Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to launch an operation “in the near future” to remove the Kurdish forces from the areas of east Euphrates in northern Syria, like reported by basnews.com. 

“We are ready to destroy the terrorist structure east of the Euphrates. We have completed the preparations for this issue. In the near future, we will drive the terrorist organization into a corner through a large-scale and efficient operation,” Erdogan told members of his party. 

“One night, we will suddenly come,” he said.

Turkey views the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which is designated as a “terrorist organization” by Ankara. The PKK and Turkish government are in a decades-long armed conflict over the Kurdish question in the country.

Dozens of Houthi militia were killed and wounded in clashes with the Yemeni army in east of Hodeidah, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

More than 40 militias were killed and others wounded in violent clashes with Al-Qaeda brigades on the road between the capital Sanaa and Hodeidah, a statement released by the army’s media office said.

In Al-Jouf province, in northeastern Yemen, Houthi militia members were killed and wounded in artillery attacks in the western province.

In a statement on the Yemeni armed forces’ official website, “September 26,” a military official said that forces launched artillery attacks targeting the positions and gatherings of the Houthi militia.

At least 40 prisoners have escaped from a jail run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the last major rebel-held bastion of Idleb, local activists said according to syrianobserver.com.

About 40 detainees forced open the doors at the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham prison on Saturday and guards were unable to stop them. The jail housed rivals and ideology critics of the group formerly known as al-Nusra Front.

More than half of Idleb province is controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist alliance led by Syria’s former al-Qaeda affiliate, while Turkish-backed rebels hold much of the rest.

Three people were wounded in a suicide attack in Fallujah city in Anbar, a paramilitary official was quoted saying according to iraqinews.com.

Speaking to Almaalomah website, Col. Salah al-Eissawi, commander of mobilizations troops at Amiriyat al-Somoud region, south of Fallujah, said “a suicide attacker on a motorbike blew himself up before the arrival of police patrol. Three civilians were injured.”

Troops, according to Eissawi, “cordoned off the blast scene and transferred the injured to hospital for treatment.”

A total of 75 Iraqi civilians were killed, while 179 others were injured due to acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict in Iraq in September 2018, according to casualty figures by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

Baghdad came on top of the worst affected Governorate, with 101 civilian casualties (31 killed, 70 injured), followed by Anbar (15 killed and 37 injured).
In December, Iraq announced gaining control on all the territories that were captured by Islamic State, since 2014.

Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country. The group still has dormant cells, through which it carries out attacks, across Iraq like it used to do before 2014.

Iran reportedly transfers mid-range ballistic missiles, capable of reaching Israel, to Shiite group Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq, like reported by jns.org.

Iran is building factories to manufacture and upgrade missiles in Iraq, in addition to its efforts in Syria and Lebanon, Israeli intelligence has discovered.

According to reports, Iran has already shipped missiles to Shiite militias in Iraq and helped Iraq set up missile factories in its territory.

This latest development has the potential to bring Iraq onto the Iranian axis of countries that pose potential threats to Israel.

Last month, reports revealed that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had supplied the Iraqi Shiite militia Hashd al-Shaabi with mid-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel.

Earlier in October, reports revealed that the United States had decided to shut down its consulate in Basra, a key Shiite stronghold and the third-largest city in Iraq, after discovering a Revolutionary Guard plot to attack it.

The latest revelation comes after Fox News reported on Sunday that Iran has ‎stepped up its shipments of advanced weapons to ‎Hezbollah, its Lebanon-based proxy, and that some ‎shipments now include sophisticated GPS systems meant ‎to improve the accuracy of Hezbollah missiles.

According to the report, the shipment made its way ‎from Tehran to Damascus aboard a Qeshm Fars air cargo plane. From there, the plane made its way to ‎Beirut, before returning to Iran via Qatar.‎

On Sunday, several speakers at a Jerusalem Institute of Security Studies devoted to the Iranian-Israeli conflict warned that Iran was trying to threaten Israel on multiple fronts.

Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan informed participants that Hezbollah, heavily supported by Iran, currently has a stock of some 150,000 missiles.

“The commander of Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, wants to create another Hezbollah in Syria,” Erdan warned. “When [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas’ time is up, I wouldn’t be surprised if Iran tries to expand its influence to Judea and Samaria, too, as the Palestinian governance dwindles and they are in need of money and support.”

“At any minute, Iran can set off clashes that will expand to Syria and Lebanon, and we cannot rule out the possibility of [Iran] using Iraq as a base from which to fire missiles at Israel,” Erdan said.

