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While the Obama administration has focused on confronting the Islamic State militarily, experts say the group’s recent victories point to the need for a political component in the strategy to counter the group — even after nearly 4,000 airstrikes by the American-led coalition and what United States officials say are the deaths of 10,000 ISIS militants.

Sunnis form an aggrieved majority in Syria, where repression of a mostly Sunni uprising by Mr. Assad’s government, backed by Shiite-led Iran, exploded into war.

Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.

French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."

Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.

"The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.

The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.

Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.

A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.

"We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.

The United States is responsible for bringing the various opposition groups in line while the Russians are supposed to pressure the government. Washington and Moscow also agreed to set up a hotline to monitor compliance by both sides.

President Obama sealed the final terms of the arrangement in a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has become perhaps the most influential player in the Syrian war since Russia thrust itself into the conflict in September on behalf of its client, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

The priorities, Mr. Obama told Mr. Putin, were to “alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people,” accelerate a political settlement and keep the focus on the coalition’s battle against the Islamic State.

On the ground in Syria, the prospects for an end to the bloodshed seemed even more elusive. In the last week alone, more than 100 people in Homs and Damascus were killed by suicide bombings by the Islamic State.

Airstrikes by the Syrian government and its Russian allies in Aleppo and elsewhere have killed scores of people, including in at least five hospitals, one aided by the international charity Doctors Without Borders.

Farther east, scores of civilians were said by locals to have been killed in airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The diplomatic efforts did yield a small victory: Aid was delivered for the first time in months to several towns after the combatants gave permission under intense pressure.

hundreds of thousands of Syrians remain trapped in areas that are classified as besieged or hard to reach, without regular access to food and medicine. Humanitarian groups caution that the more access to aid is used as part of political deals, the less the combatants will provide it unconditionally, as required under international law.

The agreement came after one false start: Secretary of State John Kerry announced in Munich on Feb. 12 that the truce would take effect in a week, but the target date passed as the two sides wrestled over how to carry it out. On Sunday, in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Kerry spoke three times by phone with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to iron out the details.

On Monday, while flying back to Washington, Mr. Kerry briefed ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey about the agreement, according to a senior State Department official. He is expected to discuss the truce when he testifies at a budget hearing Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. Kerry has tended to be more optimistic than the White House about the prospects for a diplomatic solution in Syria. But his statement on Monday was also notably reserved. He did not mention the Feb. 27 date and said that while the agreement represented a “moment of promise,” the “fulfillment of that promise depends on actions.”

Analysts expressed skepticism about the deal, noting that in the five days before the truce takes effect, the Syrian forces and their Russian allies could inflict a lot more damage to Aleppo through bombing raids. Some speculated that Russia might expand its military campaign to Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, where Nusra fighters are also operating.

“This depends entirely on the good faith of Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, none of whom have shown much good faith in the last five years,” said Frederic C. Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who worked on Syria policy during the first term of the Obama administration.

In Riyadh on Monday, a Saudi-backed consortium of Syrian opposition groups and political dissidents said they would agree to the terms of the truce. But Riad Hijab, who coordinates the group’s efforts, did not expect the Syrian government, Iran or Russia to abide by it since, he said, Mr. Assad’s survival depended on “the continuation of its campaign of oppression, killing and forced displacement.”

For the Obama administration, a partial truce in Syria may simply be a way to keep a lid on the violence there while it turns its attention to planning and carrying out military operations against Islamic State fighters in Libya.

Some analysts said the agreement was less an effort to end the fighting in Syria than to ease the bloodshed enough to allow more humanitarian aid to reach stricken cities like Aleppo.

In a statement posted on the insurgents’ website, the Taliban denied that a representative would attend the talks.

Previous talks have taken place without Taliban representatives present, but Afghan and Pakistani officials had expressed confidence that direct talks between the Afghan government and the militants would resume in March, and they maintained that position on Saturday.

The official said the Pakistan military leader, Gen. Raheel Sharif, who visited Kabul last week, had assured Afghan leaders that talks would go ahead.

Direct talks began last summer in Pakistan, but quickly fell apart after Afghan officials concerned about the authority of the insurgent delegation leaked word that the Taliban’s longtime leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had been dead for two years.

