Coalition air bombing southeast of Mosul turned at least nine military bases of the Islamic State (ISIS) group into rubble late Sunday, and dozens of militants were reported killed or wounded, a senior Peshmerga commander said.

“At 5:30 pm coalition jets started shelling ISIS bases in the villages of Tolband and Kulabor on the Khazir front in Mosul,” Brig. Saed Hazhar, deputy commander of the elite Zeravani Peshmerga, told Rudaw by phone.

He confirmed the killing and wounding of dozens of militants, as well as the “complete destruction of nine military bases.”

Coalition jets have continually been shelling ISIS bases to weaken the group’s abilities on the front. The militants have launched multiple assaults on the Khazir front, since capturing Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul in June 2014.

The front is strategically important because it guards the strategic main road between the cities of Erbil and Duhok.

rudaw.net

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units are waging a successful campaign against Daesh forces in Syria, targeting the terrorist movement’s primary source of income.

A meeting of Arab states in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to discuss the growing confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran ended in full support for the Saudi position, and any measure any measure against Iran to halt Tehran’s “terrorist acts” and to ensure that it refrains from “meddling in the affairs of Arab nations.” However, no concrete action was taken or committed.

According to Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir:

The Kingdom is looking at additional measures to be taken, if Iran continues with its belligerent policies. […]

We cannot deal with a country that attacks and burns embassies, whether those embassies are British or American, or for that matter Saudi.

If it is a nation state, it should act like a responsible state. If not, it will be further isolated.

The escalation is coming from Iran, not from Saudi Arabia or the GCC. We are evaluating Iran’s moves and taking steps to counter them … things will be clearer in the near future. …

It is entirely in the hands of Iran, whether it wants to be a good neighbor or it prefers to remain in a hostile environment within the region.

Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in a letter to the United Nations, blamed Saudi Arabia specifically for numerous terrorist attacks, from 9/11/2001 to Paris to San Bernardino:

Regrettably, immediately after the successful conclusion of the first interim nuclear agreement between Iran and E3/EU+3 in November 2013, Saudi Arabia focused all its resources to prevent or defeat a comprehensive deal, and preclude normalization in the region. Today, there are indications that some in Saudi Arabia are on a mission to drag the entire region to conflict, fearing that removal of the smokescreen of the manufactured Iranian nuclear threat would expose the real global threat posed by extremists and their sponsors.

It is an unfortunate reality that most extremist perpetrators of acts of terror from September 11, 2001 to the recent senseless terrorist shooting in San Bernardino and all other episodes of extremist carnage in between whether in Beirut, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul and Peshawar, or in Paris, London, Moscow, Madrid and Ottawa – and most members of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS and Al-Nusra Front were either Saudi nationals, or those mis-educated in Saudi financed schools or otherwise brainwashed by petro-financed demagogues, who have promoted an anti-Islamic message of hatred, exclusion and sectarianism across the globe for decades.

Saudi Arabia has called an emergency meeting of all 22 countries in the Arab League, to meet in Cairo on Sunday (today). Arab News (Riyadh) and Tehran Times

Arab countries deeply divided over Iran vs Saudi Arabia confrontation

According to Fawaz Gerges, Mideast expert at the London School of Economics, interviewed on Al-Jazeera on Saturday, Saudi Arabia views Iran’s penetration in the Arab world in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and Lebanon to be an existential threat to Saudi Arabia, and so the Saudis have made a strategic decision for all-out confrontation with Iran.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have severed diplomatic relations with Iran, Kuwait and Qatar recalled their ambassadors, the UAE downgraded its ties and Oman condemned the embassy attacks. The Saudis are pushing very hard for more mare Arab countries to cut diplomatic relations. The Saudis would like a united Arab position to counterbalance Iran.

However, the confrontation has deeply divided the Arab world, and split the countries into three blocs, according to Gerges:

• Pro-Iran bloc: Iraq and Syria. Lebanon is deeply divided, with Hezbollah controlling much of the country. Most of Yemen is in support of Iran.
• Pro-Saudi bloc: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait. Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE) support the Saudis, but to a lesser extent.
• In the middle: Egypt is reluctant to join either camp, even though it says it supports Saudi Arabia. Oman does not want to take any sides. Algeria is trying to play a mediating role.

