Rebels from the Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist group have taken 300 civilians hostage in northwestern Syria, the Lebanese Mayadeen television channel reported Monday.

The terrorists captured the civilians, many of whom are children, in the village of Al-Dana, 38 kilometers (23 miles) to the west of Aleppo, the television station said.

Saudi Arabia has asked Pakistan to contribute aircraft, ships and ground troops to its coalition fighting rebels in Yemen, the Pakistani defence minister said Monday according to Gulf Times.
Khawaja Asif spoke at the start of a special parliamentary debate on whether to join the Saudi-led military intervention against Shiite Huthi rebels trying to overthrow President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is due to visit Islamabad on Wednesday to discuss the situation, Asif said.
Shiite Iran has strongly criticised the intervention in Yemen by the coalition of largely Sunni Muslim nations, accusing Saudi Arabia of sowing instability with its air campaign.
Despite close and longstanding relations with Riyadh, Pakistan has so far held back from joining the fight, calling for a negotiated settlement and saying it does not want to get involved in any conflict that would inflame sectarian tensions.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced the special session of parliament last week, saying any decision on intervention could only come after proper debate.
Asif was part of a high-level political and military delegation that visited Saudi Arabia last week to assess the situation.
He repeated the government’s position that Pakistan was ready to defend Saudi territorial integrity.
“There should be no ambiguity that if the security of Saudi territory is at stake Pakistan will stand by for support,” he told lawmakers.
“Saudi Arabia has requested us for aircraft, naval vessels and ground troops.”
Sharif visited Turkey on Friday for talks with his counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu aimed at finding a way to promote a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
The parliamentary debate — which Sharif missed as he was in talks with the visiting Sri Lankan president — is due to resume at 5:00 pm (1200 GMT).

The International coalition jets targeted an Islamic State (IS) leader in Mosul on Sunday night 5th April.

A Kurdish security source told BasNews, “IS Leader Waadullah Ahmed Hamd al-Hayali, also known as Abu al-Yaman, was killed last night at 12:30 am in the Musanna neighbourhood of Mosul.”

He added, “Using several intelligence sources, coalition jets located Abu al-Yaman in Mosul and successfully targeted him.”

“He was a coordinator between IS militants in Iraq and Syria,” said the source.

“He served as an Iraqi officer during Saddam Hussein’s regime but joined Al-Qaida after 2003 and took senior positions in Islamic State thereafter.”

The source confirmed that as well as being a key figure in IS ,Abu al-Yaman was very close to al-Baghdadi, and was fully authorised to take decisions on the movement of IS militants.

It comes after the Kurdish jihadist Mufaq Assa’ad Askandar, who beheaded the Peshmerga officer Hujam Surchi last January, was killed during an operation in Mosul few days ago.

After IS militants had control of Tikrit for months, the Iraqi army retook the town last week, causing most IS leaders to withdraw to Mosul.

At least 13 people were executed by Daesh militants in Yarmouk camp in southern Damascus on Sunday, according to the Syrian activists and Albawaba.com.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, or SNHR, released a statement and said that Daesh militants killed at least 13 people in Yarmouk camp, the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.

Daesh militants marched into Yarmouk on April 1, and many Palestinian and Syrian people have been trapped. “ Daesh militants have killed Syrian opponents inYarmouk camp. The (Bashar) Assad regime’s intense bombardment and militants’ attacks have been continuing in the camp,” the statement said, stressing the camp residents’ dire condition.

Separately, The Arab League called Sunday on the international community to take action to protect Yarmouk camp’s Palestinian refugees from Daesh militants.

The Arab League released a statement and expressed their concerns for around 500 thousand Palestinian refugees who live in Syria. “Palestinian refugees are not a side in the ongoing Syrian conflict,” the statement said.

The league also emphasized that the displaced Palestinians are just guests in Syrian lands until comprehensive peace is established in the region, and then they will be able to return home.

The Yarmouk camp has remained under siege by Syrian regime forces and pro-regime militias since last September.

Located on the outskirts of Damascus, the camp accommodated more than 160,000 Palestinian refugees before the Syrian civil war began in March 2011.

Most of the refugees were forced to leave after the conflict began.

Saudi Arabian special forces are involved in the military operation against Shiite Huthi rebels in neighboring Yemen, a Saudi adviser said Saturday.

A Saudi-led coalition began air strikes on March 26 against the Iran-backed rebels, but says it has no plans for now to deploy ground forces.

However, Saudi army and naval special forces have carried out specific operations, said the adviser, without revealing if they had actually set foot on the ground.

Army special forces supplied weapons and communications equipment to militia loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi in the main southern city of Aden, the adviser told AFP.

Naval special forces provided “coordination and guidance” to enable the loyalist fighters to launch a counter-attack on the rebels.

