Daesh fights to hang on a year after defeat in Iraq

The Daesh group is fighting to hang on to its last enclave in Syria, engaging in deadly battles with US-backed forces in the country’s east near the Iraqi border. (File/AP)
Updated 08 December 2018
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Daesh fights to hang on a year after defeat in Iraq

  • “There is still major danger for Iraq and Syria especially in areas close to the border when it comes to Daesh,” a senior Iraqi intelligence official said
  • Huge parts of Iraq and Syria are still in ruins, with little cash and — in Syria’s case — little international political will to rebuild

BAGHDAD: A year after it was routed from Iraq in a devastating war that left entire neighborhoods and towns in ruins, the Daesh group is fighting to hang on to its last enclave in eastern Syria, engaging in deadly battles with US-backed forces.
Cornered in the desert near the Iraqi border with nowhere to run, the militants are putting up a fierce fight, inflicting hundreds of casualties among their opponents and releasing a stream of beheading videos reminiscent of the extremist group’s terrifying propaganda at the height of its power.
The battle for Hajjin has dragged on for three months, highlighting the difficulty of eradicating an extremist group determined to survive. In Iraq, there is rising concern that the group may stage a comeback. Daesh sleeper cells have recently launched deadly attacks against security forces and kidnapped and killed civilians, mostly in four northern and central provinces that were once part of the group’s self-declared caliphate.
“There is still major danger for Iraq and Syria especially in areas close to the border when it comes to Daesh,” a senior Iraqi intelligence official said, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the extremists. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media about security matters.
He said Daesh lost most of the income it once made from oil and taxes imposed in areas it controlled. The group now relies on selling gold and other reserves that they had accumulated after declaring their caliphate in June 2014. He said the money is being used to buy weapons and finance attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Another Iraqi intelligence official said Daesh has begun restructuring its command, relying more on non-Iraqi commanders after most of its leaders were killed in coalition strikes.
The Daesh group once held an area the size of Britain across vast territories straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, running a so-called caliphate and planning international attacks from its headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Tens of thousands were killed in both countries as an array of local forces, some backed by a US-led coalition, eventually drove the extremists out of virtually all the lands they once held.
Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi declared final victory over the group on Dec. 9, 2017. Two months earlier, the coalition, working with Kurdish-dominated fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, liberated Raqqa after a bombing campaign that decimated much of the city.
The area that Daesh still holds in Syria represents less than 1 percent of the territory it controlled at its height. The pocket is home to some 15,000 people, including Daesh fighters and their families. The US military estimates there are about 2,000 remaining Daesh fighters there.
The SDF launched their offensive to retake Hajjin on Sept. 10. It has been a grueling campaign, with sand storms and fog at times grounding coalition aircraft, allowing the militants to launch counteroffensives that have killed hundreds of SDF fighters. IS has also taken scores of prisoners and hundreds of civilians hostage.
“It is very difficult because we are in the last stages, where almost every Daesh fighter is a suicide belt,” Brett McGurk, the White House envoy for the war against IS, said at a security conference held recently in the Gulf nation of Bahrain.
The extremists, besieged near the border, have no place to go. They are surrounded from the east and north by SDF fighters while from the south and west, Syrian government forces and their allies have closed roads to the surrounding desert.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says since the fighting began nearly three months ago, 1,616 people have been killed, mostly fighters from both sides. It said the dead include 827 Daesh gunmen, 481 SDF fighters and 308 civilians.
The fighting is now believed to be in its final stages, with SDF fighters said to have broken IS defenses and taken the fight inside the town.
The fall of Hajjin will end the group’s hold over any significant territory in Iraq or Syria, but sleeper cells in both countries will continue to stage attacks amid attempts to regroup. Daesh affiliates in Libya, Afghanistan and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula continue to stage regular attacks.
The group’s savage legacy, meanwhile, will stay for years to come.
Huge parts of Iraq and Syria are still in ruins, with little cash and — in Syria’s case — little international political will to rebuild.
Emerging from the more than three years of war, Iraq estimates that $88.2 billion is needed to rebuild the country. An international donors’ summit held early this year in Kuwait gathered pledges of $30 billion that mainly came in the form of loans, but no progress has been made to fulfil the pledges.
“The biggest problem we have is the lack of funds,” said Mustafa Al-Hiti, the head of a government-run reconstruction fund.
“What we spent till now is about 1.5 percent of what we need and that came as loans and donations,” Al-Hiti added.
Another challenge is the unexploded ordnance, mainly in the northern city of Mosul, where the climactic battle occurred. He estimated that 4 million unexploded bombs are still littered around Mosul, the largest city Daesh once held, with only 6 percent cleared so far.
Nuri Mehmud, an SDF spokesman speaking by telephone from Syria, said all of Daesh’s experienced fighters are now in the besieged area of Hajjin.
“It is a difficult battle but in the end we will wipe out Daesh,” he said.


