Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has ordered his officials to develop nuclear-powered ships, accusing the United States of violating last year’s international nuclear deal.

World powers had agreed to lift sanctions in exchange for curbs to Iran’s nuclear programme.

But Congress recently voted to extend its laws regarding sanctions on Iran.

President Barack Obama is expected to sign the laws, but says they will not affect the international agreement.

He insists the White House will continue to suspend all the sanctions linked to Iran’s nuclear programme.

In a statement, Mr Rouhani criticised the Congress move as a breach of the accord and said he had asked his officials to start work on “planning the design and production of nuclear fuel and reactors for maritime transport.”

He also says Iran will make a legal complaint to the committee overseeing the agreement.

In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump, now president-elect, threatened to scrap the Iran deal altogether, but it is unclear what his policy will be.

Iran has raised the possibility of building nuclear-powered ships before, at the height of tensions with the international community over its nuclear programme.

But analysts say it will be an extremely costly effort without strategic gain.

bbc.com

Members of the terror group Daesh disguised themselves as Bedouins and Syrian army soldiers in order to reach Palmyra

On Sunday, Daesh attacked and recaptured Palmyra, which had been liberated from the terrorist group by the Syrian army with the help of Russian warplanes in March. The ancient, UNESCO-recognized city had suffered for eight months under Daesh control, during which countless examples of priceless antiquities were deliberately destroyed, in line with the group’s aberrant interpretation of Islamic law.

Up to 5,000 militants, including hundreds of suicide bombers and dozens of vehicles, took part in the offensive.  They had reportedly relocated from Mosul in Iraq and the Syrian provinces Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa, where the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had stalled their planned attack on the group. Their ability to reach Palmyra apparently undetected by regional surveillance operations has been a cause for consternation. One theory is that the fighters disguised themselves as local people, military expert Alexander Perendzhiev, a lecturer at Moscow’s Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, told RIA Novosti.

“Terrorists in Syria use sophisticated tactics to move in small groups, so-called ‘flash mob tactics.’ Under the guise of Bedouins, local people or even Syrian army soldiers, they come from different directions and meet in an inconspicuous place. As a result, suddenly there is an unexpectedly large force in one place.” “The terrorists have taken more than one city using this tactic, but we still haven’t learned to actively counteract it,” he added.

There are several important gas fields in the region of Palmyra, including al-Shaer, located some 150km northwest of the city, which reportedly produces three million cubic meters of gas a year. In addition, two important military airports, T4 and Shairat, are located near the field, and near the Palmyra-Homs road.

While the Syrian army had directed many of its resources towards Aleppo, Perendzhiev said that Daesh’s return to Palmyra was relatively predictable given its importance. “The next step after capturing Aleppo should have been the capture of these oil deposits, the oil from which goes to Arab countries – Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The terrorists’ sponsors aren’t going to give them up, that’s why they provided the resources for the attack on Palmyra. At the same time, in addition to arms, munitions and personnel support, the fighters were provided with strategic assistance,” Perendzhiev said.

sputniknews.com

While it’s steadily losing  territories around the world, the Islamic State Group or the Daesh has once again managed to come up with something insane to continue it Pizzazz. This time with it ‘Target Bahrain’ mantra!

Video clips urging supporters to unleash attacks on Bahrainis and the American Military personnel  stationed in the Kingdom are now doing the rounds on various social media platforms for the past few weeks. The ISIS video, posted online, shows a man, claiming to be a Bahraini, calling upon the people of Bahrain to “follow the right path and join Jihad”.

Apparently filmed in Homs, Syria, the video shows the man in military uniform giving Bahrainis two choices: “to live in disgrace or to join Jihad”.

Speaking in a dramatic ‘poet voice’, the man who is named “Abu Yaqoub Al Bahraini” said: “Jihad should be performed whether in Al Basra, Sitra or Bani Jamra, and in Baghdad, Muharraq or Arad”.

In a bid to create sectarian tensions, the man, in the  video, urges the Sunni sect here for jihad against people of the Shia sect as well as against the western military troops in the Kingdom.

Bahrain is part of the anti-ISIS coalition and is home to the 5th fleet of the US Navy as well as the British naval base.

