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Republican presidential candidates in the US have taken part in a new round of debates ahead of the party's primary elections due to be held next year.

The hopefuls on Tuesday evening sparred on domestic policy, as well as subjects including trade with China, climate change, and how to deal with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), at the event held in Milwaukee in the US state of Wisconsin. On foreign policy, billionaire TV personality Donald Trump, who has led opinion polls in the Republican race for months, said he supported Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to "knock the hell" out of the ISIL group by launching air strikes in Syria.

The comments earned the rebuke of the former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who said Russian military intervention in the country and its alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad resembled a "board game".

European privacy regulators are putting U.S. surveillance practices under the microscope, this time with a crucial transatlantic data deal hanging in the balance.Legal and privacy advocates say European nations are poised to strike down the deal if they decide the U.S. hasn't done enough to reform its spying programs.The new test comes after the European Commission and the Commerce Department — after months of tense negotiations — reached a deal this week permitting Facebook, Google and thousands of other companies to continue legally handling Europeans’ personal data.ADVERTISEMENTCritics though have long warned that unless the U.S. overhauls its privacy and national security laws, there is no legal framework that can stand up in European court, where privacy is considered a fundamental right under the EU Charter.A working group of 28 EU nations’ data protection authorities — domestic entities separate from the Commission that will be in charge of enforcing the new agreement — may now cast the deciding vote.The group is spending the next few months picking through the so-called Privacy Shield agreement to determine if it adequately protects the personal data of European citizens.

“The Commission has said, ‘We’re satisfied. We believe them. We believe the U.S. has substantially changed its practices,’ and they are no longer going off the [Edward] Snowden revelations in the media,” said Susan Foster, a privacy attorney at Mintz Levin who works in both the EU and the U.S.“Whether the working group will go along with it is another question.”The privacy advocate whose complaint against Facebook brought down the Privacy Shield’s 15-year-old predecessor agreement is already questioning the new deal’s validity.“With all due respect ... a couple of letters by the outgoing Obama administration is by no means a legal basis to guarantee the fundamental rights of 500 million European users in the long run, when there is explicit U.S. law allowing mass surveillance,” Max Schrems of Austria said in a statement Tuesday.The United States has been fighting against the perception that it tramples on civil liberties after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the breadth of the agency’s snooping.One sticking point in the Privacy Shield negotiations was over the scope of an exception allowing surveillance for national security purposes.

In announcing the deal, Commission officials insisted that the U.S. had provided “detailed written assurances” that surveillance of Europeans’ data by intelligence agencies would be subject to appropriate limitations.“The U.S. has clarified that they do not carry out indiscriminate surveillance of Europeans,” Andrus Ansip, Vice President for the Digital Single Market on the European Commission, said Tuesday.The U.S. has also agreed to create an office in the State Department, to address complaints from EU citizens who feel their data has been inappropriately accessed by intelligence authorities.Complicating the working group’s approval of the deal is the hodgepodge of competing regulators in Europe. Each nation has an agency in charge of its own country’s regulation. Some countries — such as Germany — are seen as tougher on privacy than others, like France or the U.K.While some countries consider U.S. privacy protections to be satisfactory, in others they are seen as woefully inadequate.

Donald Trump has claimed he will sign an executive order mandating the death penalty for all convicted cop killers, as a petition to deny him entry to the UK becomes the most signed on parliament’s website. It follows a week of controversial rhetoric from the Republican presidential hopeful. On Monday, the billionaire claimed as president he would order a “complete shutdown” of all Muslim immigration to the US, sparking a week-long row that has dominated media coverage and seen Trump recover in the polls, having fallen behind Ted Cruz in an earlier Monmouth poll.

Accepting the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association, a local police union representing more than 4,000 officials, Trump issued his latest legally-murky commandment on Thursday night.