Egypt unveils first ancient royal tomb since Tutankhamun

Updated 3 sec ago
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Egypt unveils first ancient royal tomb since Tutankhamun

The tomb, discovered near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt, belonged to King Thutmose II of the 18th dynasty
Thutmose II was an ancestor to Tutankhamun himself

CAIRO: Egypt’s antiquities authority says it has found the ancient tomb of King Thutmose II, the first royal burial to be found since the famed discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.
The tomb, discovered near the Valley of the Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt, belonged to King Thutmose II of the 18th dynasty, who lived nearly 3,500 years ago.
Thutmose II was an ancestor to Tutankhamun himself, and his half-sister and queen consort was Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
Her giant mortuary temple stands on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor a few kilometers (miles) from where the tomb of Thutmose II was found.
Although preliminary studies suggest its contents were moved in ancient times — leaving the tomb without the iconic mummy or gilded splendour of the Tutankhamun find — the antiquities ministry on Tuesday called the discovery “one of the most significant archaeological breakthroughs in recent years.”
It has been excavated by a joint Egyptian-British mission, led by the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the New Kingdom Research Foundation.
The tomb’s entrance was first located in 2022 in the Luxor mountains west of the Valley of the Kings, but was believed at the time to lead to the tomb of a royal wife.
But the team then found “fragments of alabaster jars inscribed with the name of Pharaoh Thutmose II, identified as the ‘deceased king’, alongside inscriptions bearing the name of his chief royal consort, Queen Hatshepsut,” confirming whose tomb it was, the ministry said.
Shortly after the king’s burial, water flooded the burial chamber, damaging the interior and leaving fragments of plaster that bore parts of the Book of Amduat, an ancient mortuary text on the underworld.
Some funerary furniture belonging to Thutmose II has also been recovered from the tomb in “the first-ever find” of its kind, according to the ministry.
It quoted mission chief Dr. Piers Latherland as saying the team will continue its work in the area, hoping to find the tomb’s original contents.

Six migrants drown off Turkiye’s Aegean coast

Updated 3 min 7 sec ago
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Six migrants drown off Turkiye’s Aegean coast

  • The incident took place before dawn just south of the seaside resort of Izmir
  • “The bodies of six lifeless illegal immigrants were fished out of the water,” Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya wrote on X

ISTANBUL: Six migrants drowned while another 27 were rescued by the coast guard when their boat started sinking off the western coast of Turkiye, the interior minister said on Wednesday.
The incident took place before dawn just south of the seaside resort of Izmir in the waters separating the Turkish coast from the Greek island of Samos, which lies just 15 kilometers (nine miles) away.
“The bodies of six lifeless illegal immigrants were fished out of the water,” Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya wrote on X, adding that the coast guard had rescued 27 others, one of whom was detained on suspicion of smuggling.
Last month, seven migrants drowned in the same stretch of water.
Shipwrecks are very common on the short but perilous route between the Turkish coast and the nearby Greek islands of Samos, Rhodes and Lesbos that serve as entry points to the European Union.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2,333 migrants disappeared or died in the Mediterranean last year.


Sudan battle forces 10,000 families out of famine-hit camp: UN

Updated 19 February 2025
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Sudan battle forces 10,000 families out of famine-hit camp: UN

  • The International Organization for Migration said the violence since February 11 had displaced 10,000 families from Zamzam
  • Beyond the camp, a further “1,544 households were displaced from various villages” near El-Fasher, the IOM said

