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Hundreds may be dead after ISIS abductions in Deir Ezzor

The city of Deir Ezzor in northern Syria has seen more than its share of conflict and suffering since the Syrian insurgency began

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Sunday that at least 400 civilians -- including families of pro-regime fighters -- had been abducted by ISIS during the latest fighting and taken to the surrounding countryside.

As the post-9/11 Afghanistan conflict dragged deep into its second decade, with persistent rumours alleging impropriety, brutality, and even possible war crimes swirling among Australia’s tight-knit defence community, Dr Samantha Crompvoets, a civilian sociologist, was commissioned to investigate alleged cultural failings within its special forces.

Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times over a series of 2018 articles he claims defamed him because they portrayed him as committing war crimes while on deployment in Afghanistan. He strenuously denies all allegations and has previously rejected them as malicious and deeply troubling.

US soldiers were convicted over the deaths of two unarmed Afghan civilians on Bagram airbase in 2002. Two soldiers from a self-declared “kill team” pleaded guilty to murder while deployed, while Staff Sergeant Robert Bales pleaded guilty to the murder of 16 Afghan civilians during a shooting spree in Kandahar province in 2012. Members of the storied Seal Team 6 have been accused of war crimes, including beheading and mutilating slain enemies.

Turkish-backed militias, armed by Ankara, have killed civilians in areas abandoned by the U.S., four U.S. military and intelligence officials tell TIME. The officials say they fear that the militias committing those potential war crimes may be using weapons that the U.S. sold to Turkey.

Turkey and its allies may be preparing to clear civilian populations from the area, which has largely been controlled by the Kurds, Ankara’s long-time enemies in the region. Turkish President Recep Erdogan told the United Nations on Sept. 24 that he planned to establish a safe zone across the border in Syria, and to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently sheltered in Turkey.

This intelligence is emerging as the U.S. struggles to manage the fallout from its precipitous retreat from Syria, which was announced Oct. 13, after Erdogan told Trump that Turkey was about to attack territory in northern Syria where U.S. troops were deployed. Trump gave the Pentagon and State Department no warning of his decision to pull the U.S. out of the area, and no time to plan an organized retreat or to negotiate a handover of territory. That has left U.S. military officials and diplomats scrambling to deal with the situation.

stemming from U.S. support for Saudi Arabia and the Emirates as they have waged a disastrous war in Yemen, using American equipment in attacks that have killed thousands of civilians

“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”

the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness.

Ethiopia's government said on Saturday it would act against the perpetrators after a video appeared on social media showing armed men, some in military uniforms, burning civilians to death in the country's west.

"A horrific and inhumane act was recently committed... In a series of horrific images circulated on social media, innocent civilians were burned to death," the statement read.

In the video, some of the men in the crowd are wearing Ethiopian military uniforms as well as uniforms from other regional security forces.

This is broadly what we know happened: Shortly after launching the intensive early-morning rocket attack, elite Hamas units simultaneously rushed multiple military outposts on the Gaza-Israel border. They quickly overwhelmed the posts, killing or kidnapping virtually all the soldiers in them. They then destroyed the observation and communications networks on which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) depended for identifying breaches of the border fence.

In parallel, Hamas launched an aerial and naval attack using several dozen motor-powered hang gliders, armed drones, and small speed boats. In the ensuing chaos, the fence was breached by bulldozers, explosives, and wire-cutters in up to 80 spots along the northern and eastern border between Gaza and Israel, facilitating the main thrust of the attack.

Over 1,500 armed militiamen on pickup trucks, motorbikes, and SUVs rushed across the border into adjacent Israeli kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. Several dozen militiamen also headed to the scene of a youth music festival where around 3,500 revelers were camped in tents and cars. This became the epicenter of a massacre.

“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, two days after the attacks, as he described how the Israeli military planned to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.

“We’re fighting Nazis,” declared Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister.

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”

The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.

In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.