"One of the first things I do, in terms of executive order if I win, will be to sign a strong, strong statement that will go out to the country -- out to the world -- that anybody killing a policeman, policewoman, a police officer -- anybody killing a police officer, the death penalty. It's going to happen, OK?"

Turkey withdrew troops Monday from a north Iraq camp, a lawmaker and witnesses said, after a deployment which Baghdad said went ahead without its permission and that sparked a diplomatic row.It was not immediately clear how many soldiers were removed from the camp, where Ankara sent troops and tanks on a deployment last week it said was routine and necessary to protect Turkish trainers working with Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State jihadist group.Baghdad has sharply criticized the deployment, terming it an "incursion" that violated the country's sovereignty, repeatedly demanding the forces be withdrawn and complaining to the United Nations Security Council."The Turkish army withdrew from Camp Zilkan at dawn today, and according to our information, only the trainers remain to train Hashad al-Watani forces," MP Salem al-Shabaki said, referring to anti-IS forces and the site where they were being trained."Witnesses confirmed that they saw the Turkish army withdrawing from Camp Zilkan... toward the Turkish border," Shabaki said.

A senior Turkish official said last week that between 150 and 300 soldiers and 20 tanks were deployed to protect Turkish military trainers at a camp near Mosul, the main IS hub in Iraq.

s Mayor Rahm Emanuel was apologizing Wednesday for the broken system of police accountability exposed by the Laquan McDonald case, city attorneys argued before a federal judge that footage of an officer fatally shooting a 17-year-old carjacking suspect nearly three years ago should be kept from public view.Lawyers for Cedrick Chatman's family allege the videos of his January 2013 killing contradict statements from police that Chatman had turned and pointed a dark object at police as he ran, prompting Officer Kevin Fry to fire in fear of his life. City attorneys argue releasing the footage — which they described as low-quality and incomplete — could inflame the public and jeopardize a fair trial.At a brief hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman said the records should stay sealed for the time being. But the judge said he would likely lift the protective order next month if he was going to be asked to consider the videos in any pretrial rulings, a move that would automatically make them part of the public record.

"If it's likely going to come out through pretrial motions, then there really is no reason to wait," said Gettleman, who set a hearing on the issue for Jan. 14.Gettleman's ruling came three weeks after police dash-cam video of 17-year-old McDonald being shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke went viral, sparking protests and leading to the resignations of both police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and Scott Ando, who headed the Independent Police Review Authority, which has drawn criticism for its lax enforcement on excessive-force complaints.

Earlier this year, Lorenzo Davis, the IPRA supervisor who headed up the Chatman probe, filed a federal lawsuit alleging he was fired by Ando for concluding that officers in several shootings — including Chatman's — were not justified in using lethal force.Davis, who viewed the surveillance video as part of the IPRA inquiry, told the Tribune last month he did not see Chatman aim at or turn toward the officers."Cedrick was just running as the shots were fired," Davis said. "You're taught that deadly force is a last resort and that you should do everything in your power to apprehend the person before you use deadly force. I did not see where deadly force was called for at that time."An investigator on Davis' team alleged that Fry violated the department's deadly force policy, but that claim was ruled "unfounded" in the final IPRA report.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi on Friday instructed the Foreign Ministry to lodge an official complaint to the UN Security Council over the deployment of Turkish troops in northern Iraq.A statement by Abadi's office said the incursion by Turkish troops "is blatant violation of the provisions and principles of the UN Charter and a violation to the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, which happened without the knowledge and consent of the Iraqi authorities."Iraq demands the UN Security Council "to shoulder its responsibilities and orders Turkey to withdraw its troops immediately, and to ensure unconditionally withdrawal to the internationally recognized border between the two countries," the statement said.