Gerges points out that the Saudis believe that their “strategic partner,” the United States, has let them down and sided with Iran against them, allowing Iran to gain the upper hand in the region. For that reason, the Saudis did not consult with the US before deciding to cut diplomatic relations with Iran.

Meanwhile, according to Gerges, the Obama administration is very unhappy with the current Saudi-Iran escalation, because it diverts attention from the US agenda: to focus confrontation on ISIS, to find a diplomatic solution in Syria, and a ceasefire in Yemen.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, these objectives are pretty much fantasy anyway. Generational Dynamics predicts that the Mideast is headed for a major war between Shias and Sunnis, between Arabs and Jews, and between different ethnic groups. Events of the last year, including the war in Yemen, the rise of ISIS, the Russian military intervention in Syria, Iran’s nuclear deal with the west, and now the Saudi-Iran split, have moved this prediction much closer.

breitbart.com/

Islamic State ran a sophisticated immigration operation through a Syrian border town with Turkey until its defeat in the area by Kurds this summer, documents obtained by the Guardian suggest.

Passenger manifests dated between December 2014 and March 2015, which were seized by Kurdish commanders in Tel Abyad, carry the stamps of Isis’s “department of immigration” and “department of transport”. They show that busses passed through the town having submitted the names, dates of births, ID numbers and even birthplace of scores of travellers.

Most of the registered passengers were travelling from within Isis-held territory. One manifest shows a group of five male and female Tunisians aged 23-36 entering the area. They are registered as coming from Kairouan, a city south of the Tunisian capital, Tunis, known to be a hotbed of radicalism. Kairouan is where gunman Seifeddine Rezgui, who massacred 30 British tourists on a Sousse beach in June, was studying.

Tunisia is the biggest source of foreign fighters entering Syria. In October, the Tunisian government estimated that 6,000 fighters had left Tunisia headed for the conflict.

Turkey has long said that it is unable to secure its 500-mile border with Syria. In January, as Isis was logging people passing in and out of Tel Abyad, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, told the Independent that sealing the border would be impossible. “We cannot put soldiers everywhere on the border. In any case, there isn’t any state on the other side [of the frontier].” he said.

A Turkish diplomat speaking to the Guardian last month re-emphasised how difficult it was to stop fighters sneaking across the border at night.

The seven passenger manifests, countersigned by travel agents in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, suggest there was for a period of formalised passage on the Syrian side of the border.

The manifests were sent to the Guardian by Syrian Kurdish force’s spokesman, Redur Xelil, and bear the same stamp marks and logos as other Isis documents the newspaper has been able to verify. Spanning four months, they meticulously record 70 passengers, 28 of whom were under 18, including seven babies.

Some busses were detailed as heading to Isis stronghold of Raqqa, about 40 miles south of Tel Abyad, while others were full of families from Mosul, which Isis conquered last year.

The border crossing remained open until Kurdish forces took control of the town in June, at which point Turkey promptly sealed it. The crossing remains closed, a government official confirmed.

Turkey, a member of Nato, has been under international pressure because of its border with Syria, as concerns mounted over the ease with which Isis fighters appeared to be able to enter and leave territory held by the group.

In July, Davutoğlu vowed to increase border security after an Isis bombing killed more than 30 youth activists. The pressure to further increase security has mounted since the Paris attack.

Speaking in France shortly after the attacks in November, Barack Obama said he had had “repeated conversations” with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about border security, adding: “We’ve seen some serious progress on that front, but there are still some gaps.” The US president mentioned a 60-mile stretch that he said continued to serve as a transit point for fighters and Isis fuel exports.

David Phillips, an academic at Columbia University and author of two recent research papers into links between Turkey and Isis, alleges that the country “knows the movements of all persons and can control the flow across the border if it chooses”.

He said there was “a steady stream of vehicles, individuals, weapons, financing, oil going back and forth”, adding: “It’s not like people are putting on their hiking boots and crossing over rough terrain. There’s an extensive surface transport network which is highly regulated and controlled … on both sides of the border.”

Academic researcher Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert on examining Isis documents, said he had no doubt about the authenticity of the manifests. “The documents… coincide with other documents illustrating daily bus routes within Islamic State territory. Though private companies provide the actual transportation, the Islamic State bureaucracy is responsible for authorising and overseeing the routes,” he said.

