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Increasingly intensive Russian airstrikes are pushing thousands of Syrians north, away from the northern outskirts of the once bustling city, according to the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, the main opposition group.

A sense of panic among those fleeingRead More

<img alt="Aleppo, once a bustling city, has been reduced to rubble in Syria's civil war." class="media__image" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/151020182337-syria-aleppo-zaidoun-al-zoabi-large-169.jpg">Aleppo, once a bustling city, has been reduced to rubble in Syria's civil war.But the latest video appears to show a sense of panic among the thousands streaming out of the northern outskirts of the city, fleeing for their lives -- bound, most probably, for the Turkish border, 60 miles (97 kilometers) to the north.

"Now 10,000 new refugees are waiting in front of the door of Kilis because of air bombardments and attacks against Aleppo,"

"Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving toward Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but in our border -- how to relocate these new people coming from Syria? Three hundred thousand Aleppo people, living in Aleppo, are ready to move toward Turkey."

Innocent civilians 'running for their lives'

"We are cut off from Aleppo City," said David Evans, Mercy Corps' regional program director for the Middle East. "It feels like a siege of Aleppo is about to begin."

"Right now, we are seeing tens of thousands of people make their way to the border with Turkey."

"Innocent civilians are running for their lives," Evans said.

It was the deadliest attack on the Shabab in the more than decade-long American campaign against the group, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, and a sharp deviation from previous American strikes, which have concentrated on the group’s leaders, not on its foot soldiers. Continue reading the main story #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap { max-width:180px; } .g-artboard { margin:0 auto; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180{ position:relative; overflow:hidden; width:180px; } .g-aiAbs{ position:absolute; } .g-aiImg{ display:block; width:100% !important; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 p{ font-family:nyt-franklin,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:13px; line-height:18px; margin:0; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle0 { font-size:11px; line-height:13px; font-weight:500; font-style:italic; color:#628cb2; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle1 { font-size:12px; line-height:14px; font-weight:500; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle2 { font-size:12px; line-height:14px; font-weight:500; text-align:right; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle3 { font-size:12px; line-height:13px; font-weight:700; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle4 { font-size:11px; line-height:13px; font-weight:500; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle5 { font-size:11px; line-height:13px; font-weight:500; font-style:italic; text-align:center; color:#628cb2; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle6 { font-size:9px; line-height:8px; font-weight:500; text-transform:uppercase; text-align:center; color:#000000; } Gulf of Aden ETHIOPIA SOMALIA Camp Raso Mogadishu KENYA Indian Ocean 300 miles MARCH 7, 2016 By The New York Times

It comes in response to new concerns that the group, which was responsible for one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on African soil when it struck a popular mall in Nairobi in 2013, is in the midst of a resurgence after losing much of the territory it once held and many of its fighters in the last several years.

The planned attack on American and African Union troops in Somalia, American officials say, may have been an attempt by the Shabab to carry out the same kind of high-impact act of terrorism as the one in Nairobi.

Pentagon officials would not say how they knew that the Shabab fighters killed on Saturday were training for an attack on United States and African Union forces, but the militant group is believed to be under heavy American surveillance.

The Shabab fighters were standing in formation at a facility the Pentagon called Camp Raso, 120 miles north of Mogadishu, when the American warplanes struck on Saturday, officials said, acting on information gleaned from intelligence sources in the area and from American spy planes

One intelligence agency assessed that the toll might have been higher had the strike happened earlier in the ceremony. Apparently, some fighters were filtering away from the event when the bombing began.

The strike was another escalation in what has become the latest battleground in the Obama administration’s war against terror: Africa.

The United States and its allies are focused on combating the spread of the Islamic State in Libya, and American officials estimate that with an influx of men from Iraq, Syria and Tunisia, the Islamic State’s forces in Libya have swelled to as many as 6,500 fighters, allowing the group to capture a 150-mile stretch of coastline over the past year.

The arrival of the Islamic State in Libya has sparked fears that the group’s reach could spread to other North African countries, and the United States is increasingly trying to prevent that

American forces are now helping to combat Al Qaeda in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso; Boko Haram in Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad; and the Shabab in Somalia and Kenya, in what has become a multifront war against militant Islam in Africa.

