U.S. launches fresh strikes on Khorasan group in Syria

The fierce battle between the US and the terrorist groups in the Middle East continues Reuters reports a US lauched a fresh air strike on Khorasan group in Syria, read the full report bellow from Reuters

The United States said it conducted air strikes on Wednesday night against the
so-called Khorasan group, an al Qaeda-linked militant faction based in Syria, and said the group was plotting to attack Europe or the United States.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a target of the strike was David Drugeon, a French- born militant and convert to Islam who some U.S. officials say is a bomb maker for the group.

General Lloyd Austin, the head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, said Drugeon was one of the group’s

“leadership elements and one of the most dangerous elements in that organization.”

He declined to say whether Drugeon was killed, telling a forum in Washington the military was assessing the results of the strikes. Asked whether Drugeon was a
target, he said, “Any time we can take their leadership out is a good thing.”

The officials said they believed a leader of the Khorasan group, Muhsin al-Fadhli, who had been targeted in U.S. strikes in Syria in September, was still alive. It was unclear whether al-Fadhli was a target of
the latest U.S. raid.

In a statement on Thursday, U.S. Central Command said the latest strikes were carried out by the U.S. military against five Khorasan targets near Sarmada in Idlib province, close to the Turkish border and west of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

“We took decisive action to protect our interests and remove their capability to act,” it said, adding that al Qaeda militants “are taking advantage of the Syrian conflict to advance attacks against Western interests.”

“SKILLED AL QAEDA VETERANS”
U.S. officials have described Khorasan as a grouping of skilled al Qaeda veterans who moved to Syria from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and set up operations under the protection of Nusra Front, the main Syrian al Qaeda affiliate.

From strongholds in northwestern Syria, Nusra Front has fought militants in the Islamic State, another spin- off of al Qaeda which holds territory in Syria and Iraq and is considered a major threat in the area by Washington.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, said a series of U.S. air strikes targeted Nusra Front in Idlib province, where last week the group pushed back Western-backed Syrian rebels.

The Observatory said at least six Nusra
militants had been killed. There was no independent confirmation that this was
an account of the same attack described by CENTCOM.

The U.S. military made clear the attacks were specifically aimed at Khorasan and not more broadly at Nusra Front. “There were no strikes conducted against al Nusra,” Austin said.

U.S. officials have described Khorasan as a particularly menacing faction of militants who have been using their sanctuary in Syria to try to organize
plots to attack U.S. and other Western targets, possibly including airliners.

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Iraqi Lawmakers approve sending fighters to aid Syrian town

As the Syrian saga intensifies Iranian government approves sending fighters to aid Syrian town of Kobani, read the full report from Reuters bellow…

Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers approved a plan on Wednesday to send fighters to the Syrian town of Kobani to relieve fellow Kurds under attack by Islamic State militants, marking the semi-autonomous region’s first military foray into Syria’s war. Kobani lies on the border with Turkey and Islamic State fighters keen to consolidate territorial gains in northern Syria have pressed an offensive against the town even as U.S.-led forces started bombing their positions.

The battle has also taken on major political significance for Turkey, where the siege has sparked protests among Kurds and threatened a peace process with Turkey’s own Kurdish insurgents, who are angry at the government for failing to aid Kobani.

Under pressure to go beyond humanitarian assistance for those fleeing the violence, Turkey said on Monday it would allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as “peshmerga” or those who confront death, to cross its territory to reach Kobani.

Iraqi Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Haji Omer said the Kurdish parliament approved the plan in a session on Wednesday. “Today in parliament we agreed to send the peshmerga forces to Kobani as soon as possible,” he said.

Iraqi Kurdish official Hemin Hawrami said on Twitter the peshmerga would be equipped with heavy weapons. This would help the besieged fighters, who
say they need armor-piercing weapons to fight the better-armed Islamic State militants.

Gunshots rang out throughout the day and an air strike occurred near the center of the Kobani in the early afternoon, while five Kurdish fighters were buried in the Turkish border town of Suruc to defiant speeches and Kurdish songs.

Idris Nassan, a local Kurdish official, said clashes had taken place in the east, southeast and southwest of Kobani.
“They (IS) are always bringing more people and weapons from the surrounding areas and also from
(the Syrian province of) Raqqa and Iraq. It’s obvious every time they attack,” he said.

One resident who visited Kobani and asked not to be named said Islamic State were still in control of the town center. The pro-Islamic State Amaq News Agency released a video of fighters speaking from what they said was the center of Kobani, claiming that their morale is high and that they are advancing despite coalition air strikes.

SUSPICIONS
Two senior Kurdish officials said late on Tuesday that preparations were under way to send a small number of peshmerga to Kobani, known in Arabic as Ayn al- Arab, but it would take several days until the necessary arrangements were in place.

