Firat News: Another massacre in Sinjar:
Gangs affiliated to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) are continuing to massacre civilians around the Yezidi town of Sinjar they occupied on 3 August.
Local sources speaking to ANF and a refugee who managed to flee the brutal violence said ISIS gangs committed massacre against the people of Kocho village which has been under the siege of jihadist gangs for the last several days.
According to the statements of eyewitnesses, around 200 families unable to flee the horrific acts of the ISIS gangs remained stranded in the Kocho village where among these men and elder were massacred while girls and women were forced into cars and taken somewhere else after radical Islamist gangs threatened the people “either to covert into Muslim or to die”.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes and lands after Sinjar was taken by ISIS on 3 August.
While the dimension of the massacres committed in the region has yet to be revealed entirely, hundreds, if not thousands, of survivors of the brutal attacks are feared to have been massacred or taken capture by ISIS gangs in the areas they captured in South Kurdistan since early August.
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France 24: The sacred union of Kurds saves Yezidis in Iraq
Special envoys from FRANCE 24 went to Sinjar Mountains in South Kurdistan where Kurdish fighters came to the aid of Yezidis after the occupation of the Sinjar town by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) gangs on 3 August.
According to FRANCE 24 special correspondents in Iraq, Kurdish fighters from the Turkish and Syrian wing of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, moved to Sinjar Mountains where thousands of members of the Yezidi community were stranded after fleeing ISIS brutality in the town.
“We are in northern Iraq, but the men who hold the Sinjar Mountains are actually Kurdish fighters from Syria and Turkey,” said Romeo Langlois, Special Envoy of FRANCE 24.
“Daesh, as they call it here the Islamic State, is a few kilometers. [Jihadists] control absolutely all the plain,” the journalist said.
Remarking that various Kurdish factions have strengthened their cooperation with the security forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, the peshmerga, after the occupation by ISIS of many areas since early August, the news channel reminded that the capture of Sinjar, 50 miles from the border between Iraq and Syria, provoked an exodus of thousands of civilians from the Yezidi minority.
France 24 also pointed out that the arrival of troops from the PKK on the battlefield has certainly helped Iraqi peshmerga to regain some of the lost territory, according to experts in the region.
“The PKK has very experienced fighters. They are mobile, agile and very tactical,” said FRANCE 24 Zulal Shwan, a professor at Kings College and a specialist in Kurdistan.
The report on Sinjar also remarked that; “Despite the heavy price paid by the Yezidi minority, the intervention of PKK fighters helped to secure the evacuation of a number of them.”
According to France 24 reporters on the ground, there were, Friday, Aug. 15, more than a hundred families on the Sinjar Mountains, against nearly 5,000 refugees at the beginning of the crisis.
“The situation is extremely complex.The airlift set up there about ten days only serves to meet the needs. Having said that, most people have fled and, through control of these men, referring to PKK fighters, the situation has stabilized, at least for civilians, “said Romeo Langlois of FRANCE 24.
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Reuters: Islamic State executed 700 people from Syrian tribe: monitoring group
BEIRUT/AMMAN – The Islamic State militant group has executed 700 members of a tribe it has been battling in eastern Syria during the past two weeks, the majority of them civilians, a human rights monitoring group and activists said on Saturday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has tracked violence on all sides of the three-year-old conflict, said reliable sources reported beheadings were used to execute many of the al-Sheitaat tribe, which is from Deir al-Zor province.
The conflict between Islamic State and the al-Sheitaat tribe, who number about 70,000, flared after the militants took over two oil fields in July.
“Those who were executed are all al-Sheitaat,” Observatory director Rami Abdelrahman said by telephone from Britain. “Some were arrested, judged and killed.
Reuters cannot independently verify reports from Syria due to security conditions and reporting restrictions.
Proclaiming a ‘caliphate’ straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State has swept across northern Iraq in recent weeks, pushing back Kurdish regional forces and driving tens of thousands of Muslims, Christians and members of the Yazidi religious minority from their homes, prompting the first U.S. air strikes in Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011.
The insurgents are also tightening their grip in Syria, of which they now control roughly a third, mostly rural areas in the north and east.