On Thursday, an Iraqi foreign ministry spokesman said that Iraq has contacted the five permanent member states of the UN Security Council for condemning Turkey's deployment of troops on Iraqi soil.He also said that Iraq demanded an Arab League extraordinary session to "discuss the consequences of the Turkish breach (to Iraqi sovereignty) and adopt an Arab stance against it."Iraq's latest move came a day after the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that withdrawing Turkish troops from Iraq is out of the question and that the Turkish soldiers are in Iraq as part of a training mission."Turkish troops in Mosul are not there as combatants; they are trainers. Their numbers may vary depending on the size of Kurdish Peshmerga troops. It is out of the question, for now, to pull them out," he said.The crisis between the two countries sparked last Friday when reports said a Turkish training battalion equipped with armored vehicles was deployed near the city of Mosul to train Iraqi paramilitary groups in fighting the ISIL terrorist group.Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, has been under ISIL control since June 2014.

Baghdad has insisted that the Turkish troops had no authorization from the Iraqi government and thus demanded their withdrawal, while Ankara called the troops only a routine rotation of the trainers.

For hours on a Friday, a staff sergeant using the fake name “Jinx” testified in open court about her yearlong work here at a prison for suspected terrorists once considered the CIA’s prized war-on-terror captives.

The few reporters who went to court or watched on video feeds from Guantánamo to Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as a dozen legal observers and the mother and sister of a man killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, heard her say all that in open court. But as far as the public court record is concerned, those things were never said.

In a first for the war court, intelligence agencies scrubbed those and other facts — including questions asked by the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl — from a 379-page transcript of the Oct. 30 pretrial hearing in the 9/11 death-penalty case. A Miami Herald examination counted more than 130 pages with blacked out public testimony. Of them, 37 pages are completely redacted in the latest challenge to the remote war court’s motto, “Fairness, Transparency, Justice.”　Typically the court releases the transcripts “word for word with no redactions,” chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told reporters Saturday, defending the “rare” exception of “ex-post redactions” as a security necessity.“I have not encountered it actually thus far for a transcript to be redacted. But there is a rule that enables that,” he said. “The government is fully entitled to look and say in the aftermath … ‘It ought to be protected, it could be damaging.’”

Russian planes in Syria "violated Turkish air space" the news agency currently tell us. But an earlier report shows that this claim may well be wrong and that the U.S. pushes Turkey to release such propaganda. Reuters (Mon Oct 5, 2015 7:54am BST): Turkey says Russian warplane violated its airspace A Russian warplane violated Turkish airspace near the Syrian border on Saturday, prompting the Air Force to scramble two F-16 jets to intercept it, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday. The Foreign Ministry summoned Moscow's ambassador to protest the violation, according to an e-mailed statement. Turkey urged Russia to avoid repeating such a violation, or it would be held "responsible for any undesired incident that may occur." AFP (10:20am · 5 Oct 2015): Turkey 'intercepts' Russian jet violating its air space Turkey said on Monday its F-16 jets had at the weekend intercepted a Russian fighter plane which violated Turkish air space near the Syrian border, forcing the aircraft to turn back. ... Turkey said on Monday its F-16 jets had at the weekend intercepted a Russian fighter plane which violated Turkish air space near the Syrian border, forcing the aircraft to turn back.

Here now what McClatchy reported on these air space violations in a longer piece several hours before Reuters and AFP reported the Turkish claim: ISTANBUL - A Russian warplane on a bombing run in Syria flew within five miles of the Turkish border and may have crossed into Turkey’s air space, Turkish and U.S. officials said Sunday. ... A Turkish security official said Turkish radar locked onto the Russian aircraft as it was bombing early Friday in al Yamdiyyah, a Syrian village directly on the Turkish border. He said Turkish fighter jets would have attacked had it crossed into Turkish airspace. But a U.S. military official suggested the incident had come close to sparking an armed confrontation. Reading from a report, he said the Russian aircraft had violated Turkish air space by five miles and that Turkish jets had scrambled, but that the Russian aircraft had returned to Syrian airspace before they could respond. The Turkish security official said he could not confirm that account.

