War

As the noose continues to tighten against the Islamic State, now that a military campaign has been launched against its capital Raqqa, ISIS has reportedly taken its gruesome acts to new highs. Following reports that ISIS is now capitalizing on the sex trade by selling sex slaves on FaceBook to refill its rapidly dwindling coffers, the Kurdish ARA News agency reports that ISIS publicly executed 19 Kurdish women of the Yezidi minority, who were burned alive in iron cages.

British special forces are involved in frontline operations in Syria. According to the Times, elite UK soldiers had crossed into southern Syria to support the New Syrian Army (NSA) rebel group fighting ISIS close to the border with Jordan. RT reports: The New Syrian Army (NSA), comprised largely of defectors from the Syrian special forces, has been picked up for retraining by the Americans and the British. It now finds itself holed up in the al-Tanf village, in the southeast.

Syria has accused four countries of double standards for refusing to label Ahrar ash-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam as terrorist organisations while Aleppo comes under shelling from rebel groups. A letter sent to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by the Syrian Foreign Ministry accuses US, France, Britain and Ukraine of helping terrorist groups in Syria.

A notorious night raid by US special forces in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of seven civilians, including two pregnant woman, is the subject of a cover up, according to Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist on US national security policy. An internal investigation by the Defense Department resulted in no disciplinary action for any soldier involved. According to eyewitnesses US soldiers killed two pregnant women at the raid near Gardez, Afghanistan and then removed the bullets from the corpses.

Starting about two weeks ago, a new campaign was launched to put the substantially weakened Islamic State on the defensive: in the south, Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), Popular Mobilization, and Sunni tribal fighters have closed in on a multiple-axis assault to encircle the city of Fallujah. As we reported previously, Iraqi forces, together with Kurdish Peshmerga forces, Shi'ite Muslim militias, and Sunni tribal fighters, backed by U.S.-led coalition forces, have pushed on toward Fallujah after recapturing several key cities in the past year, including Ramadi, Tikrit, and Baiji.