Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Raqqa

Rss Feed Group items tagged

sarahbalick

Putin says he 'hopes' nuclear warheads will never be needed against Isis... or anyone e... - 0 views

  • significant damage" had been done to a munitions depot, a factory manufacturing mortar rounds and oil facilities. Two major targets in Raqqa, the defacto capital of Isis, had been hit, said Mr Shoigu.
  • With regard to strikes from a submarine. We certainly need to analyse everything that is happening on the battlefield, how the weapons work. Both the [Kalibr] missiles and the Kh-101 rockets are generally showing very good results. We now see that these are new, modern and highly effective high-precision weapons that can be equipped either with conventional or special nuclear warheads."
  • "Naturally, we do not need that in fighting terrorists, and I hope we will never need it. But overall, this speaks to our significant progress in terms of improving weaponry and equipment being supplied to the Russian army and navy."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Of course not, and the president has stated this, that there is no need to use any nuclear weapons against terrorists, as they can be defeated through conventional means, and this is fully in line with our military doctrine,"
jongardner04

The Real Power of ISIS - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • The West has failed utterly to understand the appeal of the ISIS narrative, much less to develop effective counter narratives.
  • In the meantime ISIS is reaching out, especially in Africa but also in Central Asia and wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery” (at-tawahoush) exists, to fill the void. It is establishing its caliphate as a global archipelago where “volcanoes of jihad” erupt, so that it may survive even if its current core base between the Euphrates River in Syria (Raqqa) and the Tigris in Iraq (Mosul) is seriously degraded.
jongardner04

The Middle East Big Game: Forecasting the Conflict | Global Research - Centre for Resea... - 0 views

  • The main strategic result of the ongoing Russian military operation in Syria is loss of the US monopoly on the recourse to force. Now, the US is lossing the leadership in the Middle East region. The success of the alternative anti-ISIS coalition will mean that the US could lose the leadership in a great part of the world, in Eurasia.
  • The US is pushed to answer on this challenge through political, military and media means. This is why Washington is preparing a military operation of Peshmerga and People’s Protection Units (YPG) to take control of Raqqa. The US military will coordinate this offensive and provide air support.
  • Indeed, this situation looks as a background of the future war. Nonetheless, the near-war situation can’t be stable. At the moment, the US and Russia stay on different sides of the trench. But, the rapidly changing situation could lead to occurrence of the shotgun marriage between Russia and the US.
ecfruchtman

Why Jordan is Deporting Syrian Refugees - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • For decades, Jordan has taken in millions of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees, earning it a reputation as an island of peace.
  • Yet Jordan also deports and blocks aid access to refugees and asylum seekers, regularly violating basic humanitarian principles, all in the name of maintaining that same “security.”
  • Years ago, this man was an ornithologist, he said. He’d worked at a reserve in the central Syrian Desert with more than a thousand Arabian gazelles and oryxes, specializing in tracking the bald ibis, a rare bird that once migrated between the Levant, the Gulf, and Central Africa. Then he had to flee from Palmyra to Raqqa to Rukban, where his six children and wife are living among at least 50,000 displaced people in tents and mud shelters. The bald ibis has since gone extinct in the Middle East.
runlai_jiang

At 12 She Joined the Kurdish Militia-Seven Years Later She's Had Enough - WSJ - 0 views

  • Four years ago, she joined the war against Islamic State—part of a Kurdish militia allied with the U.S. She has been wounded twice and has shrapnel lodged in her head. During the battle for Raqqa last year, she braved land mines near the front lines. Now, Ms. Ali is done fighting. “I’m tired,” she says, curled up on a sofa in her parents’ home in northeastern Syria, intently chipping away at her pink fingernail polish.
  • Ms. Ali’s mother, Ahin Ali, winces at the details. “It hurts a lot, that she witnessed all this pain,” she said. But even as she mourns the cost to her daughter, she doesn’t regret the sacrifice she made in allowing her to figh
  • Amid the chaos of the war, the Kurds have been fighting for self-rule in Syria. But their aspirations are increasingly under threat. Turkey is determined to reverse Kurdish gains and the U.S., which armed the Kurds’ YPG militia for years so it could fight Islamic State, hasn’t come to the group’s defense.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As the Syrian conflict began to encroach on a corner of the country spared early in the war, the teenager traveled to a training camp in Iraq’s remote Qandil Mountains. Soon Islamic State began seizing large parts of Syria, including some Kurdish areas, and she headed to the war’s front lines.
  • At first her father, who had been arrested several times by the Syrian government because of his membership in a Kurdish political party, resisted because of her age. But her mother knew she couldn’t stop her daughter from joining a cause they had trumpeted all her life.
  • A portrait of Abdullah Ocalan —the jailed leader of the PKK Kurdish separatist  movement in neighboring Turkey and founder of its many affiliates, including what evolved into the YPG—hangs in the family’s living room.
  • In the years she was away, Ms. Ali only wrote three letters, sending them home via a modern day pony express by pick-up truck rather than horseback. Her mother keeps them carefully folded up in a leather wallet. One she wrote before participating in battle for the first time. The other is a poem of yearning:
runlai_jiang