The clips are shared and viewed by thousands of internet users, even though they were removed briefly, only to be reposted multiple times on the You Tube.

The videos were also aired by a couple of Lebanon-based news channels.

In his response to the video via. MilitaryTimes, Cmdr. Bill Urban, a 5th Fleet spokesman, said officials were aware of the video, but declined to discuss possible security measures the Navy might have taken.

While the US Embassy in Manama acknowledge that they are aware of the threat to MilitaryTimes, the Bahrain Government, according to Associated Press, said it “remains vigilant against terrorist activities and extremism”.

Collective action against extremism was also the main theme of the recently concluded GCC Summit, which hosted British Prime Minister Theresa May and several key leaders from the GCC and the Middle East.

The summit also viewed that the defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria will likely worsen the threat in other parts of the world in the way of returning fighters.

newsofbahrain.com

Iranian army has unveiled two new drones, on Dec. 13 at the last day of a massive military drill in the southeast of the country.

The two drones dubbed “Oqab” and “Shahin” have been designed and manufactured by Iran’s Army, IRNA news agency reported.

“Oqab” is a combat drone capable of carrying air-to-surface missile, while “Shahin” is a reconnaissance drone, which has a flight time of 24 hours.

On Dec. 11, the Iranian Army Ground Forces started the three-day massive drills dubbed Muhammad Rasulullah 4 (Muhammad the Messenger of God) with participation of Army Air Forces and Khatam al-Anbia Air Defense Base.

The modern and updated military equipment of Iran is used in the drills, which cover an area of 220,000 square kilometers.

Iran regularly conducts various drills to enhance the defense capabilities of its armed forces and to test modern military tactics and equipment.

trend.az

itv.com

ISIS drones are the extremist group’s eyes in the sky for suicide car bombs in the streets in the battle for Mosul

A convoy of black Humvees crawls along a dirt track on the eastern outskirts of Mosul on an overcast morning in late November. The vehicles stop at an Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) command post and soldiers begin unloading a pile of unmanned aerial vehicles from the back of one of the armored vehicles. The drones range from off-the-shelf, consumer-grade quadcopters to homemade, fixed-wing craft assembled from duct tape and the kind of corrugated plastic ordinarily used for signs.

“These are daesh drones,” a soldier explains, “and we captured them.”

Since the start of November, ISF have been fighting to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State, known locally by its Arabic acronym daesh. They are discovering though that with two-and-a-half years to prepare their defenses, ISIS militants are well entrenched in Iraq’s second-largest city.

Drones have emerged recently as a crucial and lethal part of the group’s defensive strategy. Beyond their tactical value, analysts also see drones as a further example of the group’s adaptability, suggesting that further new developments may await the Iraqi armed forces as they penetrate deeper into the heart of the so-called caliphate.

The captured drones are carried to the roof of the two-story concrete house, where officers are busy talking into radios.

“These are just the drones we got today,” says Lt. Gen. Abdul Wahab al-Saadi.

The mustachioed officer is the deputy commander of the elite counter-terrorism special forces carrying out the bulk of the fighting in Mosul. He stops talking into his radio to explain that the ISIS drones are important both for reconnaissance and for aerial shots in the terror group’s propaganda videos. “They use them to film our troops, and now they also use them for directing their suicide bombers.”

It’s a lethal development. Since launching the current military operation on October 17, suicide bombings have been the ISF’s most deadly threat. Iraqi authorities claim ISIS have dispatched over 600, ISIS propaganda puts the number at less than that. Either way, the figure is unprecedented.

In the early stages of the Mosul campaign, the fighting took place on the relatively open Nineveh Plains which provided open lines of sight for suicide bombers. As the fighting moved to a close quarters urban combat zone however, it became more difficult for suicide bombers – peering through the narrow viewing slit in their vehicle’s improvised armor – to navigate to their targets. This is where the drones have come into play.

A recent ISIS propaganda video shows how relaying directions via a drone can further increase the effectiveness of SVBIEDs — suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. In the clip — itself filmed from a drone — a suicide vehicle is seen driving towards a Humvee. At the last moment though, it drives around the vehicle to detonate closer to a larger grouping of military vehicles.