An activist in Deir al-Zor who spoke on condition of anonymity told Reuters that 300 men were executed in one day in the town of Ghraneij, one of the three main towns of the al-Sheitaat tribal heartland, when Islamic State stormed the town earlier this week.
Another opposition activist from Deir al-Zor said residents of al-Sheitaat towns had been given three days to leave.
“Those who were executed during the storming of the al-Sheitaat area are around 300. The rest were killed in the course of the battles,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity to protect his identity.
Civilians fleeing al-Sheitaat towns had either taken sanctuary in other villages or travelled to Iraq, he said.
More than 170,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war, which pits overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Shi’ite-derived Alawite minority, backed by Shi’ite militias from Iraq and Lebanon.
The insurgency is split between competing factions in Syria, with Islamic State emerging as the most powerful.
Tribal powers in Syria and Iraq have had to make the choice between fighting Islamic State or pledging allegiance.
On Friday, a video posted on YouTube showed men who said they were from the al-Sheitaat towns of Kishkeih and Abu Hammam pledging full support for Islamic State.
“We say that what Islamic State stands for is justice,” a tribal member sitting in a room with dozens of other men said in a statement that was read out.
The head of the al-Sheitaat tribe, Sheikh Rafaa Aakla al-Raju, called in a video message for other tribes to join them in the fight against the militants.
“We appeal to the other tribes to stand by us because it will be their turn next … If (Islamic State) are done with us the other tribes will be targeted after al-Sheitaat. They are the next target,” he said in the video, posted on YouTube.
Islamic State was condemned on Friday in a U.N. Security Council resolution for “gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law.”
(Editing by Stephen Powell and Sonya Hepinstall)
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Guardian: Isis: a portrait of the menace that is sweeping my homeland
The rise of Isis is rooted in a mix of politics, a Sunni sense of isolation and a shakeup in Salafist doctrine. Here, an analyst whose Syrian home has seen some of its bloodiest excesses, explains its dramatic surgeSyrian government forces backed by Lebanon’s Hezbollah took control of a town just outside Damascus from Islamist fighters on Thursday, a blow to the rebels who had held it for more than a year.
Syrian state television broadcast showed government soldiers in the streets of Mleiha, which lies on the edge of the eastern Ghouta region near Damascus airport and had been surrounded by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Buildings were damaged or reduced to rubble, and tanks patrolled the streets.
Mleiha, about 7 km (4 miles) from the heart of Damascus, has formed a base for rebel fighters to bombard the capital with mortars in Syria’s three-year-old civil war.
The Britain-based, pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government warplanes attacked several areas in the town. A Syrian rebel source said government forces had taken most of Mleiha and were using planes to attack the last point of resistance. Some of the rebels pulled out to nearby villages.
“Everything here is now under the control of the Syrian Arab Army,” a soldier standing near a damaged building told state TV.
“The town of Mleiha is the biggest in Ghouta and used to be a supply route for the gunmen. This will lead to the fall of other towns into the hands of the army,” said an army commander.
Government forces have pushed back the rebels around Damascus with help from Hezbollah, and consolidated Assad’s grip over central Syria and along the border with Lebanon.
The main rebel factions have also lost territory to the Islamic State (IS), an al Qaeda splinter group that has declared a caliphate on lands it has captured in both Syria and Iraq.
The group has been advancing in the northern region of Aleppo in the past 24 hours, seizing several towns and villages from rival Islamists and carrying out executions, the Observatory and opposition activists said.
Already in control of large areas of northern and eastern Syria, Islamic State’s latest gains include the towns of Turkmen Bareh and Akhtarin, 50 km (30 miles) northeast of Aleppo.
Late on Wednesday they advanced to nearby towns including Dabeg and Azizeyeh, now controlling a belt of towns close to the Turkish border.
Survivors from Akhtarin told the Observatory that the group assembled the local men in the town square, looking for fighters who oppose them. They said nine men were beheaded.
Islamic State sympathisers posted on social media pictures of what they said were some of the group’s fighters inside Akhtarin. It showed two fighters with thick beards celebrating by burning a flag of a rival group. Two others raised the black and white flag of IS over what appeared to be a telecom tower.
It was not possible to independently verify the accounts.
(Writing by Tom Perry/Mariam Karouny; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)