Responding to the Guardian’s claims, a senior Turkish government official said Turkey regarded any Tunisian entering Isis controlled territory as a “foreign fighter”. But he questioned whether the documents proved whether those arriving in Tel Abyad had done so using the legal road crossing or through other means.

The official said Turkey was doing everything it could to stop the influx of foreign fighters, including cracking down on recruitment and logistic networks such as travel agents mentioned in the documents.

Turkey arrested 207,437 people for illegally crossing the border between 1 January 2014 and 1 November 2015, he said, adding that the country hosts more than 2 million Syrian refugees as part of its “open door” policy.

theguardian.com

A “projectile” struck a clinic supported by international medical group Medecins Sans Frontieres in north Yemen on Sunday, killing four people, MSF said, another in a series of attacks on its facilities in the war-torn country.

MSF said it was not clear who was behind the attack that also wounded 10 other people in Shiara Hospital in the Razeh district, where the group has worked since November last year.

In a statement on its Twitter account, MSF did not identify who was killed in the attack but said that three of the wounded were staff members, of whom two were in critical condition.

“This is the third severe incident in the last 3 months. Our teams struggle on a daily basis to ensure the respect of health facilities,” MSF wrote. An earlier tweet by the group described the projectile as a rocket.

Regional MSF operations chief Raquel Ayora said all warring parties are regularly informed of the GPS coordinates of the medical sites where the group works, and that MSF was in constant dialogue with them.

“There is no way that anyone with the capacity to carry out an air strike or launch a rocket would not have known that the Shiara Hospital was a functioning health facility providing critical services and supported by MSF,” she said.

MSF said Saudi-led air strikes hit another of its health facilities elsewhere in the province in October last year, wrecking the building and lightly wounding two staff members.

A military coalition led by Saudi Arabia has been fighting the Iran-allied Houthi group in Yemen, a campaign Riyadh says is aimed at repelling at what it sees as creeping Iranian influence in the Arabian Peninsula region.

Nearly 6,000 people have been killed since the Saudi coalition entered Yemen’s conflict in March, almost half of them civilians. The war has exacerbated hunger and disease in Yemen, the region’s poorest country.

In a separate incident, an intelligence colonel was killed in a drive-by shooting in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden on Sunday, a security official source said, in an attack claimed by Islamic State militants.

It was the latest in a series of assassination and bombings by militants belonging to the Yemen branch of the ultra-violent group which have undermined security in Aden, the temporary capital of the embattled Yemeni central government.

trust.org

ISIS militants have abducted 54 families while escaping the terrorist group near Hawija district of Southern Kirkuk province.

According to local news agencies, the 54 families have been attempting to move secretly to Alam district in Tikrit province, but were noticed by ISIS insurgents near Hamrin mountains.

The kidnapped families mostly consist of children and elderlies, and their whereabouts remain unknown until now.

Since the emergence of ISIS in Iraq in 2014, the brutality of the terrorist group has forced millions to flee their homes, while hundreds of thousands remain in their area and suffer the harsh restrictions.

After the liberation of Ramadi in Western Iraqi province of Anbar last December, retreating extremists took scores of civilians to allegedly use them as human shield.

abna24.com

The Syrian air force has targeted a convoy of 20 tankers smuggling oil from territories held by Daesh in the Arab country’s east.

Syrian warplanes bombarded the tankers on the al-Mayadin Highway near the eastern city of Dayr al-Zawr on Sunday.

In another development, a top commander of al-Qaeda-linked Ahrar al-Sham group, called Abu Talib, was killed in a booby trap explosion in Syria’s northwestern Idlib Province.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s al-Ahed news website reported that a number of civilians sustained injuries after militant groups launched mortar attacks on the northern part of the Syrian province of Hama.

Syria has been gripped by militancy since March 2011. More than 260,000 have reportedly lost their lives and millions displaced as a result of the violence.

Syrian forces have been battling militants, particularly Daesh members, on different fronts throughout the country. They have recently been making rapid advances against militants in operations backed by the Russian air cover, which began on September 30 last year at the request of the Damascus government.