Mossad Director Yossi Cohen said Monday at a meeting at the Finance Ministry that he had recently met an American official who had asked him what would happen if Iran were defeated.

“I told him, ‘If we beat Iran, I’ll be out of of work, jobless, but if Iran isn’t defeated, I’ll find myself homeless.’ I prefer the first option,” Cohen said.

Cohen stressed that “if we don’t push Iran out of the Middle East … we will find ourselves in a position of Iranian forces spreading throughout the Middle East, unchecked, even inside the Gaza Strip.”

“But of course, everything is affected by changes in the approach at a very high level since [U.S. President Donald] Trump took power, which I think is very good for Israel. There is a sense that there is a simpler, clearer distinction being made between good and evil,” the Mossad chief said.

2 Senior officials followed to Lebanese Hezbollah militant group were killed in Syria, according to Lebanese media, without indicating the place of their death, like reported by qasioun-news.com.

Media sources reported that the senior officials are Mohammed Zidan and Mohammed Saeid Saeid, both from Nabtya area southern Lebanon.

Mustafa Yazbek, religious supervisor at the Al-Murtada Educational Complex in the Lebanese town of Boudai, mourned during a sermon at the mosque of Sayeda Zeinab in the town of Boudai (Haji Tariq Ibrahim Haidar), who was killed by ISIS in rural Suweida, describing him as a commander, without mentioning the reasons for his death.

At least four people were killed and 15 wounded in a car bomb blast in the northern Iraqi town of Qayyara on Tuesday, police and medical sources said according to reuters.com.

A vehicle packed with explosives was parked near a restaurant and a crowded market area in Qayyara, south of the city of Mosul, police said. Health official said the death toll might rise as some of the wounded were in a critical condition.

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but Islamic State militants often carry out such attacks.

Iraq declared victory over Islamic State in December, dislodging the group from all territories it held after its self-proclaimed caliphate, which also composed part of Syria, collapsed earlier in 2017.

The group’s fighters have since waged a campaign of kidnapping, killing and bomb attacks targeting civilians and security forces.

An interior ministry spokesman said the blast was a result of a “terrorist attack by a car bomb”.

A Turkish-Russian agreement last month forestalled a potentially disastrous Syrian military attack on the country’s northwestern Idlib governorate, the Syrian opposition’s last major stronghold. Yet the agreement also required Turkey to “remove” the Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other hardliners from much of the northwest, a possible first step toward separating them from the rest of the opposition, like reported by warontherocks.com.

So far, results are reportedly mixed. Whether the group continues to comply, and how it resolves its own dual transnational-local identity, could be a matter of life or death for the northwest’s nearly three million residents.

A recent video release from Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, helps show how it has integrated into Syria’s opposition, and how it translates its ideological worldview into the language of Syria’s war. The Sept. 17 video features a roundtable discussion between three of the group’s top leaders and members of its advisory Shari’a Council as they expound on what the Syrian government calls “reconciliation” — the negotiated surrender of opposition-held areas. As they do so, they also engage in a seemingly unscripted discussion of politics, war, and religious law. And they repeatedly touch on language, and how the vocabulary of Syria’s war corresponds to their particular religious-jurisprudential lexicon.

For a group that has been designated a terrorist organization internationally, HTS’s integration into the Syrian rebellion is key to its survival. A group that is flush with its Syrian opposition surroundings is one that cannot be easily isolated and destroyed. HTS’s fusion of jihadist and Syrian rebel rhetoric, on display in its recent video, evidences the group’s duality. It is also part of how the group frustrates attempts to separate it from its Syrian context, by policing opposition discourse and deterring Syria’s other rebels from turning against it.

De-Marbling and Reconciliation

Turkey and Russia’s September deal is just the latest in a series of international agreements that have excluded Syria’s jihadists, and thus aimed to isolate them.

Since HTS first joined Syria’s civil war — originally as “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which later declared itself Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate — it has protected itself from foreign enemies by embedding in the more palatable parts of the Syrian opposition. The United States and the opposition’s other backers endeavored unsuccessfully to “de-marble” Syria’s opposition and separate the rebels they could comfortably support from the jihadists they feared. One such attempt in 2016 seems to have prompted Jabhat al-Nusra to begin shape-shifting. The group announced the first of several re-brandings and a split with al-Qaeda that was initially false but, since the group evolved into HTS in 2017, has almost certainly become real.