The leader who took over, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, had been known to favor participation in the negotiations. Since Mullah Mansour took power, the group has been riven by dissension over the leadership change, and fighting off challenges in some areas from insurgents allied with the Islamic State group.

The request does not seem to have gone over well with Taliban leaders, who have insisted that their political office in Qatar is the only address for peace talks.

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 — the United States military is carrying out airstrikes in support of Afghan government operations and secret American Special Operations missions.

Pakistan has leverage over the Taliban because the group enjoys sanctuary in Pakistani territory, and many of its fighters receive medical treatment there.

Human rights advocates are urging world leaders to keep the focus on protecting civilians, even as the conversation shifts to U.S. airstrikes in Syria.

U.S. should do more to assist in resettling Syrians. Global funding is also far short of what the United Nations says is necessary to meet the humanitarian needs of the refugee population.

Death now comes daily to Europe’s beaches. How is this tolerable?

President Bashar al-Assad and cronies stand accused of a wide range of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Civilians, rescuers, health workers and hospitals are routinely (and illegally) targeted. The International Criminal Court is stymied by Russian and Chinese vetoes

Repeated regime use of banned chemical weapons in defiance of global treaties has grave international ramifications.

Russia has repeatedly hindered investigations, while the US has ignored its own “red lines”. As a result, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is seriously weakened.

A lasting beneficiary of the war is Islamic State (Isis), which overran territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014. While an international coalition eventually crushed the caliphate, Isis was behind many terrorist attacks in Europe in 2014-17.

The war has marked a clear shift in the Middle East balance of power from the US to Russia. After Barack Obama declined to intervene militarily, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, filled the ensuing power vacuum in 2015 – and probably saved Assad’s regime. Joe Biden’s main concern is deterring pro-Iranian militia and jihadists – witness last month’s limited air strikes. The UN-led peace process collapsed in January – and Biden seems to think it’s too late to save Syria. It would be great to be proved wrong.

Western states initially expressed sympathy for attempts to overthrow dictators and authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria in 2010-12. But as events turned unpredictable and Islamists got involved, the west backed away. The window that briefly opened on peaceful reform in the Arab world slammed shut. The cause of global democracy was a big loser. Syria symbolises its defeat.

Israel worries about the build-up of Iranian Revolutionary Guard and pro-Tehran armed forces in Syria and Lebanon. It has launched hundreds of air strikes on Iran-linked targets there, and has urged the US to do likewise

The failure to end the war has done enormous damage to international institutions. The UN security council in particular has been severely discredited. So, too, have UN peacemaking efforts. Yet if the UNSC’s “big five” had really wanted to stop the conflict, there is little doubt that, acting together, they could have done so. That they did not even try is the Syrian war’s most shameful legacy.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted that while President Biden stated Israel has a right to defend itself, she asked, "But do Palestinians have a right to survive?" adding, "If so, we have a responsibility to that."

For the decades that followed, few American elected officials on either side of the aisle prioritized Palestinian human rights. Thankfully, Sen. Bernie Sanders changed that during the 2016 presidential campaign when he declared, "We are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity." Sanders, while defending Israel's right to exist, called for the United States to stop being "one-sided" in the conflict.

in Gaza, 95% of the residents don't have access to clean water and 80% of the population relies on international aid to survive. And Human Rights Watch recently released a 213-page report in which it accused the Israeli government of engaging in an "apartheid" system of polices that favor Israeli Jews over Palestinians in both Israel and the territories.

Not forgetting about the Palestinians is more than pushing for peace -- it's the United States taking a stand for Palestinian human rights.

Biden should declare he's willing to leverage the $3.8 billion in annual aid the United States provides to the Israeli government -- along with America's leadership role in the world -- to achieve that. This even-handed approach is step one in hopefully laying the foundation for a lasting, just peace deal.

the United States has provided material support over five years for actions that have caused the continuous killing of civilians.

chief prosecutor could open an investigation into the actions of American forces in the Afghanistan war — the first time the court has authorized a case against the United States. The Trump administration this month imposed sanctions on that prosecutor and another of the court’s lawyers, a sign of how seriously the administration takes the possibility of prosecution.

When an internal investigation this year revealed that the department had failed to address the legal risks of selling bombs to the Saudis and their partners, top agency officials found ways to hide this.

