey Mevlut Cavusoglu announced that Turkey will allow some Kurdish forces to cross the border into Syria to fight the Islamic State in the Syrian town of Kobane. Turkey will not allow all Kurdish forces to fight, and will only allow the Peshmerga, rather than the PKK, to cross the border. "Peshmerga" is a Kurdish word for armed fighters, but more specifically refers to nationalist soldiers for an independent Kurdish state.
cbrock5654

Female fighters of #YPG in #Kobane ! - 0 views

twitter.com/...1

YPG PKK Kurds Twitter

shared by cbrock5654 on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • cbrock5654 on 10 Nov 14
     
    This is a tweet of a drawing by Sazan Slemani, a Kurdish woman who is very active on Twitter in support of the female fighters of the YPG, a branch of the PKK. In the drawing, a female PKK soldier is depicted putting her hair up in a ponytail, as if in preparation for a battle, and as her hair flows down from her hands, it changes into the shape of a gun. While art critique is not exactly my forte, I found this image to be really moving. I thought it was particularly interesting how long hair, which typically symbolizes femininity, was paired with something traditionally masculine like assault rifles and war.
cbrock5654

Kobani 'Poster Child' For Kurdish Female Fighters 'Beheaded' By IS - 0 views

www.rferl.org/...26660097.html

shared by cbrock5654 on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • cbrock5654 on 10 Nov 14
     
    This article is partly a news report and partly a discussion of gender equality in the PKK. On October 27, rumors began to spread on social media that a Kurdish female fighter known by the pseudonym Rehana may have been beheaded by Islamic State militants in Kobani. Rehana became the face of the PKK's female fighters after a picture of her making the victory sign was retweeted hundreds of times on Twitter. An image of a beheaded woman whom IS fighters claim to be Rehana was posted on pro-IS social media sites on the 27th, but it is impossible to verify whether the photo is genuine. The author goes on to discuss the complicated history of gender equality in the PKK. Currently, the group has the largest female militia in the world, and has a history of feminism rooted in it's founder Abdullah Ocalan's ideology. However, the author cites claims made by Berfu Kiziltan about how while the PKK has historically recruited women as well as men, in its early days, recruitment was sometimes by force. The author also mentions the PKK's history of female suicide bombers, as well as a recent suicide bombing in Kobani carried out by a female PKK soldier.
jreyesc

Vile image of baby girl being 'beheaded' found by Kurds on phone taken from dead ISIS f... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...dead-isis-fanatics-kobane.html

ISIL children images Syria

shared by jreyesc on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • jreyesc on 19 Oct 14
     
    Kurdish soldiers recovered images of ISIL picking a baby girl down with a knife near her throat. It is unclear what happen to the child. Many other images were found in the phone like the terrorist group playing football with heads.
kevinobkirchner

Egypt Orders Evacuation Along Gaza Border to Thwart Militants - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...order-to-thwart-militants.html

gaza egypt palestine sinai militants

shared by kevinobkirchner on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • kevinobkirchner on 30 Oct 14
     
    The Egyptian government has ordered the forced evacuation of homes along the 9 mile border with the Gaza strip. The homes will be demolished to make room for a 500 yard wide buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza that includes water-filled trenches to stop tunnel diggers. This buffer zone is designed to stop the flow of arms and militants from Gaza into Egypt which authorities believe are responsible for the rise in terrorism in the Sinai peninsula. This is primarily a response to the October 24th terrorist attack that killed 31 soldiers in eastern Sinai.
hkerby2

Is It Possible The Syrian Rebels (Not Assad) Used Chemical Weapons? : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ot-assad-used-chemical-weapons

rebels chemical weapons Obama Syria possible npr

shared by hkerby2 on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • hkerby2 on 08 Apr 15
     
