Turkey and its militia allies spent months battling the Islamic State in the northwest Syrian city of Al Bab. And soon after defeating the terrorist army in the city, Turkey reiterated its vow to shift targets and attack the Syrian-Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, in the city of Manbij to the east, like reported by warisboring.com.

It’s certainly a predicament. The YPG is a central component of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed army that Washington relies on for its current offensive toward Raqqa, the Islamic State’s stronghold in Syria.

Previous clashes between the Turkish-FSA forces and the SDF were met with statements from Washington which invariably urged both sides to desist and focus their efforts on the Islamic State.

The Turkish-backed FSA militia fighters — a proxy army for all intents and purposes — began clashing with the SDF in Manbij on March 1. So, to prevent these clashes from escalating into a full-blown confrontation, the United States deployed additional troops to Manbij to beef up its on-the-ground presence there.

It’s also a clear warning to the Turkish-FSA force to stay away.

U.S. Air Force Col. John Dorrian, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, tweeted on March 4 that the deployment is a “deliberate action to reassure coalition [members and] partner forces, [and] deter aggression and keep focus on defeating ISIS.”

This is part of longstanding U.S. policy aimed at preventing fighting between Turkish-backed militants and the SDF. What makes it significant now is that U.S. ground forces have been deployed to this flashpoint to directly prevent tensions from escalating.

It goes without saying that Turkish threats to seize Manbij and deny the YPG a foothold there is massively problematic for the United States, which has also supported Turkey against the Islamic State in the northwest Syrian border regions, and — after a halt in air strikes for a few weeks — in Al Bab.

Seeing these two sides go to war with each other wouldn’t be in U.S. interests, for obvious reasons.

The U.S. military presence could also give Washington more leverage over the SDF, and prove to Ankara that only Arab fighters — not Kurdish ones with the YPG — remain in Manbij. This would uphold part of a formerly secret agreement between the two countries when the SDF/YPG offensive against the Islamic State in the city began in late May 2016.

Dorrian clearly implied this is the case in a follow-up tweet in which he confirmed that it is a U.S. objective in Manbij to “ensure there’s no persistent YPG presence.”

This development comes shortly after Russia brokered a deal between the Syrian regime and the SDF in Manbij. The agreement saw the SDF hand over villages west of the city to the Syrian army, placing regime soldiers in a buffer zone directly between the SDF and the Turkish-FSA forces.

In the latter stages of the Turkish-FSA assault on Al Bab, Syrian troops advanced toward the city from the south, prompting fears that the two sides would clash. Fighting between them risked undermining the ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey in December 2016.

A brief clash did occur in a village to Al Bab’s southwest. One FSA militia commander told France 24 the fighting began when “rebels shot to warn them not to get any closer, but the tank responded and a clash erupted.” Russia didn’t have any of it and quickly “intervened to calm down the situation.”

“This whole incident felt like a test,” the FSA official remarked.

Russia has provided provided air support to Turkey and the Syrian regime.

It’s a familiar dynamic — if the two sides turned their guns on each other, it would not be in Moscow’s interests for much the same reason a war between the SDF and Turkey would not be in Washington’s interests.

Russia and the United States seem content with curbing these disputes for now. But after the Islamic State is defeated — and chances are it will be, eventually — it’s less clear how these outside powers will keep the peace between Syria’s myriad armed factions without continuing to pump more military resources into a combustible situation.

Iraqi troops encountered the “heaviest” clashes yet with Daesh group fighters Sunday in western Mosul since the start of the new push more than two weeks ago, according to a senior commander, like reported by arabnews.com .

Maj. Gen. Haider Al-Maturi of the Federal Police Commandos Division told The Associated Press that Daesh militants dispatched at least six suicide car bombs, which were all destroyed before reaching the troops. The militants, he said, are moving from house to house and deploying snipers.

The wave of heavy resistance comes as Iraqi forces launched attacks against Daesh-held neighborhoods in western Mosul from three points Sunday morning. The Federal Police are closing in on the city’s main government complex in the Dawasa neighborhood and Iraq’s special forces are attempting to push into the Shuhada and Mansour neighborhoods.

Daesh fighters have “some mortar (teams) and snipers positioned inside homes,” said Iraqi special forces Maj. Ali Talib, explaining that US-led coalition airstrikes have helped destroy some of the Daesh defenses, but clashes are still ongoing.

Al-Maturi, of the federal police, said his troops are now some 500 meters away from the government complex.

The push on Mosul’s west was launched about two weeks ago after the eastern half of the city was declared “fully liberated” in January. The operation to retake Mosul officially began in October after more than two years of slowly clawing back territory from Daesh militants. Daesh overran nearly a third of Iraq — including Mosul the country’s second largest city — in the summer of 2014.