Iraq declares war with Islamic State is over - BBC News - 0 views

  • But it suffered a series of defeats over the past two years, losing Iraq's second city of Mosul this July and its de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria last month.
  • Some IS fighters are reported to have dispersed into the Syrian countryside, while others are believed to have escaped across the Turkish border.
  • This is undeniably a proud moment for Mr Abadi - a victory that once looked like it might only ever be rhetorical rather than real.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • em, it doesn't mean the battle against the group's ideology or its ability to stage an insurgency is finished - whether in Iraq, Syria or the wider world.
  • Attacks may be at a lower level than they once were, but Iraqi towns and cities still fall prey to suicide bombers,
  • Our forces are in complete control of the Iraqi-Syrian border and I therefore announce the end of the war against Daesh [IS].
  • The Iraqi armed forces issued a statement saying Iraq had been "totally liberated" from IS.
  • "The United States joins the government of Iraq in stressing that Iraq's liberation does not mean the fight against terrorism, and even against Isis [IS], in Iraq is over," she added.
  • historic moment" but warned that IS still posed a threat, including from across the border in Syria.
  • aid it had "fully liberated" the eastern border town of Albu Kamal, the last last urban stronghold of IS
  • he mission to defeat bandit units of the Islamic State terrorist organisation on the territory of Syria, carried out by the armed forces of the Russian Federation, has been accomplishe
  • Russia's military presence in Syria would now concentrate on preserving ceasefires and restoring peace.
  • will escape over Syria's borders to carry out more attacks abroad.
krystalxu

The War on ISIS Held the Middle East Together - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • No longer will ISIS plant severed heads on stakes in the main town square and spew hate from repurposed churches and government buildings, painted black.
  • Just as the dispute between Iraqi Kurds and Baghdad simmered in the background while everyone’s eyes were on ISIS,
  • the U.S. decision not to back Kurdish aspirations vindicates the view that the United States isn’t secretly agitating to break the Middle East into a patchwork of feuding statelets.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The conflict will continue, to murderous and destabilizing effect, until and unless these Arab states change their entire approach and self-definition
malonema1

Raqqa: US coalition 'wiped city off Earth', Russia says - BBC News - 0 views

  • Russia has itself been accused of committing war crimes for its bombardment of Aleppo last year.
  • Syrian activists say between 1,130 and 1,873 civilians were killed and that many of the civilian casualties were the result of the intense US-led air strikes that helped the SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, advance.
  • he US-led coalition said it had adhered to strict targeting processes and procedures aimed to minimise risks to civilians.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Syrian army backed up by Russian airpower and Iranian militias is also attacking the extremist group.
rerobinson03

An Immigrant Family Caught Up in a Distinctly American Tragedy: The Boulder Shooting - ... - 0 views

  • After years of moving from rental to rental, they bought a seven-bedroom gabled home in the Denver suburbs near golf courses and walking trails. Their children attended high-rated schools. The family ran a handful of Middle Eastern restaurants across the Denver area where customers raved about the lamb kebabs and the pillowy pitas. Friends recalled the big, multigenerational family as hard-working and generous.
  • On a now-deactivated Facebook page, Mr. Alissa said he had moved to the United States in 2002, years before a vicious civil war turned millions of Syrians into refugees. The Syrian cities that some in his family name as their hometowns — Aleppo and Raqqa — became bombed-out battlegrounds and a haven for the Islamic State as Mr. Alissa and his siblings were growing up and starting businesses in the United States.
  • Records show that at various times, the Alissa brothers also ventured into a car-service business and — at one point — junk removal. A brother-in-law, Usame Almusa, a recent immigrant from Syria, filed corporate papers to form yet another restaurant business. The family moved at least three times over the past two decades, from the largely middle-class city of Aurora to an apartment in Denver to a rental in Arvada, where a former neighbor remembers family members sometimes stopping by to ask questions about the suburban chores of lawns and weeding.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In 2014, Ahmad’s older brother Imad pleaded guilty in Denver to carrying a concealed weapon, records show. He was arrested again four years later on a charge of possession of a weapon by a previous offender, though prosecutors did not pursue charges.In 2016, a female member of the family pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless endangerment and was given a deferred sentence after she agreed to take a parenting class.In 2018, the Arvada police responded to a call at the house that stemmed from a dispute between Imad Alissa and his wife, Ms. Archuleta’s daughter. The couple had broken up (they later reconciled, Ms. Archuleta said), and a fight over a torn mattress had escalated to the point that the police were called.
  • Six days before the attack, Mr. Alissa bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol, a handgun that resembles a shortened assault-style rifle, from a gun store just three miles from the family home. About two days before the attack, a relative saw him back at the family home, playing with what she told the police looked like a “machine gun.”After the attack, the Mercedes C-class sedan that was often seen parked in the driveway of the large family house was one of the cars left in the parking lot at the King Soopers grocery, along with all of the other cars whose owners would not be driving them home. An empty rifle case was left in the passenger compartment.
blythewallick