So it is the U.S., not Turkey, which was first pushing the claims of air space violation and of scrambling fighters. The Turkish source would not confirm that. But how could it be a real air space violation when Russian planes "flew within five miles of the Turkish border and may have crossed into Turkey’s air space". The Russian planes were flying in Syrian airspace. They "may have crossed" is like saying that the earth "may be flat". Well maybe it is, right? Fact is the Russians fly ery near to the border and bomb position of some anti-Syrian fighters Turkey supports. They have good reasons to do so: The town, in a mountainous region of northern Latakia province, has been a prime route for smuggling people and goods between Turkey and Syria and reportedly has functioned as a key entry for weapons shipped to Syrian rebels by the U.S.-led Friends of Syria group of Western and Middle Eastern countries.

Spy agencies in Britain will be given the explicit right to hack into smartphones and computers as part of a new law being introduced by the Conservative government. Security services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ can already access electronic devices by exploiting software security vulnerabilities, but the legal foundation for the practice is under scrutiny.New powers laid out in the Investigatory Powers Bill, due to be introduced in Parliament next month, will give spies a solid legal basis for hacking into computer systems, according to the Times.The revelation has sparked criticism from human rights group Liberty, which accuses the government of giving spy agencies “unlimited potential” to act against citizens.The bill, which was announced in the Queens’ Speech following the general election, is likely to include the new Snooper’s Charter, according to privacy campaigners at the Open Rights Group.

British spies will be able to hack into a person’s “property” through backdoors in the software. Once inside, intelligence agents can install software that allows them operate microphones to eavesdrop on conversations and even control the camera to take photographs of targets.The government admitted in February that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ were hacking into computers, servers, routers and mobile phones using the Intelligence Services Act 1994, which does not give explicit authorization for such practices.Independent reviewer of terrorism legislation Dave Anderson QC recommended in June that new legislation be introduced to clarify give intrusive hacking a firm legal basis.Anderson said that hacking presents a “dizzying array of possibilities to the security and intelligence agencies.”While some methods are appropriate, “many are of the view that there are others which are so intrusive that they would require exceptional safeguards for their use to be legal … A debate is clearly needed,” he said.

The investigatory powers bill will give agents explicit powers to interfere with “property” once they have obtained a warrant from the home secretary.Digital evidence expert Peter Sommer said the powers circumvented encryption technology.“Increasingly, [intelligence agents] can’t read communications sent over the internet because of encryption, so their ability to get information from interception is rapidly diminishing. The best way around this is to get inside someone’s computer. This is an increasingly important avenue for them,” he told the Times.

Why is the U.S. targeting Iran’s central bank? Well, multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price told King World News: What happened to Mr. Gaddafi, many speculate the real reason he was ousted was that he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to him that happened to Saddam because the US doesn’t want any solid competing currency out there vs the dollar. You know Gaddafi was talking about a gold dinar. And as I noted in August: Ellen Brown argues in the Asia Times that there were even deeper reasons for the war than gold, oil or middle eastern regime change. Brown argues that Libya – like Iraq under Hussein – challenged the supremacy of the dollar and the Western banks: Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.

The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that “[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.” According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Libya – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar”, Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. *** And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:

One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned … Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.

“On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.” Though the intricate surveillance apparatus described above seems straight from a dystopic novel, it is actually the Washington Post’s recent description of the the visual data collection system employed by a local California police department. The police department in Fresno, California, has taken extreme measures to combat high rates of crime in the city. As the Post reports, Fresno’s Real Time Crime Center, buried deep in the police station’s headquarters, has developed as a response to what many police call increasing threats. The system, according to police officials, can “provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases” — a feature they say is increasingly important in the wake of events like the November terror attack in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting last month.