    The Obama administration says there is little doubt that President Bashar Assad's regime is to blame for last week's reported attack, but there has been research into the possibility of the rebels using chemical weapons. It is possible but not likely. If the rebels were to use chemical weapons they would not use it in an area with such little soldier population. additionally it is the regime that has the controlled stockpiles of chemical weapons, not the rebels.
wmulnea

Three Years After Gadhafi's Death, Libya Slides Into Civil War As Death Toll Rises In B... - 0 views

www.ibtimes.com/th-toll-rises-benghazi-1707824

shared by wmulnea on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • sliding further and further into all-out civil war, with pro-government forces battling Islamist militias for power in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the revolution that ousted Gadhafi started in 2011. 
  • renegade army general Khalifa Hifter, the man who has assembled a militia of former Libyan soldiers and is leading them on a campaign to oust Islamists from the country.
  • He is now at the head of a militia that supports moderate values against radical Islam in a campaign called "Operation Dignity." 
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The new Libyan House of Representatives, which was elected in June, has formally announced its alliance with Hifter on Monday
  • But other Arab nations are intervening directly in the conflict.
  • Hifter would now lead Libyan army soldiers as well in the fight against the Islamist militias.
  • Operation Dawn, seized Tripoli in August, parliament and the rest of the government have all decamped to faraway Tobruk, in the eastern end of the country close to Egypt.  
  • Egyptian officials told the Associated Press that Egyptian warplanes, operated by Libyan pilots, were bombing Islamist militias in Libya. Both Libyan and Egyptian officials later denied those reports, and aviation experts said it was highly unlikely that Libyan pilots would have the skills needed.   On Monday, the presidents of Egypt and Sudan said they would support the Libyan military.  
  • Prime Minister Abdullah al Thinni is planning to visit Moscow to seek Russian support for the army.  
wmulnea

Libya's civil war: That it should come to this | The Economist - 3 views

www.economist.com/...factional-chaos-it-should-come

shared by wmulnea on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • It is split between a government in Beida, in the east of the country, which is aligned with the military; and another in Tripoli, in the west, which is dominated by Islamists and militias from western coastal cities
  • Benghazi is again a battlefield.
  • The black plumes of burning oil terminals stretch out over the Mediterranean.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • Libya looked like the latest fragile blossoming of the Arab spring
  • Army commanders, mostly of Arab Bedouin origin, refused orders to shoot the protesters
  • the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya
  • Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control
  • In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.
  • Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya
  • he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.
  • militia leaders were already ensconced in the capital’s prime properties
  • The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.
  • Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside
  • The Homeland party, founded by Abdel Hakim Belhad
  • tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi
  • The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered
  • He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes
  • which might have given militiamen jobs
  • Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks
  • the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.
  • In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.
  • In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity
  • The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote
  • Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.
  • Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before
  • Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east
  • Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government
  • So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.
  • The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.
  • Libya Dawn controls the bulk of the territory and probably has more fighters at its disposal.
  • General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry
  • the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam
  • Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers
  • Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists
  • threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.
  • Yusuf Dawar
  • The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset
  • And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies
  • ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.
  • Oil production has fallen and become much more volatile
  • oil is worth half as much as it was a year ago
  • The Central Bank is now spending at three times the rate that it is taking in oil money
  • The bank is committed to neutrality, but is based in Tripoli
  • Tripoli may have a little more access to cash, but is in bad shape in other ways
  • Fuel supplies and electricity are petering out
  • Crime is rising; carjacking street gangs post their ransom demands on Twitter
  • In Fashloum
  • residents briefly erected barricades to keep out a brigade of Islamists, the Nuwassi
  • “No to Islamists and the al-Qaeda gang” reads the roadside graffiti
  • Libya’s ungoverned spaces are growing,
  • Each month 10,000 migrants set sail for Europe
  • On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint
  • The conflict is as likely to spread as to burn itself out.
  • the Western powers
  • have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines
  • Obama washed his hands of Libya after Islamists killed his ambassador
  • Italy, the former colonial power, is the last country to have a functioning embassy in Tripoli.
  • Even under Qaddafi the country did not feel so cut off
  • Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms
  • The UAE’s Gulf rival, Qatar, and Turkey have backed the Islamists and Misratans in the west
  • If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table
  • Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west
  • The old divisions still matter
  • the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army
  • Tensions between those tribes and Islamist militias ran high from the start.
  • July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.
  • In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support
  • Port cities started to claim self-government and set up their own border controls.
  • Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world
  • opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council
  • Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
  • In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.
wmulnea