The video shows that the suicide bomber was in close communication with the drone pilot, says Charlie Winter, an ISIS expert at the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Studying ISIS propaganda videos like this has led Winter to conclude that drones are being used to guide the bombers as well as film their results.

“I think the propaganda role is absolutely there, but I think tactically, drones do play quite a big role also,” he said.

Back at the command post, an enormous explosion rocks the neighborhood. It’s another suicide bomber — the fourth for the day — detonating nearly two miles to the west. An enormous dust cloud rises from the scene and the officers on the roof rush to radio in its coordinates. Two bearded French special forces soldiers remain hunched over their rugged laptops, while voices speaking with American, British and Australian accents communicate with Iraqi officers over the radio. Somewhere, western coalition troops are monitoring the situation from drones of their own, Lt. Gen. Saadi remarked.

That particular suicide bomb failed to cause any casualties, Brigadier General Haider Fadel Azurki reported afterwards. He insisted that tactics like these will not be enough to stop his men. “Our forces are experienced and morale is high,” he said. “We are advancing according to our plan.”

A pair of large-scale maps hanging on a wall behind him though show just how slow their advance has been. After more than a month of fighting, Iraqi forces have barely penetrated the eastern neighborhoods and are still far from the Tigris River which divides the city.

A visit to a nearby casualty collection point shows the toll the fighting has taken so far. Set up in an abandoned home, the clinic consists of little more than cots where the wounded are stabilized before being raced to the nearest hospital — an hour’s drive away in the city of Erbil in Kurdistan.

Standing outside, Lieutenant Zaid watched as people were brought in. “Just suicide bombs and snipers,” the 22-year-old said in English. “No real fighting.”

Like many Iraqi soldiers, he gave only his first name but said he was from Babil, and used to study law in Baghdad before joining the special forces two years ago.

In the two weeks he’s fought in Mosul, Zeid says he’s experienced three suicide bombers at close range. The nearest blew himself up a mere 30 yards away, leaving Zeid’s ears ringing for days. There’s a hint of frustration in his voice as he explains how they are unable to engage the enemy in conventional battle.

A black Humvee tears up in a cloud of dust and disgorges a patient. A soldier, shot through the chest by an ISIS sniper. He is already dead.

Exactly how many soldiers have been killed in the campaign is a sensitive issue. The UN mission to Iraq reported last week that 1,959 members of the ISF had been killed in November across the country. The Joint Operations Command of the Iraqi military reacted angrily, denouncing the figures as “much exaggerated.” UNAMI later said it would stop issuing military casualty estimates, saying “military figures were largely unverified,” because the Iraqi military doesn’t release its own casualty figures.

“UNAMI has just touched an extremely sensitive point,” explained Michael Knights, a Boston-based Iraqi military expert at The Washington Institute. “The Iraqi government is struggling to keep together a narrative for why thousands of Shiites from the south should be wounded and killed fighting to liberate Mosul, a Sunni city which was seen to welcome ISIS.”

vocativ.com

Syrian forces have gained control of nearly all of Aleppo, after gaining control of two more rebel-held neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city on Dec. 12. According to several news outlets, forces loyal to the Syrian government now control up to 98% of the city.

Over the last few days, news began emerging that opposition fighters were contemplating a deal to evacuate Aleppo. On the night of Dec. 11, it was reported that the withdrawal from Aleppo had Russian and U.S. backing. According to Reuters, under the terms of the deal opposition forces would be allowed to leave to any area in Syria bearing light arms.

Aleppo has been divided between opposition and government forces since 2012.

armenianweekly.com

By the time the jihadists had finished, not even a woman’s eyes were legal. Showing them was a punishable offense.

The dress code imposed on the women of Mosul started soon after the Islamic State overran the city more than two years ago. It was carried out gradually, until every part of the female body was erased, starting with the face, then the rest of the body — including the hands, which had to be covered with gloves, as well as the feet, which had to be hidden by socks. It ended with an announcement blared over loudspeakers, telling women to wear a film of black cloth over their eyes.

Halima Ali Beder, 39, said she had resentfully made each new addition to her wardrobe, starting with the niqab to cover her face, and the abaya, also known as a jilbab, a loosefitting gown. Yet she still ran afoul of the Islamic State’s increasingly harsh enforcement of its codes when she stepped into the lane outside her home, planning to pop over to her neighbor’s house.