Special forces “will continue their engagements” with the fighters loyal to Hadi, who has sought refuge in Saudi Arabia, said the adviser who did not want to be identified.

He said army and navy special forces were also involved in operations against Huthi units that “invaded” Myun Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, through which much of the world’s maritime trade passes.

On Friday, the coalition announced that air strikes had destroyed “military equipment and missiles” on the island, which could have posed a threat to shipping.

“Special forces have isolated the island as the operation continues to destroy all remnants of Huthi presence” which was supported by “foreign military” technicians, the Saudi adviser said.

Iran has dismissed as “utter lies” claims that it supplied weapons to Yemen, but a Western diplomat told AFP “there have been a lot of shipments”.

Shiite Iran, which backs the Huthis, has accused Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia of sowing instability in the region.

Riyadh’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, had on Thursday hinted at a special forces role, saying that “we don’t have troops, formal Saudi troops in Aden”.

The issue of ground troops is “on the table but the decisions will be made depending on the circumstances and the need”, he was quoted as saying by the Saudi-US Relations Information Service.

Coalition spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Assiri, said on Saturday that there has been no announcement about “boots on the ground”.

“Even if it is true, I think the security and safety of the operation is most important for us,” rather than announcing it through the media, he told reporters.

Around 2,000 people have been evacuated from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus after the Islamic State group seized large parts of it, a Palestinian official told AFP Sunday.

Iran’s press has been euphoric and ecstatic over this week’s nuclear agreement between Iran and Western negotiators. Many newspapers are devoting entire editors to the agreement. A typical headline is, “Our nation is on the cusp of a great victory.”

The American mainstream media, who are overwhelmingly Democratic and always support President Obama no matter what he does, have stayed in line by endorsing the deal, calling it “historic” or “a great victory for Obama’s legacy.”

However, the more conservative New York Post hired a Farsi expert to compare the Farsi version of the agreement, published by Iran, versus the English version of the agreement, published by the White House, and found some significant differences. Indeed, it is clear from the two text versions that the claims of complete agreement between Iran and the West are simply not true.

• The Iranian text uses different verb forms when describing Western and Iranian commitments. For example, the Iranian commitment, “The nuclear facilities at Fordow shall be developed into a center for nuclear research and advanced Physics” is written in the passive voice without specifying any time frame. But the Persian text uses a very aggressive active verb mood for Western commitments: “The United Nations shall abrogate its previous resolutions while the United States and the European Union will immediately lift sanctions [imposed on] financial, banking, insurance, investment and all services related to oil, gas, petrochemicals and car industry.”
• In some cases, the two texts directly contradict each other. The American statement claims that Iran has agreed not to use advanced centrifuges, each of which could do the work of 10 old ones. The Iranian text, however, says that “on the basis of solutions found, work on advanced centrifuges shall continue on the basis of a 10-year plan.”

To use the old joke, this is actually déjà vu all over again. There was an interim nuclear agreement that Iran signed with the West in November 2013 that had similar problems. The full text of that agreement has never been published. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that, under the agreement, Iran had no right to enrich uranium, while Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif gloated that Iran had preserved its right to enrich uranium. The White House published a “summary,” but Iran completely rejected the White House summary as “not true.” Then, in January 2014, Iran disclosed that there was a secret side agreement to the nuclear agreement. The White House first confirmed this, saying that the side agreement would be made public, and then denied that there was a secret side agreement.

So it appears that we are starting off with the same kinds of lies and deceptions that were part of the 2013 interim agreement.

There is another thing bothering me. During his “mission accomplished” televised victory press conference earlier this week after the deal was announced, President Obama referred to a fatwa supposedly issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful, and that forbids the development of nuclear weapons. The fatwa supposedly says, “the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.”

The problem is that nobody has ever seen this fatwa, because it does not exist, according to a number of Iranian and Arab writers have researched the issue. “18-Mar-14 World View — Does Iran’s anti-nuclear fatwa really exist, as claimed?”

So the question is: Why did Obama refer to this nonexistent fatwa? Is he simply lying because he can always get away with lying? Does he think the reporters in the mainstream media are so stupid that they won’t even check it out? Well, if that’s what Obama thinks, then Obama is probably right.

At any rate, it is pretty clear that President Obama is willing to say and do anything to get the final deal with Iran ratified by the July 1 deadline. We’ll see what he’s willing to do as the weeks go by. BBC and New York Post and Memri (17-Mar-2014) and Memri (4-Oct-2013)

Armed Yemeni tribesmen deployed across the streets of Mukalla on Sunday, residents and local officials said to JP.com, taking control of the eastern port town which had been briefly overrun by al-Qaida militants.

The tribal fighters entered Mukalla on Saturday, pledging to restore security after the militants broke into its jail on Thursday, freed a local al-Qaida leader, ransacked banks and took over local government buildings, residents said.