Strife in Libya Could Presage Long Civil War - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...libyan-unrest.html

shared by wmulnea on 21 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Salah Badi, an ultraconservative Islamist and former lawmaker from the coastal city of Misurata.
  • Mr. Badi’s assault on Libya’s main international airport has now drawn the country’s fractious militias, tribes and towns into a single national conflagration that threatens to become a prolonged civil war. Both sides see the fight as part of a larger regional struggle, fraught with the risks of a return to repressive authoritarianism or a slide toward Islamist extremism.
  • the violence threatens to turn Libya into a pocket of chaos destabilizing North Africa for years to come.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Ansar al-Shariah, the hard-line Islamist group involved in the assault on the American diplomatic Mission in Benghazi in 2012
  • Their opponents, including the militias stocked with former Qaddafi soldiers
  • The ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess a similar conservative but democratic vision.
  • an escalating war among its patchwork of rival cities and tribes.
  • Motorists wait in lines stretching more than three miles at shuttered gas stations, waiting for them to open. Food prices are soaring, uncollected garbage is piling up in the streets and bicycles, once unheard-of, are increasingly common.
  • Tripoli, the capital and the main prize, has become a battleground
  • The fighting has destroyed the airport
  • Constant shelling between rival militias has leveled blocks
  • Storage tanks holding about 25 million gallons of fuel have burned unchecked for a month
  • with daily blackouts sometimes lasting more than 12 hours.
  • many Libyans despaired of any resolution
  • In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, the fighting has closed both its airport and seaport, strangling the city.
  • the rush toward war is also lifting the fortunes of the Islamist extremists of Ansar al-Shariah, the Benghazi militant group.
  • The United Nations, the United States and the other Western powers have withdrawn their diplomats and closed their missions
  • “We cannot care more than you do,” the British ambassador, Michael Aron, wrote
  • Until now, a rough balance of power among local brigades had preserved a kind of equilibrium, if not stability
  • the transitional government scarcely existed outside of the luxury hotels where its officials gathered, no other force was strong enough to dominate. No single interest divided the competing cities and factions.
  • But that semblance of unity is now in tatters, and with it the hope that nonviolent negotiations might settle the competition for power and, implicitly, Libya’s oil.
  • In May, a renegade former general, Khalifa Hifter, declared that he would seize power by force to purge Libya of Islamists, beginning in Benghazi. He vowed to eradicate the hard-line Islamists of Ansar al-Shariah, blamed for a long series of bombings and assassinations.
  • General Hifter also pledged to close the Parliament and arrest moderate Islamist members
  • he has mustered a small fleet of helicopters and warplanes that have bombed rival bases around Benghazi, a steep escalation of the violence.
  • moderate Islamists and other brigades who had distanced themselves from Ansar al-Shariah began closing ranks, welcoming the group into a newly formed council of “revolutionary” militias
  • a broad alliance of Benghazi militias that now includes Ansar al-Shariah issued a defiant statement denouncing relative moderates like the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. “We will not accept the project of democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the Islamic cause,”
  • the general’s blitz has now stalled, it polarized the country, drawing alarms from some cities and tribes but applause from others.
  • the loudest applause came from the western mountain town of Zintan, where local militia leaders had recruited hundreds of former Qaddafi soldiers into special brigades
  • the rival coastal city of Misurata, where militias have allied with the Islamists in political battles and jostled with the Zintanis for influence in the capital
  • the Misurata and Islamist militias developed a reputation for besieging government buildings and kidnapping high officials to try to pressure the Parliament. But in recent months the Zintanis and their anti-Islamist allies have stormed the Parliament and kidnapped senior lawmakers as well.
  • the newly elected Parliament, led at first, on a seniority basis, by a member supportive of Mr. Hifter, announced plans to convene in Tobruk, an eastern city under the general’s control.
  • About 30 members, most of them Islamists or Misuratans, refused to attend,
  • Tripoli’s backup airport, under the control of an Islamist militia, has cut off flights to Tobruk, even blocking a trip by the prime minister.
  • a spokesman for the old disbanded Parliament, favored by the Islamists and Misuratans, declared that it would reconvene in Tripoli
  • In Tobruk, a spokesman for the new Parliament declared that the Islamist- and Misuratan-allied militias were terrorists, suggesting that Libya might soon have two legislatures with competing armies
  • Each side has the support of competing satellite television networks financed and, often, broadcast from abroad, typically from Qatar for the Islamists and from the United Arab Emirates for their foes.
  • Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan-born business mogul who owns one of the anti-Islamist satellite networks, speaking in an interview from an office in the Emirates. “We are in a state of war and this is no time for compromise.”
  • Fighters and tribes who fought one another during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi are now coming together on the same side of the new fight, especially with the Zintanis against the Islamists. Some former Qaddafi officers who had fled Libya are even coming back to take up arms again.
  • “It is not pro- or anti-Qaddafi any more — it is about Libya,” said a former Qaddafi officer in a military uniform
  • Beneath the battle against “extremists,” he said, was an even deeper, ethnic struggle: the tribes of Arab descent, like the Zintanis, against those of Berber, Circassian or Turkish ancestry, like the Misuratis. “The victory will be for the Arab tribes,”
  • andrea_hoertz on 21 Sep 14
     