“I put on everything — the niqab, the abaya, the gloves, the socks. All I forgot to do is cover my eyes,” said Ms. Beder, one of a dozen women from recently liberated neighborhoods of the city who recounted their experiences in interviews at the Khazer refugee camp, about 45 miles from Mosul in northern Iraq.

Ms. Beder had taken only a few steps when the morality police spotted her, and officers began shouting at her, castigating her. “They said: ‘Where is your husband? Does he accept that just anyone can see your face?’ I said: ‘But I wasn’t showing my face. Only my eyes!’”

More than two million people lived in Mosul when it fell to the Islamic Stateon June 10, 2014. It was a conservative city where most women already covered their hair with a scarf and their arms with long sleeves. But as in other places where the militants imposed their creed, the new rules took enforced modesty to such an extreme that it riled families in Mosul, who described how they quickly began to feel suffocated.

Three days after seizing the city, the militants began going door to door to distribute the “Bill of the City,” laying out how they planned to govern, according to a study by a researcher, Rasha Al Aqeedi, a native of Mosul and now a fellow at the Al Mesbar Studies and Research Center in Dubai.

“To the virtuous women,” the bill said, “in modesty and the wide, loose jilbab, stay in your homes and leave them only in cases of necessity.”

All over territory controlled by the Islamic State, billboards were going up showing a picture of a woman looking like a black silhouette, completely covered in concealing clothes. It laid out the new look in seven bullet points, including that a woman’s gown should be “thick and not reveal what is beneath” and should “not draw attention.”

For at least a month, obedience to the new rules was not enforced. Then at the end of July, thousands of niqab sets were distributed to shops. The first of numerous decrees was issued, ordering women to don the niqab as well as gloves. Around the same time, residents began seeing vehicles painted with the logo of the Islamic State’s morality police, Ms. Aqeedi said.

Opposite the university, they opened the police unit’s headquarters, known as the Diwan al-Hisba. Its enforcement officers fanned out across the city, carrying books of numbered citations.

When the police caught a woman straying from the dress code, they issued a notice in exchange for her husband’s ID card. He then had to appear at a hearing before a judge. Depending on the offense, he was forced to pay a fine, or else either he or his wife was sentenced to a whipping, recent escapees said.

When the Islamic police barged into the home of Ms. Beder, they demanded her husband’s ID. Then when he appeared before them, he was forced to pay a fine of 50,000 dinars — around $40, a sizable portion of the family’s monthly income.

Women say the minders multiplied each month, until residents had the impression that the morality police were omnipresent. Officers loitered near shops and beside market stalls. One woman, Zeena Mohamed, 27, described how she lifted her flap just enough to see the cream-colored dress she was considering buying. She couldn’t be sure of its hue through the black film, she said.

Straightaway she heard a man shouting, and looked up to see the officer, who expelled her from the shop.

Others described not being sure of the amount of money that shopkeepers handed back to them, afraid to lift up the veil to check. Tripping, even falling, became a regular occurrence, they said.

Throughout areas controlled by the terror group in Iraq, as well as in Syria and Libya, the Islamic State’s hisba became a bureaucracy of virtue, its offices filling up with binders of receipts for the various violations it had issued. It prosecuted a list of offenses, fining and flogging men for incorrect beard length, for failure to pray at the sanctioned time, for possession of cigarettes and alcohol and for a long list of other perceived moral failings.

On letterhead bearing the group’s black flag, the Islamic State released fatwas detailing each new restriction and outlining penalties, according to documents obtained by the researcher Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who agreed to share several unpublished examples with The New York Times. One fatwa discussed the appropriate color women should wear, concluding that red was illegal. Another stresses the importance of covering the entire face “because it is the place of captivation and temptation.”

One woman was stopped because her sock had a hole in it, revealing the skin on her ankle. A middle-aged secretary recounted how the gloves made it hard for her to hold a pen, which kept slipping. When she tried taking off the glove of her writing hand, she was spotted and threatened.

Because the dress code applied to what women should wear in public, Wafa, a 39-year-old woman, did not bother putting on the attire when she went to bake flatbread in the earthen oven inside her family’s compound.

