Pro-government forces backed by General Haftar suffer casualties as they push to take port district from rival groups.

Clashes have erupted in the centre of Libya’s main eastern city Benghazi after pro-government forces pushed to take the port district from rival factions and seven soldiers were killed, according to witnesses and military officials.

The fighting mirrors a wider struggle in the oil-producing North African state where two governments and parliaments, allied to rival armed groups, are vying for control almost four years after Muammar Gaddafi fell to an armed uprising.

On Thursday morning, army vehicles advanced on Benghazi’s Corniche road towards the port gate and a nearby court building.

Soldiers took over several government buildings such as a passport office, a state insurance and a state bank damaged in earlier fighting.

About 25 soldiers were wounded, army sources said.

“The road to the port is under our control,” Reuters news agency quoted Faraj al-Barassi, a military commander, as saying.

Heavy gunfire continued until late at night. The court is famous as the place where the 2011 uprising against Gaddafi started with peaceful protests against his jailing of many opponents.

Benghazi offensive
Backed by forces led by renegade General Khalifa Haftar, army special forces in mid-October launched an offensive against the fighters in Benghazi, expelling them from the airport area and from several camps the army had lost during the summer.

Army forces have since been trying to retake the port area and two other districts where pro-government forces say fighters from the Ansar al-Sharia group are holed up.

The port, the main gateway for food imports into eastern Libya, has had to close.

Army forces in eastern Libya are loyal to Abdullah al-Thinni, Libya’s internationally recognised prime minister, who was forced to leave the capital Tripoli in the west in August for the east when a group called Fajr al-Libya [Libya Dawn] seized Tripoli.

The new rulers in Tripoli set up their own government and parliament, but these have not been recognised by the UN.

Both sides have fought each other on several fronts.

Libya has failed to build up a national army and efficient state institutions since the end of Gaddafi’s one-man rule, and the country is now effectively dominated by former rebel brigades who have carved out competing fiefs.

Source: Al Jazeera

Timely delivery of Russian Sukhoi Su-25 jets to Iraq has helped Baghdad battle extremists, including the Islamic State militant group, the Iraqi Defense Ministry said Thursday, Sputnik reported.

“The addition of Su-25 jets to the military arsenal contributed to changing the military balance in favor of the Iraqi army, and contributed to liberation of many strategically important areas where they were used to conduct airstrikes,” the ministry said in a statement.

The document says that the jets were delivered with all necessary equipment, and Russian experts trained Iraqi army pilots to operate the planes.

“The delivery of these jets [Su-25] was conducted in the framework of international support of Iraq in its fight against terrorism. Fast and timely delivery of aircraft by Russian military aviation experts was due to connections between Russian and Iraqi government,” the continued.

Iraqi media agency Basnews, citing sources in the country’s army, said on Sunday that at the moment the Iraqi army has a total of 15 fighter jets, all of which are Su-25s. The source added that prior to the United States’ 2003 invasion, Iraq had over 800 fighter jets.

The Iraqi insurgency began in 2011 with the country’s Shia-led government forces fighting several militant groups, including the Islamic State, which currently controls a large part of the country.

Source: Trend.az

In regard to the fight against terror, much of the world’s attention is currently centered on the Middle Eastern region, and deservedly so. However, the West would be remiss to forget that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its militant Islamic allies, Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA) and Ansar Dine, an AQIM-aligned jihadist group, controlled over half of the sovereign territory of Mali prior to French intervention. This two year mission by France and accompanying nations may provide a promising alternative to anti-terror approaches of recent decades.

The Pentagon sent additional Black Hawk helicopters this week to Erbil in northern Iraq to reduce the time needed to rescue pilots who may go down conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Defense Department officials said Thursday.

Libya wants to create a “flexible and a maneuverable army” with the assistance of Russia, the special Ambassador of the Libyan parliament’s president said.

Abdelaliz, who also served as Libya’s Foreign Minister from January 2013 to August 2014, described the Russian-Libyan military cooperation over the past 40 years as “historic” and extensive.

The diplomat also said that Libya wants to create a “flexible and a maneuverable army” and that the country “met understanding of this issue from Russia.”

A senior Hamas leader called Wednesday for the formation of Palestinian militant groups loyal to the Gaza-based resistance movement in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria in order to attack Israeli-occupied territories.

Mahmoud Zahar told reporters in the Gaza Strip that Lebanese and Syrian branches of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, should launch attacks on Israel “to help us liberate Palestine.”

Hamas has a significant political influence among Palestinians in Lebanon, especially in refugee camps where the resistance movement has an armed presence.

Due to tensions amongst different Palestinian groups, the movement in the past years has been busy protecting itself from rival factions, while also maintaining stability within the crowded and arms-loaded refugee camps.

The failure of the Lebanese government to meet the humanitarian and social needs of Palestinian refugees has forced Hamas and other Palestinian parties to become mainly concerned with underlying social injustices, meeting Palestinians’ basic needs, and countering stereotypes regarding the camps being a security threat or a hub for terrorists, while also struggling to assert the centrality of the fight against Israel.

