The Islamic State (ISIS) radical group has executed 12 of its own militant fighters in northwestern Iraq for trying to flee the group’s strongholds in Mosul city of Nineveh Governorate, local sources reported to aranews.net.

The militants were reportedly arrested by ISIS guards in western Mosul while trying to flee to the eastern part of the city–which is now held by Iraqi security forces.

“The Islamic State accused them of treason for trying to surrender to the US-backed Iraqi forces,” local media activist Abdullah al-Malla told ARA News.

The 12 jihadi fighters were publicly beheaded in the Zanjabili neighbourhood in western Mosul.

This comes one week after ISIS executed six of its own fighters in the town of Margada in northeastern Syria for escaping the battlefield in Deir ez-Zor Governorate.

During a meeting with his Afghan counterpart Salahaddin Rabbani on Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was worried by Daesh’s growing presence in Afghanistan. In an interview with Sputnik, Turkish expert on Central Asia, Esedullah Oğuz, commented on the situation, like reported by sputniknews.com.

Esedullah Oğuz said that, hard hit by the antiterrorist operations in Syria and Iraq, the terrorist group was now trying to open a new front in northern Afghanistan were it has seen a great number of militants from Central Asia joining its ranks over the past few years.

Describing Turkey as the primary route used by terrrosists on their  way from Central Asia to Afghanistan, Oğuz underscored the need for Turkey to tighten its border controls.

“The Turkish border has become a transit point where [terrorists] from Afghanistan and Central Asia have no problem getting in for just 500 dollars,” Esedullah Oğuz told Sputnik Turkey.

He added that the Turkish authorities have recently been working hard to toughen border controls.

“During an operation in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu neighborhood, police arrested 400 people who had illegally crossed the Turkish border. The area is often used by jihadists from Central Asia on their way to Syria and Iraq.”

Esedullah Oğuz  also said that after the US started helping Islamist radicals during the 1980s, jihadist organizations began popping up in Afghanistan thus providing an ideological background for Daesh activity in the region.

“In 2001 the US vowed to turn Afghanistan into a terrorism-free region. Fifteen years on, Afghanistan still remains a source of terrorist threat.”

“Afghanistan’s state and military structure was modeled on the one they have in the United States – a contract army and a presidential system. As a result, the country got a weak and unstable system vulnerable to terrorist attacks.”

“Right now the Afghan government has some 350,000 soldiers on its payroll. What the country really needs, however, is a conscription army, not a contract one like in the US,” Esedullah Oğuz emphasized.

Afghanistan is suffering from the activity of Taliban, a militant group formed in the 1990s, seeking to establish strict Sharia law in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The crisis in the country prompted the emergence of local cells of other extremist organizations such as Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia and numerous other countries.

A 27-year-old UK female “revolutionary” is in Syria battling Islamic State, making her the first British woman known to have joined the fight against the jihadis.

Kimberley Taylor went to the war zone without telling her family and has said she is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to end extremism, like reported by heatst.com.

She has apparently spent nearly a year with an all-female Kurdish militia. She posts regular updates  on Twitter and Facebook.

Upset by the situation which refugees face, Miss Taylor said: “I’m willing to give my life for this.”  She is currently at the frontline of the terror group’s fight against IS as it pushes towards Raqqa. Her relatives in the UK are said to support her decision.

Her father, Phil Taylor, told the Daily Mail: “I was upset in the first instance upon learning of Kimmie’s intentions… and worry about her safety.But to ask her not to follow her beliefs would be like asking her to cut her arm off. She just wants to change the world. But where most of us think and talk about it, she acts. She is truly one in a million and we are very proud of who she is and what she stands for.”

Miss Taylor grew up near Blackburn, in the north of England. She was drawn into feminist activism at Liverpool University and gained experience with weapons when she joined the university’s Officer Training Corps.  She visited Syria 18 months ago to write about it and was so “torn apart” by what she found she vowed to help.

In March last year she went to Rojava, the autonomous centre of Syria’s Kurd population, to join the all-female militia known as the YPJ. Her duties include filming and taking photographs of the unit but she has said she is willing to take up arms.

All-female fighters are apparently particularly feared by the jihadis, who believe it to be a disgrace to be killed by a woman in battle as it prohibits them from entering paradise.

Kata’ib Hezbollah Secretary General Bassam al-Safi, based in the Iraqi city of Basra, was shot dead. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said that the assassination was staged by a dicey group aiming to provoke national strife, like reported by aawsat.com.

Kata’ib Hezbollah is a predominantly Shi’ite Iran-aligned group largely based in central and southern Iraq. Iraq’s Hezbollah (not to be confused with the Lebanon-based Shi’ite movement of the same name) is a paramilitary group fighting along with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella of pro-government — mainly Shi’ite — fighting groups.

The contingent assassination of Safi was carried out by unidentified gunmen who opened fire at the car he was traveling in at the Hayaniya neighborhood, located in central Basra.

Safi is an ex-member of the city’s local board and security committee. Kata’ib Hezbollah anchored itself as an independent entity in Basra in 2006, getting greatly involved with an Iran-backed paramilitary group, the PMF.

PMF fighters joined forces with Iraqi army soldiers and Kurdish Peshmerga forces in a major operation which launched on October 17, 2016 to retake the strategic northern city of Mosul from ISIS ultra-hardliners.

Kata’ib Hezbollah’s units partook in the Iraqi offensive launched against terror group ISIS, Basra sources said.

Chairman of the Basra security committee Jabbar al-Saadi, did not rule out that Safi’s assassination being a result of his fighting role within PMF factions.