    Article explains the civil war that is erupting in Libya. Islamist extremists are trying to take over the country and towns and tribes of Libya are choosing sides. Tripoli has been the biggest battle ground and its airport was destroyed.
  • wmulnea on 11 Apr 15
     
    This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
  • wmulnea on 11 Apr 15
     
    This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
irede123

Hezbollah Brigades vows to attack US forces 'defending ISIS' in Iraq - Middle East - Je... - 0 views

www.jpost.com/...-defending-ISIS-in-Iraq-448657

ISIS hezbollah iraq

shared by irede123 on 29 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • irede123 on 29 Mar 16
     
    "Hezbollah Brigades fighters in Iraq have threatened to attack the American soldiers stationed in the country, following the decision by the US army to send reinforcements to Iraq to support the international coalition in its fights against ISIS."
mkulach

Israeli soldiers assault Palestinian detainees - 0 views

www.middleeastmonitor.com/...-assault-palestinian-detainees

Israel Palestinians prisoners media

shared by mkulach on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • mkulach on 31 Mar 16
     
    Four Palestinians arrested this week for Facebook posts have spoken of physical assaults they endured during their detention and interrogation. The testimonies were collected by the Palestinian Committee for Prisoners' Affairs and relate to four Palestinian youths, including at least two teenagers detained.
mkulach

Israel executed 19 Palestinians: report - 0 views

gulfnews.com/...-palestinians-report-1.1703231

Israel Palestine soldiers killing

shared by mkulach on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • mkulach on 05 Apr 16
     
    The Israeli regime has been known to have killed 19 Palestinians in the past six months, according to a report released by the PLO-affiliated Abdullah Al Hourani Centre for Studies and Documentation. The centre says that Israeli soldiers justified these murders under the pretext of self-defence.
sheldonmer

Timothy Spangler: Ukraine's brief social-media coup - The Orange County Register - 0 views

www.ocregister.com/...ssian-633265-ukraine-kiev.html

shared by sheldonmer on 16 Nov 14 - No Cached
    • sheldonmer
      sheldonmer on 16 Nov 14
       