“Our officers are expected to know the unknown and see the unseen,” Fresno Chief of Police Jerry Dyer said. “They are making split-second decisions based on limited facts. The more you can provide in terms of intelligence and video, the more safely you can respond to calls.” Programs similar to the Real Time Crime Center have launched in New York, Houston, and Seattle over the course of the last decade. Nationwide, the use of Stingrays, data fusion centers, and aerial drone surveillance have broadened the access local police have to private information. In another example, the FBI is continually developing a comprehensive biometric database that local police access every day. “This is something that’s been building since September 11,” says Jennifer Lynch, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Like the problem of police militarization, Lynch traces the trend back to the Pentagon: “First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”

While many of these programs may fail to shock Americans, one new software program takes police scrutiny of private citizens to a new level. Beware, a software tool produced by tech firm Intrado, not only surveils the data of the citizens of Fresno, the first city to test it — it calculates threat levels based on what it discovers. The software scours arrest records, property records, Deep Web searches, commercial databases, and social media postings. By this method, it was able to designate a man with a firearm and gang convictions involved in a real-time domestic violence dispute as the highest of three threat levels: a bright red ranking. Fresno police say the intelligence from Beware aided them, as the man eventually surrendered and officers found he was armed with a gun. Beware scours billions of data points to develop rankings for citizens, and though few recoil at the thought of catching criminals and miscreants, the program provides particular cause for concern because of both its invasiveness and its fallibility.

In the first instance of a prominent politician taken down by the 11.5 million documents leaked in the Panama Papers, Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday after fully 10 percent of Iceland's population rallied in protest of his wife's secret, offshore shell company holding millions. Gunnlaugsson was asked about the account on the day the leak was announced in a television interview, and he walked out rather than answer the question:

The next day, "an estimated 22,000 Icelanders slung eggs and protested outside the Parliament building" demanding his resignation, as Common Dreams reported. Gunnlaugsson initially refused to bow to the public pressure, but eventually announced his resignation on Tuesday evening.

News editor of the Reykjavík Grapevine Paul Fontaine said Tuesday, "While the Prime Minister's particular role in the Panama Papers leak is huge, and I don't want to downplay it, I also don't want to downplay the involvement other Icelanders—and the countless others around the world—also had in this." "This extends beyond the prime minister; it reaches parliament, it reaches Reykjavík City Hall, and it reportedly reaches hundreds of as yet unnamed Icelandic businesspeople," Fontaine pointed out. "The greater crime, which the Panama Papers illustrate comprehensively, is that we have a secret economy connected to and even supporting some of the worst aspects of the global capitalist system."

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians. The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.”

While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.

ICE agents would be able to query that database in two ways. A historical search would turn up every place a given license plate has been spotted in the last five years, a detailed record of the target’s movements. That data could be used to find a given subject’s residence or even identify associates if a given car is regularly spotted in a specific parking lot. “Knowing the previous locations of a vehicle can help determine the whereabouts of subjects of criminal investigations or priority aliens to facilitate their interdiction and removal,” an official privacy assessment explains. “In some cases, when other leads have gone cold, the availability of commercial LPR data may be the only viable way to find a subject.” ICE agents can also receive instantaneous email alerts whenever a new record of a particular plate is found — a system known internally as a “hot list.” (The same alerts can also be funneled to the Vigilant’s iOS app.) According to the privacy assessment, as many as 2,500 license plates could be uploaded to the hot list in a single batch, although the assessment does not detail how often new batches can be added. With sightings flooding in from police dashcams and stationary readers on bridges and toll booths, it would be hard for anyone on the list to stay unnoticed for long. Those powers are particularly troubling given ICE’s recent move to expand deportations beyond criminal offenders, fueling concerns of politically motivated enforcement. In California, state officials have braced for rumored deportation sweeps targeted at sanctuary cities. In New York, community leaders say they’ve been specifically targeted for deportation as a result of their activism. With automated license plate recognition, that targeting would only grow more powerful. For civil liberties groups, the implications go far beyond immigration.