The United States has a small number of trainers and advisers with African Union — primarily Kenyan — troops in Somalia. Defense officials said that the African Union’s military mission to Somalia was believed to have been the target of the planned attack.

Saturday’s strike was the most significant American attack on the Shabab since September 2014, when an American drone strike killed the leader of the group, Ahmed Abdi Godane, at the time one of the most wanted men in Africa. That strike was followed by one last March, when Adan Garar, a senior member of the group, was killed in a drone strike on his vehicle.

If the killings of Mr. Godane and Mr. Garar initially crippled the group, that no longer appears to be the case. In the past two months, Shabab militants have claimed responsibility for attacks that have killed more than 150 people, including Kenyan soldiers stationed at a remote desert outpost and beachcombers in Mogadishu.

In addition, the group has said it was responsible for a bomb on a Somali jetliner that tore a hole through the fuselage and for an attack last month on a popular hotel and a public garden in Mogadishu that killed 10 people and injured more than 25. On Monday, the Shabab claimed responsibility for a bomb planted in a laptop computer that went off at an airport security checkpoint in the town of Beletwein in central Somalia, wounding at least six people, including two police officers. The police said that one other bomb was defused.

At the same time, Shabab assassination teams have fanned out across Mogadishu and other major towns, stealthily eliminating government officials and others they consider apostates.

The Shabab have also retaken several towns after African Union forces pulled out. The African Union peacekeeping force, paid for mostly by Western governments, features troops from Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Djibouti and other African nations.

The Shabab were once strong, then greatly weakened and now seem to be somewhere in between, while analysts say the group competes with the Islamic State for recruits and tries to show — in the deadliest way — that it is still relevant. Its dream is to turn Somalia into a pure Islamic state.

IS still controls large swaths of Iraq and neighboring Syria and has declared an Islamic "caliphate" on the territory it holds. The extremist group controls Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, as well as the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

The Afghan government has given Pakistan a list of specific insurgents with whom it hopes to negotiate, the Afghan official said. Hoping to achieve some immediate reduction in violence, Mr. Ghani’s government wants to engage commanders in the field, as well as political leaders abroad who have direct influence over the level of fighting.

While there are no confirmed reports that the United States has increased troop levels in Afghanistan — there are now about 10,000 American service members in the country

A spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Mohammad Nafees Zakaria, said the four countries sponsoring the talks had recommended that there should be no preconditions. “All four countries are making efforts to bring the Taliban groups to the negotiation table,” he said.

It has overcome its former partner and eventual rival, Al Qaeda, first in battle, then as the world’s pre-eminent jihadist group in reach and recruitment.

“declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

In an echo of the Cold War, Russia has committed its own planes and missiles, a challenge to the West’s perceived indecision and inaction.

struggles in the Middle East, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Shiite and Sunni, are also playing out.

Each was shaped by the larger forces of the Islamic world, in particular religious zeal, Al Qaeda and America’s war with Iraq. Each rejected the secular culture of the West, which many say was the target of the attacks in Paris.

An American airstrike finally killed Mr. Zarqawi in June 2006. Four months later, his successors declared the founding of the Islamic State of Iraq.

in March 2008 an American lieutenant colonel, recalls vividly finding the Islamic State’s black, gold-fringed banner some 50 miles north of Baghdad.

They were not the only ones — Mr. Obama likened the group to the “J.V. team.”

In fact, while Beirut was once synonymous with violence, when it went through a grinding civil war a generation ago, this was the deadliest suicide bombing to hit the city since that conflict ended in 1990. Lebanon has weathered waves of political assassinations, street skirmishes and wars; Israeli airstrikes leveled whole apartment blocks in 2006. But it had been a year of relative calm.

To be sure, the attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. Paris saw it as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city in decades, while to Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that another outbreak of violence may come.

Meanwhile, Syrians fretted that the brunt of reaction to both attacks would fall on them. There are a million Syrians in Lebanon, a country of four million; some have become desperate enough to contemplate joining the accelerating flow of those taking smugglers’ boats to Europe.

“This is the sort of terrorism that Syrian refugees have been fleeing by the millions,” declared Faisal Alazem, a spokesman for the Syrian Canadian Council.