Moscow has repeatedly complained about Washington’s failure to “disassociate” HTS from the opposition. Now, as part of Russia’s September agreement with Turkey, reached in the Russian Black Sea resort Sochi, it has upped the pressure on Turkey to deliver where the United States could not. The Sochi agreement averted a military offensive on Idlib that clearly would have come at a terrible cost. But the agreement is not necessarily good for everyone. Its provisions, including the “removal” of “all radical terrorist groups” from a demilitarized buffer inside Idlib, seem designed to drive a wedge between hardliners like HTS and their non-jihadist comrades and neighbors.

HTS’s video is billed as the first episode of the series “The Dialogue,” titled “‘Reconciliations’ in the Balance of Shari’a (Islamic law)”. HTS leaders Mudhar al-Weis, Abdurrahim Attoun (“Abu Abdullah al-Shami”) and Yehya al-Farghali (“Abu al-Fateh al-Farghali,” an Egyptian) recorded the roundtable as Syria’s northwest was bracing for attack. The video was released, apparently coincidentally, as Moscow and Ankara announced the Sochi deal.

The “reconciliation” these three HTS officials discuss is one of the few successful ways the opposition has been “de-marbled,” albeit by the Syrian government, not the opposition’s friends. “Reconciliation” (musalaha) is Damascus’s euphemistic term for the negotiated surrender of formerly restive communities, their vertical “reconciliation” upwards with the Syrian state and system. Critically for HTS, “reconciliation” deals have typically involved the evacuation of jihadists and others deemed irreconcilable to rebel-held territory elsewhere, mostly Idlib. These bus convoys north have excised jihadists from their social base and helped turn Idlib into Syria’s most intense concentration of jihadists, as well as a haven for millions of vulnerable civilians.

Damascus’s version of “reconciliation” has always excluded HTS and other jihadists. The group has thus been on guard for “reconciliation” in Syria’s northwest, particularly after seeing rebels accede to these deals in Syria’s center and south earlier this year. HTS and other rebels have arrested local figures suspected of dealing with Damascus. The group sees the need to frustrate attempts by the Syrian government and Russia to broker local settlements that could turn Idlib’s residents against HTS and deputize them in a Syrian military advance.

“Call Things by Their Names”

“The Syrian arena and the Syrian jihad are a profound experience, a broad course,” says the video’s host in his introduction, “in which events have taken place that are historical, and that we have to consider at length.”

“Arena” (saha) here refers to a single battlefield in what jihadists consider a rolling, global war. But these HTS officials are focused on Syria, and on how to describe and understand it. All three are keen to emphasize that “reconciliation” is a rhetorical ploy. And they are themselves acutely attuned to the importance of language and discourse.

What Damascus’s “reconciliation” really means, says Abu al-Fateh Farghali, is in fact “betrayal.” Farghali refers to reconciliation along these lines as “this deformed entity, this dead fetus … this monstrosity.” He continues, “As God’s Prophet, peace be upon him, told us, ‘there will come people ‘who call wine by other than its name,’ in order to thus make it permissible.” His comrade Mudhar al-Weis, meanwhile, says the word is just a continuation of a “war of terminology,” which he calls “an old war on Islam and Muslims.” “Jihad” and “revolution” are branded as “terror” and “rebellion,” he says, while “betrayal” is called a “truce” or “reconciliation.” “Really, we need to call things by their names,” says Weis.

It is these HTS figures’ other linguistic points that give deeper insight into their thinking. The way Weis, for example, speaks at length about “munafiqoun” (hypocrites) shows the extent of his suspicion of much of the non-jihadist opposition around him:

Of course, these [international] political tracks led to many of these [rebel] commanders being mortgaged, many of these factions, so the soil became ready, really, for what happened in the end. A disease got in, one mentioned in the Quran, and among the most dangerous of diseases. In the introduction of Sourat al-Baqarah, there are five verses about the believers and two about the infidels, but tens of verses about the munafiqeen. There’s an entire Sourah called “al-Munafiqoun.” These munafiqoun remain within Muslim ranks, undercover, vacillating. When there’s weakness in Muslim ranks, these forms and types appear to play their destructive role. That’s why Almighty God, how did He describe them? He said, “They are the enemy, so beware of them. May God destroy them! How they are deluded (63:4).” That is, “When you see them, their forms please you, and when they speak, you listen to their words (63:4).” They say, “Raise the flag of your revolution,” but in the end, they raised the flag of the regime. They said, “Dara’a won’t fall,” or [the] Houran [plain], “and Moscow will fall instead.” But we’re surprised the next day that …”

Another participant jumps in: “[They’re] the first ones to jump into the regime’s embrace.”

