Syrian President Bashar Assad said that the allegations of torture and mass hangings in one of his military prisons were the product of a “fake news era”. Assad claims that human rights group, Amnesty International, had fabricated evidence to discredit his government.
A Russian airstrike accidentally killed three Turkish soldiers and wounded 11 others during an operation against the Islamic State in northern Syria on Thursday morning, Turkey's military said in a statement and Moscow confirmed.The head of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, said the warplanes were targeting Islamic State sites in the al-Bab area.
Via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Flemish Father Daniël Maes (78) lives in Syria in the sixth-century-old Mar Yakub monastery in the city of Qara, 90 kilometers north of the capital Damascus. Father Daniel has been a witness to the “civil war” and according to him, Western reports on the conflict in Syria are very misleading. In short: “the Americans and their allies want to completely ruin the country.”
Submitted by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A 20-year-old British chef from West Sussex, England, turned ISIS fighter, fighting alongside the Kurdish YPG in Syria, took his own life to avoid capture by the Islamic State. Ryan Lock died during an offensive by anti-ISIS fighters to liberate a village near the ISIS capital Raqqa in northern Syria. During the battle, the young Brit was surrounded by ISIS militants and apparently “turned the gun on himself” and committed suicide to avoid falling captive, in what is described as an act of “outstanding bravery in the face of a barbaric enemy,” by his Kurdish comrades.