State media in Iran says the military has tested a Russian-made air defence system, like reported by albawaba.com.

Moscow suspended delivery of the system back in 2010 after objections from the US and Israel.

But Russia ended up handing over the system last year, almost 10 years after the lucrative contract was first signed.

Last year a landmark nuclear deal came into force between Iran and world powers.

The Iranian media says the test of the S-300 system came during a recent military exercise and various flying objects including missiles were targeted.

The system is said to have a range of up to 200 kilometres.

Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoy, Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian General Staff, has confirmed a deal between Russia, the Syrian government and the Kurds in Manbij against Turkey and Turkish-backed rebels, like reported by aranews.net.

“The detachments of the Syrian army approached the south-west areas of the city of Menbij, which is under control of Kurdish militia groups,” he said.

“Today, the Russian Centre for reconciliation of the opposing sides sent the first humanitarian convoy with food, medicines and items of the first necessity to Menbij,” he added.

Furthermore, the Russian Army confirmed the entry of Syrian army forces to the Syrian Democratic Forces-held areas.

“In addition, since March 3 the Syrian Armed Forces enter the territory occupied by Kurdish militia groups [in reference to SDF] according to the agreements reached with the participation of the command of the Russian grouping of forces in Syria,” General Sergei Rudskoy said.

The general added that the Syrian government is taking measures to resume the work of state authorities in Menbij and surrounding areas.

The SDF-linked Manbij Military Council announced on Thursday that they have reached an agreement with Russia for the protection of the western villages of Manbij from the Turkish army and Turkey-backed rebels, handing over villages in Western Manbij to the Syrian government.

“Defending the civilians and protecting them from the adverse impact of the war, ensuring the security of Manbij and frustrating the invasion plans of the Turkish army against Syrian soil are the goals we have taken for all the peoples living on the lands of Syria,” the Manbij Military Council (MMC) said in a statement.

“In order to realize these goals of ours, we as Manbij Military Council confirm that we have handed over the defense of the line – where villages between the positions of our forces in western Manbij and Turkish-affiliated gangs are located – to Syrian state forces as part of the alliance we have made with Russian officials,” the council said.

“The SDF ceded this territory west of Manbij because it is clear that there are limits to the extent that the United States will intervene on behalf of the SDF’s interests west of the Euphrates,” the statement added.

However, despite of the alleged handover of some villages to the Syrian army, heavy clashes continued on Saturday between the Turkish-led Euphrates Shield rebels and the SDF forces west of Manbij. This makes it unclear whether these areas are handed over to the Syrian government, since clashes are ongoing since Thursday.

“Euphrates Shield forces continue to attack MMC regions. They failed, and a lot of them were killed in recent clashes [about 34 km] west of Manbij,” SDF-spokesperson Sharvan Darwish said on Saturday.

In an interview with ARA News, Nicholas A. Heras, Bacevich Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), said: “Ceding that territory west of Manbij to Assad’s forces, via a Russian-brokered deal, sends a signal to Turkey that the SDF understands the strategic value of the territory to Euphrates Shield, and will spite Turkey by giving it to Assad.”

“Notably, the SDF has retained territory south and west of Manbij that continues to allow it an access road to Afrin via Assad-controlled areas. Access to Afrin from the area of Manbij is the real strategic prize of this territory for the SDF,” he concluded.

Aaron Stein, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, told ARA News that the Syrian Kurds have reached their current autonomous status due to navigating its relations with greater powers.

“The Syrian Kurds are where they are because they manage great power relations. The YPG [Kurdish People’s Protection Units] are nakedly self interested, and have proved quite deft in playing off more powerful actors to their ultimate benefit,” he said.

Lnur Cevik, an adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan, said at a conference in Russia last week that Turkey would stop its operations after capturing Manbij.

“As soon Manbij is captured, Turkey will stop its operation in Syria,” Cevik said.

However, he also said that Turkey would try to avoid attacking the Syrian army that is protected by the Russian air forces.

“Turkey is not going to go into a confrontation and moving Assad by force. That is why Turkey, Russia and Iran are holding the Astana talks, so, here using force against Assad, I do not think, is on board,” Cevik said.

The Syrian army captured the historic citadel of Syria’s ancient oasis city of Palmyra in central Syria on Wednesday, after battles with the Islamic State (IS) group, a military source told Xinhua.

 

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have recruited fighters as young as 15, and used religious schools to lure teenagers into their ranks without their parents’ knowledge, Amnesty International said on Tuesday according to albawaba.com.

The human rights group described the “appalling” practices in a report citing family members of four boys, aged 15 to 17, who were recruited by the rebels.

Samah Hadid, deputy director at Amnesty International’s Beirut office, called on the Houthis to halt such recruitment and release the child soldiers, saying “this is a shameful and outrageous violation of international law”.