“Imagine if what happened in Paris last night would happen there on a daily basis for five years,”

“Now imagine all that happening without global sympathy for innocent lost lives, with no special media updates by the minute, and without the support of every world leader condemning the violence,”

The government can’t protect us,” he said. “They can’t even pick up the trash from the streets.”

He said airstrikes could be scaled up, as well as targeting of ISIS leadership

In a meeting between U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and his French counterpart, the men "agreed concrete steps the U.S. and French militaries should take to further intensify our close cooperation in prosecuting a sustained campaign against ISIL," according to a Pentagon statement.

the White House is still not considering a ground combat role for U.S. forces in Iraq or Syria.

"We don't believe U.S. troops are the answer to the problem," Rhodes said.

Turkey has been pressing the U.S. to help establish and enforce a no-fly-zone or "safe zone" at its border with Syria, and Sunday's meeting between Obama and Erdogan led to speculation that that might be an upcoming change in policy.

White House official said the two men "agreed on the need for a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition, which would be proceeded by UN-mediated negotiations between the Syrian opposition and regime as well a ceasefire."

But the deadly Paris attacks, paired with the recent downing of a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and bomb attacks in Beirut this week, illustrate the continued extremist threat.

authorities arrested 20 suspected ISIS members in the town last week.

None of them have been able to attend school -- or at least a real school.

There is no education. Five to 11-year-old kids are in the same class. Teachers don't show up and older kids harass them."

"You can count the number of doctors on one hand and they only service ISIS. Every day hundreds gather for free food hand outs. It's not a lot. You stand there being humiliated trying to get something to eat."

"ISIS gives anything for free to people who join them. The rest of us get nothing. There is no food, electricity or money. The people join ISIS out of hunger.

Electricity lasts for roughly 12 hours a day.

"Generally, the strikes kill a relatively low number of ISIS fighters. When we were in Raqqa city, for example, the court (was) hit three times. It was empty.

Following the French airstrikes, ISIS cracked down on internet usage, fearing their targets might be revealed.

We've seen a lot of people who've been beheaded and killed, accused of being spies."

Kids, some as young as 10, patrol the street. They are trained in ISIS camps."You can see a 10-year-old kid holding a Russian AK47. It's surreal," he said. "That kids can shout at you and sometimes they stop you and you can't say anything because he is a member of ISIS."

hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees making the dangerous journey to Europe's shores.

A Saudi-led coalition that has been bombing Houthi-held areas since March, trying to support Yemeni government fighters.

Al Qaeda already controls of much of southern Yemen. But the rival terror group ISIS has been trying to gain more territory and influence in the country.

And civilians have suffered tremendously in the impoverished nation, which has turned into a haven for Islamic terrorists.

Hisham Abed (not his real name, for security reasons) says he and his 1980s-era Mercedes truck used to take the circuitous route described above. It took him just about six or seven hours to make the journey to Raqqa, and he liked the road because it was paved and relatively safe.

Mosul merchant Hassan Thanon (again, a pseudonym) complains that he can no longer communicate with the drivers of trucks carrying his stocks.

“My truck was one of the first to travel this new route,” Abed said proudly, soon after he arrived back in Mosul after another tiring journey.

And there are other adaptations: One driver has outfitted his truck like a mobile mechanic’s workshop, carrying tools and spare wheels so he can make repairs if they break down in the desert. He’s charging his colleagues high prices for his services.

The new route out of Mosul heads south rather than west. Truckers drive on real roads to Tal Abtah, then take a dirt road for nearly 40 miles until they get to the Qayrawan (also known as Balij) subdistrict southwest of Mosul. There’s a paved road here, not far from the Sinjar Mountains, and from there the trucks cross into Syria.

Transport costs have also increased by about 25 percent, Thanon said. “But we were only able to increase the prices of our goods a little bit because people living in Mosul can barely afford to buy anything anyway.”

Abed says he saw the results of one airstrike. Planes had hit a convoy of trucks carrying vegetables from Raqqa to Mosul; three trucks on the Syrian side of the border were burned out.

However, as Abed notes, there are no guarantees that this road will continue to be drivable.

The latter operated as an alliance of cells spread across the world; ISIS, by contrast, seeks to create a geographic space within which to build a caliphate.

This shift in strategy perhaps explains why ISIS has been even more successful than al Qaeda at hitting so many different foreign targets with so many different methods -- from Sinai to Beirut to Paris.