      This article gives an overview of what is currently going on in Ukraine. It talks about how social media is being used in the area. Russia swears that it isn't getting involved in the conflict, but on one of Russia's government Facebook pages, soldiers have been posting things on social media that are geotagged inside of Ukraine. People are now suspicious that they are fighting alongside local military.
allieggg

Car Bombs Explode Near Egyptian and U.A.E. Embassies in Libya - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-uae-embassies-in-libya.html

UN militias armed groups war middle east proxy car embassies nytimes

shared by allieggg on 14 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Car bombs exploded outside the embassies of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in Tripoli, Libya, early on Thursday, apparently in a backlash against the two countries for their role in a regional proxy war playing out in Libya.
  • The side that controls Tripoli includes hard-line and more moderate Islamists, as well as non-Islamist regional or tribal groups who all say they are fighting against a return to Qaddafi-style authoritarianism. The other side, based in Tobruk and Baida, includes former soldiers loyal to Colonel Qaddafi and tribal groups who say they are fighting Islamist extremists.
  • Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have backed the anti-Islamist faction. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and their ally, Saudi Arabia, all see Libya as a central front in a broader regional war against the forces of political Islam — a fight that began to intensify when the Egyptian military ousted President Mohamed Morsi last year.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The United Arab Emirates launched a series of airstrikes from Egyptian bases against Islamist-allied militias fighting in Tripoli over the summer. And Egyptian forces have actively aided anti-Islamist military units fighting around Benghazi in eastern Libya.
  • Western diplomats familiar with intelligence reports say that Egyptian special forces have participated in raids near the airport in Benghazi, Libya, as well as at a camp near the Libyan stronghold of Derna, with mixed results.
  • Each side in Libya’s conflict now claims its own government — one in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk. The anti-Islamist government in Tobruk includes the headquarters of a recently elected Parliament, although it operates with little visibility and the number of lawmakers attending its sessions has been difficult to assess.
  • The Islamist-allied government in Tripoli contends that a recent Supreme Court decision invalidated the election of the Parliament in Tobruk. The government in Tobruk argues that the court was intimidated by the threat of militias in Tripoli.
  • allieggg on 14 Nov 14
     
    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. Each side of the conflict has its own government as well as city headquarters. Islamists have occupied Tripoli and Haftar's forces Tobruk. The actions of regional players are escalating the civil war to the utmost extent.
diamond03

Attack in Egypt's Sinai leaves many dead - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...-dead-2014111941951516498.html

egypt sinai dead middle east attack

shared by diamond03 on 19 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Attack in Egypt's Sinai leaves many dead
  • Seven people have been killed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula
  • fire that hit their home
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • missile fired by one of the Egyptian army helicopters th
  • errant mortar round from fighters,
  • Tuesday's blast included women and children
  • they have not yet been identified
  • civilians were from a prominent Bedouin family in the village of Negah Shabana.
  • happened while the area was heavily shelled by fighters and the Egyptian military.
  • 65-year-old woman was injured by shrapnel during the exchange of fire and was rushed to hospital for treatment.
  • army has launched a massive crackdown against armed groups in Sinai area that has killed scores of policemen and soldier
  • demolished hundreds of homes
  • Civilians in the mostly Bedouin towns of Sinai had been caught in the crossfire before, with several killed by an errant mortar round.
  • diamond03 on 19 Nov 14
     
    Seven people were killed during an explosion in Sinai. The individuals have not ye been identified.
allieggg