The turmoil in Mukalla is another sign of Yemen’s collapsed central authority as a Saudi-led air campaign seeks to push back Shi’ite Houthi forces who control the capital Sanaa and are fighting for the main southern city of Aden.

Just outside Mukalla, the tribesmen fought with troops at a checkpoint before dawn on Sunday, killing two soldiers, tribal sources said. One tribal fighter was killed, they said.

A citizen’s group in the port city calling itself the Popular Committee for Security and Defence issued a statement on Sunday calling for residents and employees to defend hospitals and public buildings, to prevent a repeat of Thursday’s looting.

One of the prisoners freed from Mukalla prison on Thursday was named by Yemeni officials as Khaled Batarfi, a prominent member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who was arrested four years ago.

The United States had carried out a covert drone war against suspected members of AQAP, the powerful regional wing of the global jihadi movement, until March when U.S. personnel were pulled out of the country as Houthi forces advanced on the base north of Aden where they were operating.

The current security vacuum may offer AQAP an opportunity to entrench in Yemen’s sprawling eastern Hadramawt province, although they appeared to withdraw from Mukalla without offering serious resistance.

Elsewhere in Hadramawt, residents of al-Qatn town reported explosions and heavy gunfire as suspected al Qaeda militants attacked an army base housing troops allied to the Houthis

A well-known Arab intellectual has been speaking about the rise of Islamic State (IS), claiming that Iraqi authorities failed to take the threat posed by the terrorists seriously.

Arab writer Mohammed Hussein Heikal believes that 2,000 military specialists have joined IS, including Iraqi and European experts.

Heikal told Egyptian news channel CBS, “Arab forces have been defeated by IS militants on most battlefields, which indicates that the combatants are coming from beyond Syria and Iraq.”

He added, “IS was born because of a lack of political awareness of terrorism in the region.”

“The problem is that everyone is fighting IS for their own interests,” Heikal said.

Iraqi forces abandoned their posts after IS insurgents attacked Mosul in June 2014, leaving behind a significant cache of ammunition and military vehicles. It is believed that a large number of Iraqi officers have joined the extremist group.

Israel should “seriously consider” a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the aftermath of the “framework deal” announced between Tehran and western powers Thursday, a leader defense and security expert said.

Speaking to Arutz Sheva Friday, Professor Efraim Inbar, who heads the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said the deal had realized Israel’s worst fears by leaving Iran’s nuclear program essentially intact.

The Islamic Republic’s nuclear program has been granted “legitimacy” by the agreement, which still allowed it to continue enriching uranium and to maintain a reactor capable of producing enriched plutonium, he said. “And that’s what worries Israel, that they (Iran) will be able within a short time frame to reach a nuclear bomb.”

“I hold the view that the only way to stop Iran in its journey to a nuclear bomb is through military means,” Inbar maintained, suggesting that “Israel needs to seriously consider striking a number of important nuclear facilities” to head off the threat.

Inbar went further, stating that Israel had made a serious mistake in not taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities until now. Now that the deal – however bad – was struck, a military strike would be far more difficult, he posited.

Nevertheless, practically-speaking Israel was left with little choice short of accepting a nuclear-armed Iran.

“As long as there was no deal it was easier for Israel to strike. They should have carried out a strike two years ago,” he said. “This is not an easy decision but it’s what needed to be done.”

Despite that fact, many countries – most notably Israel’s immediate neighbors – would be supportive of such a strike, and were waiting for Israel to neutralize the threat posed to them by a nuclear-capable Iranian regime.

“In practice no one wants to see a nuclear Iran; all of them are playing the game so that Israel can pulls the chestnuts out of the fire.

The deal, announced yesterday at a joint conference in Switzerland and widely celebrated as a “victory” in Iran, was quickly lauded by US President Barack Obama as an “historic” agreement.

“I am convinced that if this framework leads to a final comprehensive deal it will make our country, our allies and our world safer,” Obama asserted, insisting that despite criticisms the agreement would effectively cut off any options for Iran to build a nuclear bomb.

But despite Obama’s claim that there was “no daylight” between the US’s commitment to Israel’s security and the framework deal, Israeli officials heavily criticized it as an “historic mistake“.

“If an agreement is reached on the basis of this framework, it is an historic mistake which will make the world far more dangerous,” said the officials, briefing journalists on condition of anonymity.

“It is a bad framework which will lead to a bad and dangerous agreement. The framework gives international legitimacy to Iran’s nuclear program, the only aim of which is to produce a nuclear bomb,” they added.

In Congress as well – where legislators on both sides of the aisle have expressed serious concerns over the pending deal – House Speaker John Boehner branded the agreement “an alarming departure” from the president’s own declared goals. Nevertheless, legislators have given the White House a three-month reprieve on a bill to level harsher sanctions against Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is due to address the deal directly at a press conference Friday, after holding top-level talks with security officials.