Its fighters are obsessed with recreating Islam in its earliest form (or as they interpret it to have been, because the early caliphate was far kinder) and believe that most other Muslims have fallen from the standard -- one that includes the uses of crucifixion and slavery

ISIS wants to bring on the apocalypse.

But while ISIS' reach is global, it does not command sizable support beyond its shifting boundaries. Meanwhile, the alliance against it is one of the largest and most diverse in history, including America, Britain, France, Russia and Iran.

It cannot be resolved entirely by force of arms.

And, most importantly of all, Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, will have to depart the stage.

There can be no constructive government of Syria until there is law, order and democratic elections that legitimize proper opposition parties. If we give rebels the impression that the West wants to force Assad on them again, they will resist us, too.

There's also a refugee crisis to confront.

Some American politicians have suggested a religious test for refugees seeking access to the United States.

This kind of prejudiced rhetoric adds to that false sense that this is a world war-style clash between conservative Muslims on one side and Christian democracies on the other.

we here in Europe have actual experience of living with Muslims -- and I can report that the living is easy.

It's believed to be the first time that ISIS has killed a female citizen journalist in Syria

one of a number of young activists in Raqqa who tried to get word to the outside world of what was really happening in the city.

"I'm in Raqqa and I received death threats, and when ISIS (arrests) me and kills me it's ok because they will cut my head and I have dignity it's better than I live in humiliation with ISIS."

Hassan mocked ISIS' attempts to ban Wi-Fi hotspots in Raqqa.

"These days I'm thinking about rest... about peace... about safety... about feeling reassured..."

She wrote about everyday life under ISIS rule, about coalition airstrikes as they rocked the city -- with humor, sadness and a glint of hope.

several of the Raqqa group have been assassinated in Turkey or killed inside the so-called caliphate established by ISIS,

She wanted a free and democratic Syria

As long as there is a training ground for ISIS on the other side of our border we will continue to have this problem, not only Turkey but Europe and U.S

Officials quickly blamed ISIS for the attack.

We have a free society ... but there are people who want us harmed,

No group claimed responsibility for the blast, yet Davutoglu pinned blame on ISIS, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

If Tuesday's blast is confirmed to be the work of the terrorist group, that will force Ankara to step up its anti-ISIS fight

An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,"

More than half the country's 17 million residents have fled

has begun allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey

Those explosions killed as many as 100 people and injured more than 240 others.

They have targeted the whole of Turkey and the whole world."

Syria has been embroiled in a civil war for nearly five years -- a conflict that, according to the United Nations, has cost more than 250,000 lives, spurred more than half the country's 17 million residents to flee and caused humanitarian crises for those left behind, as illustrated by the hundreds starving in the siege of Madaya.

ISIS has been behind many of the worst atrocities there

Its military cooperation with the United States and other NATO nations in particular has angered ISIS

ISIS has responded by singling out Turkey as a primary target

ISIS, which has enemies everywhere and has proven willing to strike those who don't subscribe to its twisted, hard-line version of Sharia law.

It's seen as a place where you have a mesh of different entities. It's a real melting pot."

including allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base

Tuesday's blast -- if it's confirmed to be the terror group's work -- ups the ante for Ankara, forcing it to step up its anti-ISIS fight even more

An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,

especially exasperated with Mr. Trump, who has called for a temporary ban on Muslims’ entering the United States.

Mr. Obama said that it was “understandable” that Americans were concerned, but that they should be reassured.

Mr. Obama claimed progress in pushing back the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, through a strategy of airstrikes combined with Special Operations raids and support for local forces on the ground.

Moreover, he added, part of the group’s strategy is to draw the United States into a broader military entanglement in the region.

U.S. plans to strike more financial targets like this one to take away ISIS's ability to function as a state-like entity.

U.S. considers the Mosul strike extremely sensitive, as the building is in an area where civilians are also located, and there was a significant risk of civilian casualties.

U.S. aircraft and drones watched the site for days trying to determine when the fewest number of civilians would be in the area

U.S. commanders had been willing to consider up to 50 civilian casualties from the airstrike due to the importance of the target

five to seven people were killed.

U.S. has said it will assess all targets on a case-by-case basis and may be more willing to tolerate civilians casualties for more significant targets