On Sunday, Russian airstrikes targeted the Idlib province district of Maarat al-Numan, killing upwards for 47 people.

albawaba.com

Foreign ministers from the six Gulf Cooperation Council met in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, after which the alliance’s Secretary-General Abdul Latif Zayani read a statement indicating that agreed to label last weekend’s incident as terrorism.

Zayani himself a few days ago referred to the Saudi Embassy as a terrorist act, so this terminology isn’t entirely new. Still, it is significant in that the six GCC countries — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are now officially on the same page.

It also suggests that countries in the region aren’t acceding to requests from the United Nations, United States and other officials to tone down their rhetoric and refocus on other issues, like peacefully ending Syria’s civil war and dealing with ISIS.

Protesters stormed and set ablaze the embassy in Tehran starting last Saturday, hours after Saudi Arabia executed 47 people, including prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, on terrorism charges.

That attack spurred Saudi Arabia to sever official ties with Iran, its longtime regional rival. Several other countries — most of them led by and/or containing mostly Sunni Muslims, like Saudi Arabia, as opposed to Shiite-led Iran — joined in. In that respect, this spat continues the schism that happened 14 centuries ago when Sunnis and Shiites split over who should succeed the Prophet Mohammed as Islam’s leader.

Iran, though, has stood its ground — even banning pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina as well as Saudi imports. President Hassan Rouhani called the angry reaction to Nimr’s killing “only natural” and slammed Saudi Arabia for severing ties in response.

“Of course, the Saudi government, in order to cover up its crime of beheading a religious leader, has resorted to a strange measure and has severed its ties with the Islamic Republic,” Rouhani said, according to Iran’s state-run Press TV. “Undoubtedly, such moves will never hide that great crime.”

cnn.com

Germany’s BND intelligence agency is once again working with its US counterpart on Middle East surveillance. Collaboration had been suspended after it was revealed the US was spying on European officials and firms.

German media reported on Friday that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was, once again, being supplied with intelligence from Germany’s BND spy agency.

Several newspapers said joint Internet surveillance had restarted at the Bavaria-based Bad Aibling station, whose IT system is considered central to monitoring Middle East countries in crisis, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

The resumption of cooperation follows a more than eight-month hiatus, after revelations that the BND had helped the NSA spy on European officials and firms.

German intelligence teams have the technology to process large amounts of international satellite and Internet communications at the Bad Aibling site.

A deal was made several years ago between the two agencies to give the US access to the German IT system, in order to comb through the huge data streams for suspicious content.

To refine the results, the NSA provided certain search features, including email addresses, computer IP addresses and telephone numbers.

Strained US-German relations

But amid accusations that the NSA hadn’t stuck to the agreed search criteria, it was revealed that the database had been used to search for information on German and European politicians and firms.

Last May, the German government suspended its cooperation with the NSA and launched an investigation.

But while German media reported that the allegations have since been dismissed, a report by the government-appointed special investigator Kurt Graulich in November found that the US had repeatedly tried to use BND technology to spy on Europeans.

Several newspapers have speculated that the renewed cooperation between the BND and NSA may have also been prompted by the Paris terrorist attacks on November 13 and an alert about planned terror attacks in Hannover and Munich in recent weeks.

Following the Munich security alert, the result of a tipoff from a friendly intelligence service, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere called for closer cooperation with foreign security services.

dw.com

The Islamic State (IS) militants conducted multiple attacks on the Tishreen dam in Northern Syria to retake control of the area from Syrian Kurdish forces, but they were defeated by the Syrian Kurdish fighters.

According to the information obtained by BasNews, Syrian Kurdish security forces, backed by the international coalition airstrikes, repelled several IS attacks on the Tishreen dam, 70 kilometres to the south of Kobani, on Friday, January 8th.

IS multiple attacks were conducted through Yousif-Pasha, Pishlla, Saadina, Haji Hussein, Hamada and Hasan Aqa frontlines.

Local sources claimed that scores of IS jihadists were killed with several military vehicles destroyed.

Syrian Kurdish fighters liberated the dam from IS insurgents earlier in December 2015.

The Tishreen dam has a strategic importance as it connects Jarablus and Raqqa, and taking control of the area gives superiority to the forces.

basnews.com