“At least 22 influential parties and political blocs exist in Basra, all of which partake in a rivalry. Regrettably, the tense competition affects Basra’s state of affairs,” Saadi told Asharq Al-Awsat.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the assassination. However, Basra is completely under the control of several Shi’ite militant organizations, each vying for a greater share of power and influence at the expense of one another. The assassination could therefore be one militia attacking another.

Daily occurring security breaches were admitted by Saadi.

Iranian border forces on Friday fired four mortar shells across the border into Balochistan’s Panjgur district, according to media reports and pakistantoday.com.pk.

Deputy Commissioner Panjgur Habibur Rehman claimed Iranian forces fired four mortar shells into Panjgur’s Parom area ‘without any justification and provocation’.

“We have not received any report about any human loss”, he added.

Security was tightened in the province in the aftermath of the shelling. More security personnel have been sent into the area to guard the border, the deputy commissioner said.

Pakistan has accused Iranian forces of violating its territorial integrity and has lodged protests with Iran in this regard several times in the last few years.

A local source in Salahuddin Province revealed that two members of the Islamic State were killed in an attack launched by an armed attack in Sharqat, north of the province, Alsumaria News reported on Thursday according to iraqinews.com .

The source said, “Two members of the Islamic State, riding a motorcycle in an agriculture road in Sharqat were killed, today, by an armed attack launched by unidentified gunmen.”

“The Islamic State mobilized its members in the area of incident, which is considered the first of its kind since many months,” the source added.

Noteworthy, Islamic State group is still controlling many areas in the district of Sharqat.

Islamic State has jailed three of its leaders for attempting to dissent with the group, local sources said to iraqinews.com as the group braces for further battles with government forces.

“Forces from Daesh (Islamic State) carried out raids today at Bab al-Toub and al-Dawasah, and arrested three of its leaders,” the source told Alsumaria News. They are all Nineveh locals, including an assistant to the group’s official on mosques.

“Initial information available regarding the reasons for the arrests denote that the detainees were accused of attempting to break with the group,” said the source.

Since the Iraqi government launched an offensive in mid October to retake Mosul from Islamic State, the extremist group has sustained severe losses in personnel and ground. It has also bee stricken with divisions and infighting, with reports of attempted dissent and executions of delinquent fighters growing.

Recent reports have said that the idea of dishonoring the pledge of allegiance to the group’s supreme leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, have become on the table as Baghdadi’s whereabouts or survival proved to be questionable.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a recent interview with France 24 that his government was aware of Baghdadi’s location, and that he had lost many of vital leaderships around him.

Iraqi troops recaptured eastern Mosul on January 24th after three months of battles, and are awaiting government orders to invade the IS-held west.

Russia doesn’t consider the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of Turkey and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of Syrian Kurdistan as terrorist organizations, an official said according to ekurd.net .

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s Fourth European Department Director, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, said during a press conference that neither the PKK nor the YPG are in the list of terrorist organizations in Russia, the Turkish language branch of Sputnik News Agency reported.

According to Russian news agency, Sputnik, Botsan-Harchenko told reporters that “these organisations are not in Russia’s terrorist organisations list. This is the reality”.

The official also said, “we look at every specific incident independently and deem terrorist actions according to the facts and depending on the results of an investigation.”

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.

The PKK is considered as ‘terrorist’ organization by Ankara and U.S. The PKK continues to be on the blacklist list in EU despite court ruling in 2008 which overturned a decision to place the Kurdish rebel group PKK and its political wing on the European Union’s terror list.

However, Russia, Switzerland, India, China and the United Nations do not list the PKK as a terrorist organization.

Turkey also views the Syrian Kurdish YPG as a terrorist organization due to its links with the PKK. Turkey fears the creation of an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria — similar to the Kurdish region in Iraqi Kurdistan — would spur the separatist ambitions of Turkey’s own Kurds.

The previous U.S administration on the other hand viewed the YPG more favorably due to the Kurdish group’s successful fight against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria.

Speaking by phone with U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Donald Trump to halt military assistance to the YPG in Syria.

Washington regards the Kurdish YPG of Syrian Kurdistan as key ally against Islamic State and the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and has provided them with arms, air support as well as the military advisers. The Kurdish militia has seized swathes of Syria from IS.

In 2013, Syrian Kurds have established three autonomous zones, or Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan (northern Syria) in 2013. On March 17, 2016 Syria’s Kurds declared a federal region in Syrian Kurdistan.

Syrian Kurds on Dec. 30, 2016 have approved a blueprint for a system of federal government in Syrian Kurdistan, reaffirming their plans for autonomy in areas they have controlled during the civil war.

Iran fired a surface-to-air missile Wednesday days after President Trump’s administration sanctioned Iranian individuals and companies tied to recent missile tests, multiple reports say.

According to Fox News, citing a U.S. official, Iran launched a missile from the same pad used earlier this year. The rocket, described as a short-range surface-to-air missile, impacted 35 miles away, Fox News added in its report, like reported by usatoday.com .

The reported test comes less than a week after Trump signaled sanctions on Iran with an early morning message on Twitter, citing the Tehran government’s recent missile tests. The sanctions — which have been in the pipeline for months  — said nothing about the Iranian nuclear deal, which Trump attacked during his presidential campaign.

The sanctions affect 13 Iranian individuals and 12 companies, freezing any property or funds they may have under U.S. jurisdiction. The Treasury Department also said that “U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions” with those on the sanctions list.

U.S. forces of forward deployment in the Persian Gulf are in the “highest state of readiness” because of increasing tensions with Iran and concerns about the overall readiness of the troops and equipment, RIA Novosti reported quoting official in the U.S. Department of Defense.

Defense Department official explained that readiness was a misunderstood concept. For example, not-ready Navy ships were those being repaired or upgraded in dock or undergoing crew changes, he added.

He also noted that there were always a percentage of U.S. forces that were not in a state of readiness.