While Trump's Twitter activity from yesterday continues to drive media and political outrage, especially in the UK, and with the focus of the frenzied coverage being that the president retweeted a far-right U.K. leader's "anti-Muslim videos", there is actually something much more interesting concerning the context to the “Muslim Destroys A Statue Of Virgin Mary” video. That particular video shared by the president is from 2013 and shows a Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander named Omar Gharba destroying a Virgin Mary statue as the group invaded a Syrian Christian town. In a geopolitical and deeply ironic twist demonstrating the absurdity and contradictions of US foreign policy, the radical Islamist commander was actually supported by the United States at the time as part of the FSA, which the media and US government deemed "moderate".  So a sitting US president shared a video which reveals a Syrian "rebel" fighter committing war crimes who was part of one of the very groups backed by the CIA as official US policy under the Obama administration. Of course it is likely that Trump himself is not fully aware of this, yet the astounding geopolitical irony in this should not be missed, even as public outrage is reduced to merely discussing "anti-Muslim bigotry" and whether or not Trump is being "presidential".

nd while multiple media outlets, for example NPR, continue to claim the videos are "unverified" and "have no context" or are of "murky origins" (as the Washington Post wrongly claims), this particular video especially was widely shared and discussed among the world's top Syria analysts and Middle East scholars at the time. The video was taken in 2013 and shows the Wahhabi cleric and FSA commander smashing the Christian statue in connection with the US-backed group's prior attack on Yakubiya in Idlib province. The book, The Islamic State: Combating The Caliphate Without Borders, authored by counter-terrorism experts Yonah and Dean Alexander, gives his full name as Omar Gharba al-Khojji and like vast numbers of FSA fighters he eventually jointed ISIS (some online sources alternately list his name as Omar Raghba).

akubiyah was a mostly Christian village principally comprised of Armenian Orthodox and Catholic churches which after being taken over by the FSA was subsequently held by ISIS. The local Christians saw no distinction between the invading FSA and ISIS fighters as it was primarily the US-backed FSA which began massacring Christians and looting churches. Even the US government funded Voice of America news had this to say based on an interview with a Christian survivor: Christian refugees described to VOA the execution of a half dozen of their co-religionists in the northwestern village of al-Yakubiye, in Idlib province, by Sunni Muslims aligned with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army. Rahel, a 45-year-old former teacher, said, “Al Nusra didn’t come to our village; the people who came were from villages close by, and they were Free Syrian Army.”   ...Nearly a third of Syria’s Christians, an estimated 600,000, have fled the country. Before the war, Christians accounted for about 10 percent of Syria’s population of 22 million. And The Daily Beast also confirmed at the time that "nearly all Christians have fled [Yakubiyah] after half a dozen were executed with their heads chopped off and about 20 more were kidnapped" by the US sponsored FSA. Furthermore, an October 2013 report in Arabic media confirmed that, Terrorists belonging to al-Nusra front broke into homes in Yakubiyah in Syria's Idlib province, killed a Chrisitan man and destroyed a Virgin Mary statue. Upon arrival at a house that had the statue of virgin Mary, Wahhabi cleric, Omar Gharba' carried the statue of the Virgin Mary after it was taken over by militants from the "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) and broke it by throwing it on the ground. He stated that he and his fellow Wahhabis won't tolerate any form of worship except strict Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia.   "God willing, Only God will be worshipped in the land of the Levant," the terrorist who destroyed the statue said, noting that "no other idol will be worshiped after these days . We won't accept but the religion of Allah and the Sunnah of our Prophet Mohammed bin Abdullah." In 2012 and 2013 Omar Gharba's name appeared somewhat frequently in Western news reports as he was interviewed on a few occasions and presented as a "moderate" rebel, for example by BBC Arabic in 2012. The below video is one such example of Omar Gharba insisting that he and his fellow FSA militants would be tolerant and respectful of Christians and other religious minorities should they inherit power by toppling the Assad government  - though he was subsequently outed as the destroyer of the Virgin Mary statue, as the edit of the video interview makes clear.