Weis responds, “That’s why, in reality, they’re the enemy. We need to call these things by their names. They are munafiqoun. We need to label them as God Almighty did.”

“Let Moscow fall, Dara’a won’t,” was reportedly what a rebel commander in Syria’s southern Dara’a governorate defiantly told Russians in June 2018 negotiations. Only days later, he and other “Southern Front” rebels acceded to a negotiated surrender, under withering Syrian and Russian military pressure. The Southern Front’s factions had been favored recipients of foreign support, and had publicly distanced themselves from Jabhat al-Nusra accordingly. Weis seems nonplussed by the Southern Front’s abbreviated resistance.

His reference to “Raise the flag of your revolution” is even more revealing. The slogan began as a hashtag in March 2015, as Syrian opposition protesters embraced the opposition’s tricolor flag in an implicit challenge to jihadists and their black Islamic banners. The opposition flag remained a point of contention between the opposition’s so-called “revolutionary” and more hardline Islamist wings for years. Weis is apparently conflating those non-jihadist oppositionists who rallied around the revolutionary flag to reclaim symbolic leadership of Syria’s opposition with former opposition members who surrendered and “reconciled” with the Syrian government. His reference seemingly betrays a view that those who challenged jihadists are in fact a fifth column in waiting.

Weis had been one of the leaders of Jabhat al-Nusra’s eastern branch, in Syria’s Deir al-Zour governorate. Weis, himself from Deir al-Zour, had headed the Jabhat al-Nusra judicial-administrative body that helped manage the governorate. As the Islamic State closed in on eastern rebels in 2014, local Jabhat al-Nusra took the extraordinary eleventh-hour step of combining with other Deir al-Zour rebels to form the “Mujahideen Shura Council.” It was Weis who announced the move. In 2014, Weis and eastern Jabhat al-Nusra were integrated into Deir al-Zour’s opposition to a degree probably unparalleled by the group before or since — at least until the Islamic State scattered seized Deir al-Zour and scattered its rebels across the country.

Now, in an indication of how Weis and HTS’s view of Syria’s opposition has since darkened, Weis sees “munafiqoun” everywhere. His suspicion highlights one of the central contradictions of HTS’s relationship with the Syrian opposition around it: Even as they claim to lead it, they fundamentally do not trust it. They are keen not to be extricated from the surrounding opposition, yet they see internal enemies all around them.

Defying Categorization

These HTS leaders are preoccupied with classifying the Syrian opposition around them, according to their own ideological frame of reference. By dividing the opposition into categories like “hypocrites,” “apostates,” or the civilian “oppressed,” and by analogizing between Islamic texts and their own fluid, modern surroundings, they can translate Islamic jurisprudence into practical guidance. Yet they themselves defy easy categorization, as they blend local rebellion and jihadism in terms of their worldview, or even their biographies.

Abdurrahim Attoun returns to the theme of “munafiqoun” and “nifaq” (hypocrisy) in discussing how HTS officials categorize and sub-categorize opposition fighters and civilians. On rebel fighters, Attoun says those who cooperate with reconciliations must be fought in all instances. Any former rebels who actively join Syrian military ranks, moreover, are guilty of apostasy from Islam and must be killed “without honor.” As for “the rest of the Muslim public, what’s called in modern terminology ‘civilians,’” he distinguishes between those who are “mustad’afin” (weak, oppressed) and those who are not. The mustad’afin upon whom “reconciliations” are imposed are absolved of any responsibility, he says. Local civilian notables who facilitate “reconciliations,” on the other hand, are munafiqoun — the enemy. “Their name in religion is ‘heads of nifaq,’” Attoun says.

Attoun is one of HTS’s most prominent public-facing officials, and frequently its main spokesperson in place of HTS head “Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.” He sat at Jolani’s side as the latter announced the group’s ostensible break with al-Qaeda in 2016. He may be the HTS figure most conspicuously embroiled in HTS’s intra-jihadist controversies, getting into acrimonious public arguments with the Islamic State’s spokesman in 2014 and with al-Qaeda’s top leadership late last year.