“It is appalling that Houthi forces are taking children away from their parents and their homes, stripping them of their childhood to put them in the line of fire where they could die,” said Hadid.

“The Houthis must immediately end all forms of recruitment of children under-18 and release all children within their ranks. The international community should support the rehabilitation and reintegration of demobilised children into the community,” he added.

Last June, Saudi Arabia transferred 54 child prisoners captured during clashes with Houthi rebels to the Yemeni government.

Human Rights Watch has accused both sides of the Yemen conflict of using child soldiers.

The war in Yemen pits the rebels – who control the capital and much of the country’s north – against a Saudi-led coalition fighting to restore the internationally recognised government.

Peaceful demonstrations calling for the downfall of the Saleh regime in 2011 were met with violent and often brutal responses.

Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh was given immunity and removed from power and was replaced with Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

In September 2014, the Houthi rebels, a group which Saleh had previously fought when in power, aligned with the ousted leader to bring down the new transitional leader.

In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition launched a military campaign to help the internationally-recognised government regain control of territory lost to the Houthi rebels.

Figures suggest more than 10,000 people – half of which civilians – have died since this intervention, while 3 million more were forced into displacement.

UAE and Saudi Arabia are working in the waters between Africa and Asia to counter any possible Iranian threat from north Yemen

The UAE is establishing two naval bases in the Red Sea in Somaliland’s Berbera and Eritrea’s Assab at the same time that Saudi Arabia is boosting its naval presence in the south Red Sea with a naval base in Djibouti, like reported by gulfnews.com. A few years ago, such a forceful presence would have been to combat Somali pirates, but today the threat is from a burgeoning Iranian presence in north Yemen, where Iran is backing Al Houthi rebels against the Yemeni government backed by the Saudi-led coalition in which the UAE plays a vigorous part.

On February 12, the parliament of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland agreed to allow the UAE to set up a military base in Berbera. The scale of what is planned is unclear, but the UAE is already constructing an air and naval base in Eritrea at the Red Sea port of Assab under a 2015 agreement, from which it has already mounted operations in the Yemen, 60km to the east across the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is finalising an agreement for a base in Djibouti with the government of the former French territory, with which Riyadh signed a security pact in 2016. Djibouti has the added advantage of being a member of the Arab League and of the 34-state Saudi-led anti-Iranian “Islamic coalition” announced in December 2015.

Djibouti is a busy place since it is where the United States runs its main regional counterterrorism base at a former French Foreign Legion facility, and China is also building a base there with an eye on its westward expansion into Africa and its strategic interest in securing the Indian Ocean trade routes.

BBC analyst Tomi Olipadio has pointed out that in Somaliland, the UAE has an alternative and less controversial location than its base in Eritrea, which is under United Nations sanctions. The BBC reports that the UAE will also provide much-needed training and equipment for Somaliland forces, as the unrecognised but de facto nation steadily expands its authority and ability to offer its people stable government. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the former Somalia, which has broken up into small statelets and a larger territory in the south around the capital that is controlled by the nominal government. The threat to that government posed by militant group Al Shabab has been largely kept out of the Northern Territory of Somaliland and having a stronger local force backed by an international partner will shore up this stability.

But the port in Berbera is not solely, or even mainly, for military use. In September 2016, DP World announced that it will manage and develop the port at Berbera in a concession that will last for 30 years with a 10-year automatic extension. The company will own 65 per cent of a joint venture with the government of Somaliland to manage and invest in the port, which could be as much as $442 million (Dh1.62 billion) over time. Dubai-based DP World is one of the world’s leading port operators with more than 75 terminals worldwide, and the Berbera deal gives it a new hub in the Red Sea near its existing port in Djibouti. An extra focus on the Berbera port project from the Somaliland side is to offer the unrecognised nation a strong economic opportunity to increase through-trade in the Horn of Africa region, and in particular targeting its landlocked neighbour Ethiopia.

This steady expansion of trade should bring prosperity and expanded stability to the struggling regions of the southern Red Sea. The threat of piracy from the southern Somali coast has receded in recent years, but the sea-borne activities of Al Houthi rebels in north Yemen has greatly worried international shippers who have now ordered their vessels to go down the Red Sea on the western side to benefit from the protection that Djibouti and Assab can offer, whereas until a few years ago, they followed the eastern coast to try and avoid Somali pirates.

A toehold

And there is a wider geopolitical threat that affects entire Middle East. Ed Blanche of Arab Weekly outlined the Iranian threat in the Red Sea, pointing out that in recent years, Iran has sought to establish alliances with Eritrea, Sudan and other Red Sea countries to enhance its capabilities against two of its key enemies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which both have naval access to the Red Sea. The Yemen war has provided Tehran with a toehold in the Red Sea because Iran supports Al Houthi rebels in north Yemen whom Saudi Arabia and the UAE are fighting.

