Out of my four articles this week, I found the one on the Yazidi slaves the most interesting. The Yazidi group is a minority that recide in northern Iraq. In 2014, ISIS overran the Sinjar area, where many of the Yazidi group resided in. Overall, I am glad that the 36 of the survivors have been rescued and set free… Read more »
At least 95 Syrian opposition fighters and civilians have been killed during infighting in a rebel-held district in the suburbs of Damascus, according to a monitor. In the third day of clashes, the infighting between Jaish al-Islam group against al-Rahman Corps and the al-Qaeda-linked Levant Liberation Committee (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) has killed at least 95 people in Eastern Ghouta, the UK-based… Read more »
Fayez al-Sarraj, the head of Libya’s UN-backed government, has met renegade general Khalifa Haftar in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in a rare meeting between the key figures from two rival Libyan camps. The two men held face-to-face talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday “thanks to international and Arab mediation”, the LANA news agency said. There was no official statement after… Read more »
Kurdish forces are reported to have taken 90 percent of Tabqa city in Syria’s Raqqa province from ISIL amid clashes that have left an estimated 19 people dead. The claim was made by the official spokesperson for Ghadab al-Furat, a Kurdish group fighting under the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which launched a campaign in October 2016 to retake Raqqa, the… Read more »
A group of 36 Yazidi survivors has been rescued in Iraq after three years of “slavery” under ISIL’s rule in northern Iraq, the United Nations said on Sunday. The group of men, women, and children from the persecuted religious sect was freed by Iraqi forces fighting to retake Mosul from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, according to local media. The… Read more »
Out of my four articles this week the most interesting one was the Palestinian prisoners launch mass hunger strike. Overall, the article describes how in Israeli prisons, Palestinian prisoners are on a hunger strike in order to improve conditions and treatment in the prisoners. I knew that there were tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians but I didn’t think that… Read more »
Thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley face displacement as a deadline to evacuate their informal tent camps expires on Saturday. Camp residents within a seven-kilometre radius of the Rayak airbase were given five days to remove their homes following an eviction order delivered orally earlier this week by the army. The move, reportedly taken for “security” reasons, would… Read more »
Iraqi forces gained fresh ground in door-to-door fighting in the Old City of Mosul, a military spokesman said on Monday, as the U.S.-backed offensive to capture Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq entered its seventh month. A Reuters correspondent saw thick smoke billowing over the Old City, near the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, from where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr… Read more »
The death toll from a bomb blast on a crowded Syrian bus convoy outside Aleppo reached at least 112 people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Sunday. Syrian rescue workers the Civil Defence said that they had carted away at least 100 bodies from the site of Saturday’s blast, which hit buses carrying Shi’ite residents as… Read more »
Some 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel launched a mass hunger strike on Monday to press for basic rights and shed light on the difficult humanitarian conditions inside Israeli prisons, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies. The open-ended hunger strike, one of the largest in recent years, coincides with Palestinian Prisoners Day, annually commemorated on April 17…. Read more »