PORT SUDAN: Two days of fighting between Sudanese rivals have forced an estimated 10,000 families to flee a famine-hit displacement camp in the Darfur region, the UN migration agency said Wednesday.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last week stormed Zamzam camp, home to at least half a million people, triggering clashes with the Sudanese army and allied militias, witnesses told AFP.
The International Organization for Migration said the violence since February 11 had displaced 10,000 families from Zamzam, just south of North Darfur state capital El-Fasher.
The agency cautioned that its data covers only the first two days of the reported attack as its collection capacity had been reduced due to funding constraints.
Beyond the camp, a further “1,544 households were displaced from various villages” near El-Fasher, the IOM said.
El-Fasher is the only state capital in the vast western region of Darfur that the RSF has not captured in its nearly two-year war with the Sudanese army.
With the military on the verge of retaking the capital Khartoum following a multi-front offensive on central Sudan, the paramilitaries have intensified attacks on El-Fasher in a bid to consolidate their hold on Darfur.
But the RSF has not managed to take the city, its attacks successively repelled by the army-aligned Joint Forces but sending tens of thousands of people fleeing.
Before the most recent attacks, there were already 1.7 million people displaced in North Darfur alone, with two million facing extreme food insecurity, according to the UN.
Established in 2004, Zamzam has received waves of displaced Sudanese during the current war, which began in April 2023.
Some aid officials told AFP the camp’s population has swelled to around one million during the war.
Famine was first declared in Zamzam in August, and has since taken hold of two other displacement camps around El-Fasher.
According to a UN-backed assessment, famine is projected to spread to five more areas of the state including the capital El-Fasher by May.
Across Sudan, the war has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.


Polio still circulating in Gaza, mass vaccination to resume: WHO

Updated 19 February 2025
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Polio still circulating in Gaza, mass vaccination to resume: WHO

  • The UN health agency said no more polio cases had been reported since a 10-month-old child was paralyzed in Gaza last August
  • “The presence of the virus still poses a risk to children with low or no immunity, in Gaza and throughout the region“

GENEVA: The World Health Organization said Wednesday that mass polio vaccination would resume in Gaza on Saturday, targeting nearly 600,000 children, after the virus was again detected in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
The United Nations health agency said no more polio cases had been reported since a 10-month-old child was paralyzed in Gaza last August.
But it said that poliovirus had been found again in wastewater samples taken in the Gaza Strip in December and January, “signalling ongoing circulation in the environment, putting children at risk.”
“The presence of the virus still poses a risk to children with low or no immunity, in Gaza and throughout the region.”
A new campaign would therefore take place from February 22 to 26, with the aim of reaching more than 591,000 children with oral polio vaccines, it said.
The aim was to reach all children under 10, including those previously missed, “to close immunity gaps and end the outbreak,” it said, adding that another vaccination round was planned for April.
Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious and potentially fatal.
It can cause deformities and paralysis and mainly affects children under the age of five.
After the August case was reported, brief localized pauses in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza were agreed to allow for two vaccination rounds in the territory in September and October.
Those rounds reached more than 95 percent of the children targeted, WHO said.
But it warned that some areas in the north, including Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, were inaccessible for the second vaccination round.
As a result around 7,000 children had not received their necessary second dose.
The ceasefire in effect since January 19 “means health workers have considerably better access now,” WHO said.
The agency stressed that “pockets of individuals with low or no immunity provide the virus an opportunity to continue spreading and potentially cause disease.”
“The current environment in Gaza, including overcrowding in shelters and severely damaged water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure, which facilitates fecal-oral transmission, create ideal conditions for further spread of poliovirus,” it warned.
It warned that the movement of people after the current ceasefire could help spread the virus.
WHO stressed that there are no risks to vaccinating a child more than once.
“Each dose gives additional protection which is needed during an active polio outbreak.”


Egypt says Gaza should be rebuilt without displacing Palestinians

Updated 19 February 2025
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Egypt says Gaza should be rebuilt without displacing Palestinians

  • “We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians,” President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said
  • UNRWA said its operations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank will suffer

DUBAI: Egypt’s president called on the international community on Wednesday to adopt a plan to rebuild war-torn Gaza without displacing Palestinians, after a proposal by US President Donald Trump angered Arabs with his own vision for the enclave.
“We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians — I repeat, without displacing Palestinians from their lands,” President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi told a press conference with Spain’s prime minister in Madrid.
Trump has proposed a plan to redevelop the tiny enclave into an international beach resort after resettling its Palestinian inhabitants. He called on Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinians.
Egypt and Jordan, along with other Arab states, rejected the plan and said they will work on an alternative to counter Trump’s proposal, but there are no signs they are making serious progress.
El-Sisi added that the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), which provides aid, health and education services to millions in the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab countries of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, was indispensable for Palestinians.
UNRWA said its operations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank will suffer after an Israeli law banned it in October on Israeli land — including East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in a move not recognized internationally — and contact with Israeli authorities from Jan. 30.
The United Arab Emirates’ President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan told the United States’ secretary of state Marco Rubio on Wednesday that his country rejects a proposal to displace Palestinians from their land, the Emirati state news agency WAM reported.
The leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and Qatar are expected to discuss the plan in Riyadh this month before it can be presented to an Arab League summit in Cairo in March.