The town in northern Mozambique that fighters linked to the ISIL (ISIS) group attacked late last month is now secure after the military killed a significant number of fighters and cleared one final area, an army spokesman and a provincial official said.
Commander Chongo Vidigal, leader of military operations to regain control of Palma, told state television TVM on Monday the area was now “safe”, although he stopped short of declaring that the army had regained complete control.
“The airfield area was the only one we needed to clear and we did that this morning. It’s completely safe,” Vidigal said.
The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged an American couple for supporting a “terror group” after trying to board a Yemen-bound ship to join ISIL (ISIS).
James Bradley, 20, of New York, and Arwa Muthana, 29, from Alabama were stopped on Wednesday as they stepped onto the gangplank of a cargo ship in Newark, New Jersey.
The DoJ said Bradley had expressed “violent extremist views” since at least 2019, and was in contact with an undercover agent of a law enforcement agency last year, he repeatedly said, he believed in the mission of the armed group.
He also told the undercover agent he was willing to carry out an attack on a US target, including possibly the US Military Academy at West Point.
Rania Najim Abed is terrified that ISIL (ISIS) might return to Tel Eskof, her hometown in northern Iraq, 15km (9 miles) from the armed group’s former stronghold of Mosul.
In 2014, Abed, 23, and her Christian family fled the Nineveh plains for Kirkuk to escape ISIL. The group had massacred minorities and established the so-called Islamic caliphate that straddled Iraq and Syria and was about the size of Britain.
Then, in 2016, ISIL attacked Kirkuk. “I was in the medical college in Kirkuk,” she said. “I was so scared that they might abduct me as they had done with so many other girls. Thankfully the Kurdish forces protected us.”
The failure of the last round of United Nations-led talks between the Syrian regime and the opposition in Geneva last month has left diplomats and analysts pondering how to redirect diplomatic efforts in the face of Damascus’s staunch refusal to engage in any negotiated process.
The inability of the two sides to achieve any meaningful developments in the fifth meeting of the constitutional talks pushed the UN special envoy Geir Pedersen to suspend the negotiations indefinitely.
The Norwegian diplomat implicitly put the blame on representatives of the Syrian government for rejecting any proposal put before them.
After 15 months and five meetings since its inception, the committee has not yet agreed on basic procedural matters and does not have a plan forward. The discussion of substantial constitutional points and the beginning of a drafting process thus cannot commence.