“I have a very good relationship with them,” Mr. Trump said during an interview in February. “They buy billions and billions and billions of dollars of product from us. They buy tens of billions of dollars of military equipment.”

That August, a coalition jet dropped an American-made bomb on a Yemeni school bus, killing 54 people, including 44 children, in an attack that Mr. Trump would later call “a horror show.”

senior State Department political appointees were discussing a rarely invoked tactic to force through $8.1 billion in weapons sales without congressional approval: declaring an emergency over Iran.

From that position, Mr. String tried to pressure Steve A. Linick, the inspector general, to drop his investigation, Mr. Linick, who was fired in May, said in congressional testimony in June. Mr. String’s office also handled the redacting of the report.

$8.1 billion in weapons and equipment in 22 batches, including $3.8 billion in precision-guided bombs and bomb parts made by Raytheon Company, to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

From July to early August this year, at least three airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in northern Yemen killed civilians, including a total of nearly two dozen children, according to the United Nations, aid workers and Houthi rebels.

Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for an attack.

“Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care – you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”

ccording to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the homes of thousands of Palestinians who were linked, with the assistance of AI, to militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war.

Details about the specific kinds of data used to train Lavender’s algorithm, or how the programme reached its conclusions, are not included in the accounts published by +972 or Local Call. However, the sources said that during the first few weeks of the war, Unit 8200 refined Lavender’s algorithm and tweaked its search parameters.

Responding to the publication of the testimonies in +972 and Local Call, the IDF said in a statement that its operations were carried out in accordance with the rules of proportionality under international law. It said dumb bombs are “standard weaponry” that are used by IDF pilots in a manner that ensures “a high level of precision”.

“The IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist,” it added. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.”

In earlier military operations conducted by the IDF, producing human targets was often a more labour-intensive process. Multiple sources who described target development in previous wars to the Guardian, said the decision to “incriminate” an individual, or identify them as a legitimate target, would be discussed and then signed off by a legal adviser.

n the weeks and months after 7 October, this model for approving strikes on human targets was dramatically accelerated, according to the sources. As the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza intensified, they said, commanders demanded a continuous pipeline of targets.

“We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us,” said one intelligence officer. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”

Lavender was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence division, Unit 8200, which is comparable to the US’s National Security Agency or GCHQ in the UK.

After randomly sampling and cross-checking its predictions, the unit concluded Lavender had achieved a 90% accuracy rate, the sources said, leading the IDF to approve its sweeping use as a target recommendation tool.

Lavender created a database of tens of thousands of individuals who were marked as predominantly low-ranking members of Hamas’s military wing, they added. This was used alongside another AI-based decision support system, called the Gospel, which recommended buildings and structures as targets rather than individuals.

The accounts include first-hand testimony of how intelligence officers worked with Lavender and how the reach of its dragnet could be adjusted. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” one of the sources said. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is.”

broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

Before the war, US and Israeli estimated membership of Hamas’s military wing at approximately 25-30,000 people.

there was a decision to treat Palestinian men linked to Hamas’s military wing as potential targets, regardless of their rank or importance.

According to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,” one source said.

Another source, who justified the use of Lavender to help identify low-ranking targets, said that “when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it”. They said that in wartime there was insufficient time to carefully “incriminate every target”

So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it,” they added.

When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Such a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied according to the seniority of the target.

The IDF’s targeting processes in the most intensive phase of the bombardment were also relaxed, they said. “There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations,” one source said. “A policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge.”

“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” another added. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits. These are things that haven’t happened before.” There appears to have been significant fluctuations in the figure that military commanders would tolerate at different stages of the war

One source said that the limit on permitted civilian casualties “went up and down” over time, and at one point was as low as five. During the first week of the conflict, the source said, permission was given to kill 15 non-combatants to take out junior militants in Gaza

at one stage earlier in the war they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age.

“It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” they said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’ … In practice, the proportionality criterion did not exist.”

Experts in international humanitarian law who spoke to the Guardian expressed alarm at accounts of the IDF accepting and pre-authorising collateral damage ratios as high as 20 civilians, particularly for lower-ranking militants. They said militaries must assess proportionality for each individual strike.

An international law expert at the US state department said they had “never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. There’s a lot of leeway, but that strikes me as extreme”.

Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Department of Defense, now an analyst at Crisis Group, said: “While there may be certain occasions where 15 collateral civilian deaths could be proportionate, there are other times where it definitely wouldn’t be. You can’t just set a tolerable number for a category of targets and say that it’ll be lawfully proportionate in each case.”

Whatever the legal or moral justification for Israel’s bombing strategy, some of its intelligence officers appear now to be questioning the approach set by their commanders. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza,” one said.

Another said that after the 7 October attacks by Hamas, the atmosphere in the IDF was “painful and vindictive”. “There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough. On the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”

French armored vehicles moved into position on Tuesday at the town of Niono, 190 miles from the capital Bamako

Guillaud said French military strikes were being hampered because militants were using the civilian population as a shield.

Israeli officials have declined to publicly discuss the operation. But Israel has repeatedly said it is prepared to take military action

In carrying out the raid, Israeli warplanes did not fly over the Damascus airport. Instead, they fired air-to-ground weapons, apparently using the airspace of neighboring Lebanon.

Nato's Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that warships could be used to target civilians in Syria.

"The concern is that the Kuznetsov carrier group can be used as a platform for increased airstrikes against civilians in Aleppo."

"for each nation to decide whether these ships can get supplies and fuelling and be fuelled in different harbours along the route towards the eastern Mediterranean."

The British Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, said: "We'd be extremely concerned that any Nato member should consider assisting a Russian carrier group that might end up bombing Syrian civilians."

Led by Russia's only aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, the naval group includes a nuclear-powered battle cruiser, two anti-submarine warships and four support vessels, probably escorted by submarines. The battle group carries do

Some 2,700 people have been killed or injured since the Russian-backed Syrian offensive started last month, according to activists.

About 250,000 civilians who live in Aleppo have been trapped by the fighting.

The extra resources are an acknowledgment, U.S. officials say, that the war can’t be won without a greater level of American involvement.

U.S. officials say they have seen no fallout yet from the fracas in Baghdad, but don’t rule out that there could be one if the political instability continues.

We have to pause, reset a bit and do some things.”

intense Islamic State fire from the small but strategically important village of Al-Nasr, about 40 miles to the south. It was a reminder, said Col. Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman, that “we’ve got a foot on his neck but he’s still got some fight in him."

One major effort for which the United States needs Turkish engagement is a faltering offensive against the Islamic State in the northern Syrian countryside of Aleppo province, bordering Turkey.

Cutting the Islamic State’s vital supply route to Turkey is considered an essential prerequisite for any eventual offensive to retake Raqqa.

The recent resumption of fighting around the nearby city of Aleppo has come as a fresh reminder that the war in Syria will continue to draw resources away from the Islamic State fight. Peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the conflict have deadlocked, eroding hopes that a political solution is in sight.

It was repelled, however, only with the help of intense U.S. airstrikes, underscoring the vital role the United States plays in securing recaptured territory.

But were you to remove that air power and the capabilities the Americans bring, I could imagine them making gains again on the ground.”

called for an independent investigation, adding that “the perpetrators should know that they will one day be held accountable for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.”

bombs also destroyed a hospital

killed a senior official of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent

Repeated strikes by aircraft destroyed 18 of 31 trucks that the United Nations said had been clearly marked as a humanitarian convoy.

he United States would reassess the prospects for cooperation with Russia in light of this “egregious violation” of the week-old cessation of hostilities.

believed to have been the first time a convoy has come under attack by aircraft

“I have had discussions with him on this issue,” General Mattis said. “He has shown himself open, even to the point of asking more questions, going deeper into the issue.”

The diplomats said they had heard him sound off during the campaign. But with the inauguration less than a week away, there is a growing realization in European capitals that Mr. Trump’s acerbic criticism of NATO and the European Union was not just an attempt to win votes.

they were civilians — mostly women and children — fleeing shelling and air strikes on other parts of the city.

refugees were filling up apartment buildings long abandoned because of the war

Observatory chief Rami Abdurrahman said he predicts death tolls will spiral in east Aleppo as the internal displacement creates more residential density

It blamed the government for the strikes.

more than 50,000 out of an estimated quarter-million inhabitants have been displaced by attacks on rebel-held eastern Aleppo

0,000 people have fled.