ISIS Reaps Gains of U.S. Pullout From Syria - The New York Times - 0 views

  • American forces and their Kurdish-led partners in Syria had been conducting as many as a dozen counterterrorism missions a day against Islamic State militants, officials said. That has stopped.
  • And across Syria’s porous border with Iraq, Islamic State fighters are conducting a campaign of assassination against local village headmen, in part to intimidate government informants.
  • “There is no question that ISIS is one of the big winners in what is happening in Syria,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research center in London.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • When President Trump announced this month that he would pull American troops out of northern Syria and make way for a Turkish attack on the Kurds, Washington’s onetime allies, many warned that he was removing the spearhead of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
  • Changes in the political context in Syria and Iraq have diminished the Islamic State’s ability to whip up sectarian animosity out of the frustrations of Sunni Muslims over the Shiite or Shiite-linked authorities in Syria and Iraq — the militants’ trademark.
  • Although Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared victory over the Islamic State — even boasting to congressional leaders last week that he had personally “captured ISIS” — it remains a threat. After the loss in March of the last patch of the territory it once held across Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State dispersed its supporters and fighters to blend in with the larger population or to hide out in remote deserts and mountains.
  • Mr. Trump first said last December that he intended to withdraw the last 2,000 American troops from Syria; the Pentagon scaled that back, pulling out about half of those troops.
  • And within hours of Mr. Trump’s announcement almost two weeks ago that American forces were moving away from the Syrian border with Turkey, two ISIS suicide bombers attacked a base of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
  • But now the American withdrawal and the Turkish incursion are threatening the informal supervision of those former prisoners, Ms. Khalifa said, creating a risk that some might gravitate back to fighting for the Islamic State.
  • Mr. Trump, for his part, has insisted repeatedly that Turkey should take over the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. “It’s going to be your responsibility,” Mr. Trump said he told the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Javier E

The lonely people of history | Yossi Klein Halevi | The Blogs - 0 views

  • now we are at one of those defining moments in Jewish history when we find ourselves at a moral disconnect with much of the international community. As we struggle to absorb the enormity of the October 7 massacre and to confront a global wave of antisemitism, the trauma of aloneness has returned.
  • One typical tweet in my feed reads: “First they came for LGBTQ, and I stood up, because love is love … Then they came for the Black community, and I stood up, because Black lives matter. Then they came for me, but I stood alone, because I am a Jew.”
  • Surely those who had played down Israel’s security fears would now understand the nature of the threat we face on our borders. After all, this was no “ordinary” terror attack but a pre-enactment of Hamas’s genocidal vision. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – free, that is, of Jews. 
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “The attacks by Hamas didn’t happen in a vacuum,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, citing the 56-year Israeli occupation. Both sides are responsible, added former president Barack Obama, urging us to “take in the whole truth” of the conflict.
  • This is not a political conflict, we remind the world, but an outbreak of evil. Just like ISIS, we note, recalling the terrible devastation caused by the necessary American assault in Mosul and Raqqa. 
  • No, we patiently explain, the massacre was not in response to anything Israel does but to what Israel is
  • yes, the suffering of innocent Gazans deserves the world’s urgent humanitarian attention, but not at the expense of moral clarity about the justness of this war.
  • Yes, many Jews readily acknowledge, Israel bears its share of the blame for this hundred-year conflict. So do Palestinian leaders, who rejected every peace offer ever put on the table. 
  • What may well be the most horrific massacre of our time, outdoing even the atrocities of ISIS, has resulted in the unprecedented popularity of the Palestinian cause.
  • increasingly, we sense that we are talking to ourselves. The post-religious West, which substitutes the ideological rhetoric of academia for a genuine language for evil, doesn’t understand the old Jewish language we are speaking.
  • No, Israel is not a paragon of virtue. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have spent this last year protesting every week against the anti-democratic Netanyahu government
  • To leave a genocidal regime on our border would be a betrayal of the founding ethos of Israel as a safe refuge for the Jewish people. It would be the beginning of our unraveling.
  • Over and over we repeat what we’d assumed was self-evident: One side seeks to maximize civilian casualties, the other side to minimize them.
  • Harnevo mocked Cosgrave for tweeting, on the day of the massacre, a chart comparing the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed over the last 15 years. “You see Paddy, what happened on October 7 was not another data point on your f*king charts. It was something else, unbearable.” 
  • there are moments when we must risk going alone. We know that the longer the fighting in Gaza lasts, even our friends will begin to pressure us to relent. We must resist that pressure and not fear the consequences. 
  • During the Second Intifada, when the IDF fought suicide bombers in Palestinian towns and villages, an exasperated Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, demanded: “Can the whole world be wrong and only Israel is right?” Israelis unhesitatingly replied: Absolutely.
  • Speaking at the gravesite, Yonadav’s brother called on the government to resist world pressure and persevere. He invoked Israel’s first prime minister: “David Ben-Gurion said that it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.”
  • Israelis across the political spectrum agree that the regime of Oct. 7 must be destroyed. Like Ben-Gurion, we are willing to pay the bitter price of being alone.
‹ Previous 21 - 32 of 32
Showing 20 items per page