Attoun is also a local. He is reportedly Idlibi, and, like Weis, a “graduate” of Syria’s notorious Seidnaya Prison. His brother “Abu al-Kheir” was among the first-tier leadership of mostly Syrian group Ahrar al-Sham. He is Syrian, personally, even as he is also HTS’s champion in a globe-spanning jihadist debate.

Farghali interrogates the definition of “mustad’af.”

The Egyptian Farghali, on the other hand, is obviously not a local. The video’s moderator, playing devil’s advocate, asks Farghali about those inclined to be lenient with local rebels who “reconcile.” “The local reality just imposes this on many people,” he poses rhetorically, and any deal is forced on members of “fasil al-balad” (the hometown rebel faction) who are bound up in local communal ties.

Farghali returns to Attoun’s definition of “mustad’af” to emphasize that jihadists’ sympathy has limits. “A mustad’af is an elderly man who can’t participate in jihad, a woman, a child,” says Farghali. “Not a man who’s capable of, what? Of fighting.” Someone who can go to war is mandated — as an individual, not a member of some local faction — “to fight on God’s path.” “As for someone mustad’af who goes out and fights alongside the regime, that’s not mustad’af,” he says. “And as for someone mustad’af who goes out and prevents the mujahideen from carrying out jihad, a lion with them and an ostrich with the regime, he’s not mustad’af. Islam doesn’t accept that, nor does reason, nor does religion or logic.”

Here Farghali relates the idea of a blameless “mustad’af” to, in the host’s words, “fasil al-balad,” itself a nod to the basically organic and local character of Syria’s insurgency. HTS and some other factions have a specific and defined ideological character — a commitment to establishing a particular vision of Islamic rule through violence, a struggle that, even as it may be waged in Syria, is borderless in conception and rejects the international order. Most of Syria’s rebels, on the other hand, are a sort of militarized expression of their local communities. To the extent they have a program, it seems to be “revolution” generally, and bringing down the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Yet as their homes and communities, to which they are inextricably linked, have fallen back under government control, many have laid down their arms or rejoined the Syrian military.

By one account, Farghali is a longtime jihadist who was jailed in Egypt’s similarly notorious Aqrab prison from 2002 to 2011. After arriving in Syria in 2012, he and several other Egyptians formed a hardline lobby inside Ahrar al-Sham. They eventually left Ahrar for HTS, becoming some of its most high-profile media personalities. Farghali — not only ideologically distinct from most local fighters, but a genuine alien, a non-Syrian — insists on holding Syrian rebels to the same uncompromising standard to which these HTS officials hold themselves. Yet that is a standard that is likely impossible for those who, even after years of war, are still fighting for their towns and families, and who haven’t devoted their lives to itinerant militancy as Farghali and his comrades have.

These jihadists’ local embeddedness makes it more difficult to isolate and eliminate them. Yet it also means they are surrounded by fighters who are vulnerable to communal pressures to surrender and “reconcile.”

“Frogs” and “Geckos”

Of course, these HTS figures’ jihadist pedigrees do not mean they are wholly distinct from the broader Syrian opposition milieu. Mudhar al-Weis’s references to opposition slogans show how he and others are in dialogue with the opposition around them. But the best example of how the three engage with opposition discourse is their joking riff on a novel piece of Syrian opposition slang: “frogs.”

Since the fall of Damascus’s rebel-held East Ghouta suburbs, the term “frog” (difda’) has become widespread in opposition circles, after an East Ghouta sheikh named Bassam Difda’ who rallied locals in his rebel-held town to aid the Syrian military’s advance. Now it is used to describe individuals within opposition communities who, when the opportunity presents itself, will “jump” to the government side.

Attoun laughs as he discusses ‘frogs.’

Attoun: “Just in this context, we can recall a term that spread lately — ‘frogs.’ (laughs) ‘Frogs,’ as a popular term, or a revolutionary term, there’s nothing wrong with it. As for a religious term, it’s according to the way we explained it. That is, there are frogs who jumped to join the regime, and there are frogs who reconciled with the regime … ”

Host: “So if someone says the ruling on someone is that he’s a ‘frog,’ that’s not enough.”

Attoun (laughing): “That’s not a religious ruling … ”

Weis: “On the subject of frogs: Really, we insult this creature, when we attribute to it these traitors. A frog is among the creatures that glorify God, and we’ve been discouraged from killing it, because it put out the fire on Abraham. As for those people: Really, they’re geckos.”

Host: “Right. Right.”

Farghali: “That’s a new term.”

Weis: “And the gecko … So we call things by their names, and in their right place.”