Mapping Libya's armed groups - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...lained-201452293619773132.html

libya armed groups middle east Revolution recontruction war militias

shared by allieggg on 12 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Haftar accuses Congress of allowing "terrorists" to flourish in Libya and has vowed to "wipe them out", gaining support from much of the regular armed forces and nationalist militias. Other militias have lined up to oppose him, insisting his attacks amount to a "coup".
  • 1. National Army
  • National Army is a nationalist armed group controlled by Khalifa Haftar, rather than Libya’s national army.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • re-formed to help fight in the uprising against Gaddafi in 2011.
  • composed of non-Islamist fighters and former soldiers
  • Haftar used it to launch Operation Libyan Dignity on May 16, saying his mission was to dissolve the General National Congress, which he labelled Islamist, and to destroy "terrorists" he said Congress had allowed to establish bases in Libya.
  • 2. Regular forces
  • small army and air force have mostly defected to Haftar. Libya’s armed forces fought on both Gaddafi and the rebel side in the 2011 uprising. Since then, the army has been rebuilding, with most of its units in training.
  • fighting a tit-for-tat battle against Islamist militias for more than a year.
  • 3. Zintan
  • Zintan's militias are the second most powerful armed force in Libya, after Misrata, and based in the Nafusa mountains 144km southwest of Tripoli.
  • Zintan formed one of the three fronts in the uprising and by the end of that uprising, Zintan brigades surged into Tripoli, with several maintaining bases in the city and holding the international airport.
  • regard themselves as opponents of both Congress and Islamists.
  • On May 18, two days after Hiftar’s forces attacked Benghazi, two Zintan militias stormed the national congress building in Tripoli.
  • 1. LROR 
  • Libyan Revolutionary Operations Room was formed in 2013 as the headquarters of the Libya Shield, an alliance of pro-Congress militias.
  • accused by opponents of being Islamist,
  • LROR led a powerful Shield force to Tripoli last year to defend Congress.
  • 3. Misrata
  • With strong affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party, LROR will have much to lose if Haftar takes power.
  • dedicated to establishing a caliphate in Libya
  • The US blamed Ansar al-Sharia for the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi that saw the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in 2012.
  • 2. Ansar al-Sharia
  • Misrata’s 235 militia brigades are collectively the most powerful single force in Libya, fighting through a six-month siege during the uprising.
  • They are equipped with heavy weapons, tanks and truck-launched rockets and have the power to be a decisive force in any struggle between Haftar and Islamist forces.
  • Many Misratan leaders back the Islamists in Congress, and Misratan brigades once formed a key part of the Libya Shield force in Tripoli.
  • allieggg on 12 Nov 14
     
    After the ousting of the Gaddafi regime the country pivoted into civil chaos. Because of the deficiency of structure and state autonomy, armed militias have become the dominant force in determining Libya's future governmental system. While the UN has internationally recognized the NTC as the interim government to ultimately turn the country into a democratic one, militias have taken things into their own hands tipping the country towards the brink of civil war. General Khalifa Haftar launched his Operation Dignity campaign accusing congress of allowing terrorists flourish in Libya and vowed to wipe them out, gaining much support from the regular armed forces and nationalist militias. The opposition to Haftar insist that his attacks are aiming for a military coup. This article was helpful in highlighting the armed groups and dividing them by Pro-Haftar and Pro-Congress sections. 
fcastro2

Turkish forces raise flag on Syrian territory - Daily News Egypt - 0 views

www.dailynewsegypt.com/...es-raise-flag-syrian-territory

turkish forces flag ISIS syria politics war

shared by fcastro2 on 23 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • urkish forces entered Syrian territories and advanced to the outskirts of Aleppo Saturday to transport the buried remains of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Suleyman Shah.
  • Ashma village, on which the forces planted Turkish flag and claimed authority
  • was threatened in March 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) as the radical militant organisation demanded that Turkey lowers its flag and withdraws troops guarding the site.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A soldier was killed in the operation, as far as the international coalition to combat ISIS knows, although it didn’t see clashes,
  • After the Turkish forces transported the remains, they destroyed all the buildings in the site to “prevent abuse of the site
  • fcastro2 on 23 Feb 15
     
    After the retrieval of the historical tomb, Turkish forces raised the Turkish flag in the village the tomb was transferred to. Syrian forces felt this as a bit of a threat and so relations between the two governments remain tense. 
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