Yemen could also offer potential naval bases to Iran from which it could threaten shipping through the Bab el Mandeb strait, the Red Sea’s southern gateway to the Indian Ocean, as it has long sought to do with the Strait of Hormuz, the only way in and out of the Arabian Gulf, said Blanche. The Horn of Africa is particularly important because it has a 4,000km coastline that runs from Sudan in the north to Kenya in the south and lies astride the Red Sea and South African cape maritime routes.

The Islamic State’s supreme leader has delivered a speech ordering his fighters to flee urban areas in Mosul, a presumable acknowledgement of defeat to U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and militias fighting to retake the city, like reported by iraqinews.com.

Alsumaria News quoted local sources saying that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made a “farewell speech” to his combatants in battlefields, ordering them to “flee and hide in mountainous areas” in Iraq and Syria. The text of the speech was disseminated among other speakers to read out to fighters at various areas in western Mosul.

The directives tell fighters to blow themselves up once encircled by Iraqi troops, the source claims, adding that senior commanders close to Baghdadi were moving on the borderline between Syria and Iraq. “The leaders of the so-called Mujahideen Shura (advisory) Council have all fled Nineveh and Tal Afar to Syria.”

Iraqi forces have made remarkable gains since launching a renewed offensive on February 19th to retake western Mosul from IS militants. The government said late January it had retaken the eastern side of the city following three months of fighting.

Military commanders from the Iraqi forces and the allied U.S.-led international military coalition have said IS resistance was remarkably weaker in the west compared to the east. Government forces became closer Tuesday to a government complex in central Mosul, having retaken the city’s airport, a major military base and a vital bridge linking both sides of the city.

Earlier this month, unconfirmed news claimed that Baghdadi, whose exact whereabouts remained unknown for long, had been seriously wounded when airstrikes targeted a senior leadership meeting he chaired near the borders with Syria.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reportedly presented Monday a sweeping plan to defeat the Islamic State terror group to the White House and it may have involved sending more U.S. troops to Syria, Military Times reported. Labeled as a plan to “rapidly defeat” ISIS, a Pentagon spokesperson said Mattis offered up the results of his 30-day strategy review at a National Security Council meeting that involved members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, like reported by ibtimes.com.

The plan very well may involve increasing the U.S.’ presence in war-torn Syria with more troops, while the presence in Iraq could remain unchanged, unnamed officials aware of the Mattis report’s findings told Military Times. It also calls for continued attempts to disrupt ISIS’s finances, recruiting efforts and propaganda machine.

But the spokesperson, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, also indicated that it’s a flowing plan rather than a complete one and it can evolve over time and even expand around the globe.

“This is a broad plan,” he said. “It is global. It is not just military. It is not just Iraq/Syria.”

The prospective increase in troops to Syria seemed to fall in line with comments last week from the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen Joseph L. Votel.

“I am very concerned about maintaining momentum,” Votel told reporters in Jordan according to The New York Times. “It could be that we take on a larger burden ourselves. That’s an option.”

Currently, the U.S. has roughly 500 Special Operations troops in Syria, The Times reported.

When Trump took over as the new commander-in-chief, he tasked the military to come up with a plan to defeat the terror group that’s ravaged parts of Syria and Iraq for nearly the last half-decade and Monday the president reportedly asked for the military’s budget to increase by $54 billion, or 3 percent, for the next fiscal year.

“We must ensure that our courageous servicemen and women have the tools they can be to deter war, and when called upon to fight in our name, only do one thing: Win,” Trump said Monday after a meeting with some of the nation’s governors.

“We have to win. We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war. You remember, some of you were right there with me, you remember, America never lost.”

The number of Islamic State militants killed since the launch of Iraqi forces offensives to retake western Mosul has surpassed 900, the police service said as the army prepares to invade a strategic IS stronghold, like reported by iraqinews.com .

Federal Police chief, Lt. Gen. Shaker Jawdat, said in statements Tuesday that 929 Islamic State members were killed since operations began on February 19th to recapture the western side of the city.

According to Jawdat, 200 fighters were killed on Monday alone, adding that 84 booby-trapped vehicles and 3 drones were destroyed and brought down during battles.

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Najm al-Jubouri, commander of the army’s Nineveh Operations, said in a statement that the army’s 15th division were preparing to invade the town of Tal Afar, a strategic Islamic State stronghold in northwestern Mosul.

Pro-government militias, al-Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Units), have been recapturing villages around Tal Afar since operations to retake Mosul launched in October 2016.

Iraqi forces recaptured eastern Mosul late January after three months of fighting to take over the city that fell in IS hands in 2014. The forces recently regained control over strategic areas in the western region, including the city’s airport, a major bridge and a handful of districts.