For many armed Palestinians within the camps, the right of return, a political principle asserting that Palestinians have a right to return to pre-1948 Palestine, has become marginalized, with many getting engaged in conflicts both in Lebanon and neighboring Syria.

Hezbollah, a Lebanese resistance movement, has asserted itself as the leading and most prominent movement against Israel in Lebanon, especially after liberating South Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of Israeli-occupation.

The 2006 Israeli summer aggression on Lebanon killed some 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers killed by Hezbollah fighters.

Meanwhile in Syria, a number of Palestinians have found themselves, either voluntarily or involuntarily, caught up in the four-year-old conflict that has affected Palestinian refugee camps all over the country. Many decided to join armed groups seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has intervened militarily in support of Assad, describing the fight in Syria as “existential” and arguing that the conflict in the country targets the resistance as a whole.
Hezbollah’s Iran-supplied weapons pass through Damascus, Syria’s capital, hence making Syria crucial for the group’s weapons buildup.

Despite differences in Syria, both Hamas and Hezbollah say the alliance between the resistance movements remains motivated first and foremost by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said in an in-depth three-hour interview with Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen television last month that Hezbollah was seeking to build a strategic alliance with Hamas and other resistance groups in Palestine, saying that Hamas demonstrated a will to strengthen relations again with Iran and Hezbollah despite differences regarding the Syrian conflict.

“Even if Hamas chooses to mend its relationship with the Syrian regime, Syria might have some difficulty accepting this due to past events and developments,” he said, adding that Palestinians in Syria have joined oppositions groups but there was “no proof” that Hamas was working with a certain group.

Moreover, Zahar on Wednesday denied “any interference” by Hamas in Egypt, which last month declared the Brigades a terrorist group and accused it of aiding a spate of militant attacks on security personnel in the restive Sinai Peninsula.

“Our guns are always trained on the enemy,” Zahar said, referring to Israel.

For 51 days this summer, Israel pounded the Gaza Strip — by air, land and sea — killing more than 2,310 Gazans, 70 percent of them civilians, and injuring 10,626.

The Israeli offensive ended on August 26 with an Egypt-brokered ceasefire deal.

On Monday, hundreds of Hamas supporters marched in the Gaza Strip to protest the Egyptian court decision.

In a speech to the crowd, senior Hamas official Mushir al-Masri said that Saturday’s ruling against the militant group’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades was “political” and meant to “conceal failure and the lack of security in Egypt at this time.”

Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian authorities have also declared a terrorist group and have repressed systematically since the army ousted one of its leaders, Mohammed Mursi, from the presidency in 2013.

The Palestinian faction has repeatedly denied accusations that it has carried out attacks in the North African state, saying it cannot act against Egypt’s national security.

In November, Egypt decided to create a one kilometer-deep buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula along the border with Gaza by clearing more than 800 houses, displacing more than 1,100 families, and destroying and neutralizing hundreds of subterranean tunnels.

Under Israeli blockade by air, land and sea since 2007, the Gaza Strip has seven border crossings linking it to the outside world. Six of these are controlled by Israel, while the seventh — the Rafah crossing — is controlled by Egypt.

For years, the Gaza Strip has depended on construction materials smuggled into the territory through a network of tunnels linking it to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

However, the recent crackdown on the tunnels by the Egyptian army has effectively neutralized hundreds of tunnels, severely affecting Gaza’s construction sector.

Source:  al-akhbar

What Isis expect from women has been revealed more fully in an extensive manifesto on their role, which lambastes western modes of thought such as feminism and gives the stark advice that it is “legitimate” for children to be married to fighters at the age of nine.

The 10,000 word manifesto, uploaded by the all-female Al-Khanssaa Brigade’s media wing onto popular jihadist forums, existed only in Arabic until it was discovered and translated by Charlie Winter, a researcher on jihadism in Syria and Iraq at the counter extremism think thank the Quilliam Foundation.

The document, entitled ‘Women in the Islamic State: Manifesto and Case Study’, emphasises the “sedentary” role of women as homemakers, wives and mothers, heavily criticising Western women and human rights concepts of gender equality.

The guide is being treated as a more accurate representation of what is expected of women under the group’s self-declared caliphate as it directly targets female recruits from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf instead of the West.

Western recruits have posted pictures of themselves posing with guns and a suicide belt, with one woman from south London living in Syria even boasting that she wanted to become the first female to behead a western hostage.

But this latest piece of propaganda makes clear that accounts from young Western girls on social media, who exaggerate their roles in order to encourage others to come over, is not always a true reflection of what Isis believes life should be like.

Mr Winter told The Independent: “I think that Western women have a motive to recruit other Western women. This document has a motive –recruiting women from the Gulf. The reflection that it gives of an idealised position of women is at lot closer to the reality than what our British girls are saying, for example talking about joining police forces and training for battle.