These HTS officials’ amused use of “frog” is a reminder that, while these veteran jihadists are invested in their own insular references and debates, they are also part of the opposition’s communities and culture, including its in-jokes and slang. Their rank-and-file soldiers — who grew up inside Syria’s rebellion, not international militancy — may be even more integrated into their surroundings. (On geckos: Weis is presumably alluding to the Prophet Muhammad calling geckos “vermin.”)

The video, then, emphasizes Syrian jihadists’ diglossia: They speak the language of jihadism and the language of revolution, and they understand how to translate back and forth.

Whether HTS is, at base, Syrian or not is a question with huge practical and political significance. The Syrian government characterizes its “terrorist” enemies as essentially foreign. They came through Turkey, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem has said, and they will leave through Turkey. Turkey, meanwhile, argues that the number of truly hopeless radicals is much smaller, and that sections of HTS are Syrian, pragmatic, and potentially salvageable. If they are considered Syrian, then arguably they need to be part of a final Syrian settlement and a reconstituted Syrian society. If they are aliens, as Damascus insists, the solution may be expulsion or death.

For its part, HTS insists it will not go down without a fight. In the video — again, recorded before the Sochi deal — its leaders say they absolutely refuse to lay down arms. They are prepared to resist, they say, and Idlib’s people are with them. In closing, Weis tells his “mujahideen brothers” they are at “a historic, decisive moment.” “The Islamic nation expects much from you, so be up to that responsibility and that mission laid on your shoulders,” he says. “As for our [Syrian] people, we say to you, rely on God, and hold fast to him. Trust God Almighty, then trust in your mujahideen brothers and sons.’” In an Oct. 14 statement, HTS tacitly endorsed the Sochi agreement’s terms. Yet it also reiterated it would never renounce jihad or disarm.

Now, as Turkey endeavors to fully implement the Sochi agreement and save Syria’s northwest from a catastrophic military showdown, HTS’s dual nature is part of why Turkey may have a difficult time. HTS’s integral relationship with Syria’s opposition could make it impossible to isolate the jihadists — or, conversely, it could give the Turks the opening they need to engage and demobilize parts of the group.

Whether HTS’s own intertwined identities allow it to be untangled from the opposition may be what decides Idlib’s future.

Several Iraqi intelligence reports claimed that Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi issued an order to kill hundreds of his followers, including leading figures, in Iraq and Syria over their disloyalty to the group, like reported by iraqinews.com.

The reports came at a critical time as the extremist group lost about 90% of the territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria in 2014, when it declared its “caliphate”.

Speaking to the Iraqi Shafaq News website, intelligence sources said that the world’s most wanted man “issued an order to kill 320 of his followers for their betrayal of the so-called Islamic State and their recklessness, a matter which inflicted heavy losses on the group in both Iraq and Syria.”

According to the sources, there are high-profile commanders on Baghdadi’s list, including Abu al-Baraa al-Ansari, Sief al-Din al-Iraqi, Abu Otham al-Tal Afari, Abu Iman al-Mowahed and Marawan Hadid al-Suri.

After hearing the news, a large number of IS militants escaped to unknown locations in fear of their lives with some reports expecting Baghdadi to issue more lists in the near future.

Baghdadi released a new 54-minute audio message last August, in which he urged followers to continue fighting the group’s enemies everywhere.

In his recording titled “Give glad tidings to the patient”, Baghdadi called on his followers to burn their enemies everywhere and target “media centres of the infidels”.

Baghdadi emerged as leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the groups that later became Islamic State, in 2010. In October 2011, the US officially designated al-Baghdadi as a terrorist. It has offered a reward of up to $25m (£19.6m) for information leading to his capture or death.

A bomb blast rocked central Kirkuk and left several people killed or injured. 

BasNews has learned that the explosive device was attached to a vehicle and went off on a street near the local administration of Kirkuk. 

It has reportedly killed two people and wounded four others. 

No groups or organizations have yet claimed responsibility for the attack, however, the Islamic State (IS) is suspected for being behind the terrorist attack. 

The extremist group, despite being announced as defeated in Iraq, maintains presence in some areas in the north and west of the country. 

The security situation remains dire in Kirkuk under the control of the Iraqi army and Iranian-backed militias of Hashd al-Shaabi. They pushed the Peshmerga forces out of Kirkuk in October 2017 following the political disputes between Erbil and Baghdad over Kurdistan’s referendum on independence.