Though the compound is encircled by a wall, it was low enough for people to peer over, which is how the hisba saw her. Officers immediately came to demand her husband’s ID.

“I told them if you plan to start interfering even inside our homes, then you need to start bringing us propane, and groceries and the things we need, so that we don’t have to go out,” she said. “You’re making us live in the Stone Age.”

They let her go with a warning, but the next time, she was punished. Wafa, who asked that only her first name be used, said had been at a picnic with her children. She lifted the khimar, the fabric over her face, just enough to bring her spoon to her mouth, when she noticed the black car with the green logo of the morality police, she said.

This time, they confiscated her husband’s ID and gave him a notice to appear. “Reason for detention,” says the receipt, numbered 4715. “Wife outside without khimar.”

They then drove Wafa to their office, where a long-bearded judge jotted down her punishment: 21 lashes.

“I tried to protest. To explain. How can I eat if I don’t lift up the khimar? But they didn’t listen,” she said. They delivered her to a room where a Syrian woman ordered her to kneel. In the woman’s hand was a cable that had metal spikes on the end.

“It’s indescribable the pain I felt,” Wafa said. “I was screaming, crying — begging — reciting prayers.”

Her back shredded, she spent two nights at a hospital and for weeks afterward she could sleep only on her stomach, she said.

It eventually became clear that the aim of the rules was to keep women cloistered inside their homes. “This was the entire purpose. The essence of their Islamic jurisprudence is to make women melt away. To make them invisible,” Ms. Aqeedi said. She gave the example of a woman she keeps in touch with who is still in Mosul and has not left her home for more than two years.

A small number tried to rebel. Ms. Mohamed said she was among them, routinely talking back to the morality police, an account confirmed by her mother and sisters.

Not long before their neighborhood was liberated, Zeena Mohamed and her sister Mona went to a store that sold women’s intimate wear. Among the customers were two wives of Islamic State fighters, “and they were buying the raciest lingerie in the entire shop,” Zeena said.

When the sisters left the shop, they passed the two Islamic State husbands, loitering in the hallway outside the shop. One saw that Zeena had forgotten to pull down the flap over her eyes and began loudly admonishing her.

“Your wife is upstairs buying racy panties,” she recounted saying, “and you’re concerned about me showing my eyes?”

nytimes.com

A Russian aerial onslaught killed scores of Islamic State group fighters in Syria’s Palmyra on Sunday and forced others to withdraw hours after they had re-entered the ancient city, Moscow said.

Russia’s defense ministry said its warplanes carried out more than 60 strikes overnight on Palmyra, killing more than 300 ISIS jihadists and halting their offensive on the famed desert city in central Syria.

“Intense Russian raids since last night forced ISIS out of Palmyra, hours after the jihadists retook control of the city,” said Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“The army brought reinforcements into Palmyra last night, and the raids are continuing on jihadist positions around the city,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

In a statement issued in Moscow, the defense ministry said Russian warplanes conducted 64 air strikes against “positions, convoys and advancing reserves of militants” in Palmyra.

“Over the past night, Syrian government troops with active support of the Russian air force thwarted all terrorist attacks on Palmyra,” it said in a statement.

“The attacking militants actively used car bombs with suicide bombers, armored vehicles and rocket artillery,” it said, adding that the strikes killed more than 300 militants and destroyed 11 tanks and 31 vehicles.

Russia has carried out a bombing campaign in Syria in support of its ally President Bashar al-Assad since September 2015.

ISIS began an offensive last week near Palmyra, which is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

The jihadists killed around 50 members of Syrian government forces after launching simultaneous attacks on several regime positions near Palmyra on Thursday, the Britain-based Observatory said at the time.

They targeted areas including near the Mahr and Shaar oil and gas fields and seized government checkpoints, silos and the village of Jazal, northwest of Palmyra.

In May last year, the Sunni Muslim extremist group seized several towns in Homs province including Palmyra, where they caused extensive damage to many of its ancient sites.

They were ousted from Palmyra in March by Syrian regime forces backed by Russia.

The recapture of Palmyra was hailed as a major victory, with Russian celebrities travelling there since March staging concerts and making public appearances.

israelnationalnews.com