SIS has "executed" 232 people near Mosul and taken tens of thousands of people to use as human shields against advancing Iraqi forces

terror group had carried out the mass killings on Wednesday,

42 civilians in Hammam al-Alil,

Russian officials said Thursday that the Syrian Army had stopped combat operations in the divided city of Aleppo in order to evacuate civilians, but residents of the rebel-held enclave reported that after a day of intense bombardment, fighting was continuing

150 airstrikes had killed at least 50 people and in which residents said they were unable to flee because of the intense combat

At the United Nations, the agency’s envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters he could not verify whether the fighting had stopped or whether civilians were being allowed to evacuate

American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, but in Iraq it is an entirely different story: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group.

On the outskirts of Falluja, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police officers and Shiite militiamen backed by Iran are preparing for an assault on the Sunni city, raising fears of a sectarian blood bath

But the United States has long believed that Iran’s role, which relies on militias accused of sectarian abuses, can make matters worse by angering Sunnis and making them more sympathetic to the militants.

Hiroshima is a book about what happened in Japan, to Japan, in August 1945. It is a book about five Japanese and one German hibakusha, or bomb survivors. It is not a book which concerns itself with what the bombing meant for America in military terms, but rather what it meant for the people of Hiroshima in the most human terms.

Inevitably, it also contains within it two Americas. One is the America which develops and uses—not once, but twice—a weapon of a destructive capability which far outstrips anything that has come before, the America which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory. There is nothing particular to America in this—all nations in war behave in much the same way. But in the years between the bombing of Hiroshima and now, no nation has intervened militarily with as many different countries as America, and always on the other country’s soil; which is to say, no nation has treated as many other civilian populations as collateral damage as America while its own civilians stay well out of the arena of war. So that’s one of the Americas in Hiroshima—the America of brutal military power.

But there’s another America in the book, that of John Hersey. The America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is. The America of stepping back and allowing someone else to tell their story through you because they have borne the tragedy and you have the power to bear witness to it. It is the America of The New Yorker of William Shawn, which, for the only time in its history, gave over an entire edition to a single article and kept its pages clear of its famed cartoons. It is the America which honored Hersey for his truth telling.

Thousands of Syrian civilians have finally been allowed to leave the besieged Damascus suburb of Moadamiya.

The exodus of civilians has been made possible by an apparent relaxation of a blockade by government forces.

The situation has become so desperate that earlier this month Muslim clerics issued a religious ruling allowing people to eat cats, dogs and donkeys just to survive.

I once listened to Henry Kissinger, who helped prolong the Vietnam War for more than five years, assert that its “tragedy” lay in the fact “that the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process.” It was, he claimed, “America’s first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept.”

In more than a decade spent poring over long-classified U.S. military war crimes investigations, speaking to hundreds of veterans, and traveling through rural Vietnam interviewing survivors about what is known there as the American War, I learned of a very different set of tragedies and very different kinds of pain.

the pain endured by millions of survivors in Vietnam who lost family, the pain of millions who were wounded, of millions who were killed, of millions driven from their homes into slums and camps reeking of squalor, seem to me to be so much greater.

Taliban widen offensive as Nato special forces join fight for Kunduz

Nato special forces officially flown in to “advise and assist” Afghan commandos and ordinary troops joined combat in the early hours of the morning, spokesman Col Brian Tribus told Reuters news agency.

Kunduz is the first major city in Afghanistan to come under Taliban control since 2001.

The International Criminal Court has begun considering whether to investigate alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel and the US have strongly criticised the Palestinians' move.

Israel has accused the Palestinians themselves of committing war crimes, including by firing missiles into civilian areas during the 50-day conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza last year.

40,000 fleeing Aleppo as battle for Syrian city intensifies, U.N. group says

The battle for Aleppo -- once Syria's commercial heart -- is intensifying, and video has surfaced appearing to show thousands of civilians streaming out of the devastated city

Reports said forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, crucially aided by Russian air power, have cut the city off from supplies and are advancing.

Airstrikes believed to have been carried out by Russian warplanes in western Syria are reported to have killed dozens of civilians, Human Rights Watch says, suggesting that the bombings appear to be war crimes

"the strikes were by Russian forces because the sound of the planes was different from the sound made by Syrian air force planes, and the Russians fly much higher."

The U.S. military vowed to investigate the report. U.S. Central Command said at the time that coalition forces had carried out airstrikes in the area. But it said it had no indication that any civilians were killed in those strikes.