The United States said on Sunday it had air dropped medical supplies and weapons to Kurds in Kobani provided by Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government
(KRG) – a move Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan criticized on Wednesday because Islamic State fighters managed to seize some of the weapons.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday two bundles of military supplies for Kurdish fighters in Kobani went astray during an air drop earlier this week, with one destroyed later by an air strike and the other taken by Islamic State militants.

Twenty-six other bundles of supplies were dropped to Kurds in the city and reached their targets.

“There is always going to be some margin of error in these types of operations. In fact, we routinely overload these aircraft because we know some
bundles may go astray,” said U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.

“One bundle worth of equipment is not enough equipment to give the enemy any type of advantage at all.”

Speaking at a news conference, Erdogan said he proposed the move to facilitate the passage of peshmerga fighters to Kobani in a call with U.S. President Barack Obama at the weekend.

“At first they didn’t say yes to peshmergas, but then they gave a partial yes and we said we would help,” he said. Erdogan added that talks were continuing among officials on the details of the peshmergas’ transit. One Turkish journalist close to the government said on Wednesday 500 of them were expected to cross into Kobani this weekend.

Although Turkey’s relations with the KRG are close, officials view those defending Kobani with suspicion because of their links with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), outlawed in Turkey as a terrorist group after fighting a three-decades long insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in southeast Turkey.

The government wants a definitive peace with the PKK, but that process has faltered in recent months, particularly as Turkey’s failure to intervene militarily in
Kobani has provoked fury among many of the country’s 15 million Kurds. Ankara has also criticized the PYD for not joining the wider struggle to topple Syrian President Bashar al- Assad, something the Turkish authorities have been demanding for years.

The U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State, which has seized swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria, continued on Wednesday as air strikes killed around 25 of the militants near the northern Iraqi city of Baiji, residents said.
U.S. Central Command said it targeted the militant group, carrying out 12 strikes near Iraq’s Mosul Dam and another six close to Kobani.

Iraqi army tanks and armored vehicles also fought off an advance by Islamic State militants on the town of Amiriya Fallujah, west of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, army sources said. Coalition air strikes killed around 25 Islamic State fighters on Wednesday near the northern Iraqi city of Baiji, residents told Reuters.

They said a series of bombings beginning in the early hours hit the town of al-Siniya, west of Baiji, a strategic city adjacent to the country’s largest refinery, part of a multinational effort to check the group’s progress. Despite the offensive, a wave of explosions around
Baghdad continued. A pair of parked car bombs targeted the nation’s capital Wednesday night, killing 21 people, police and medical officials said.

Syria’s Information Minister, Omran Zoabi, meanwhile said the country’s air force had destroyed two fighter jets reportedly operated by Islamic State militants in the north of the country.

Source: Reuters

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WoW ! U.S. Kurds strike at Islamic State in Syria

U.S. warplanes attacked Islamic State targets in Syria overnight, in raids that a group monitoring the war said killed civilians as well as jihadist fighters.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes hit mills and grain storage areas in the northern Syrian town of Manbij, in an area controlled by Islamic State, killing at least two civilian workers.

Strikes on a building on a road leading out of the town also killed a number of Islamic State fighters, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the observatory, which gathers information from sources in Syria.

The U.S. military said on Monday an American air strike targeted Islamic State vehicles in a staging area adjacent to a grain storage facility near Manbij, but it had no evidence so far of civilian casualties.

While raids in Iraq and Syria have taken a toll on Islamic State equipment and fighters on the ground, there is no sign the tide is turning against the group,
which controls large areas of both countries.

A U.S. Air Force general said Islamic State militants were changing their tactics in the face of American air strikes in Iraq and Syria, abandoning large formations such as convoys that had been easier for the U.S. military to target.

“They are a smart adversary, and they have seen that that’s not effective for their survival, so they are now dispersing themselves,” Air Force Major General
Jeffrey Harrigian said at a Pentagon news conference.

That “requires us to work harder to locate them, and then develop the situation to appropriately target them”, he said. In a statement to the United Nations that appeared to give approval of U.S. and Arab air strikes in Syria against the militants, Syria’s foreign minister said his country backed the campaign against Islamic State.

Syria “stands with any international effort aimed at fighting and combating terrorism”, said Walid al- Moualem, whose government has long been an
international pariah because of what critics say is its brutality in a civil war that has killed 190,000 people.

U.S. congressional aides said Congress might not vote until next year on an authorization for President Barack Obama’s air strikes against Islamic State
militants in Iraq and Syria, despite some lawmakers’ insistence that approval is already overdue.

Obama has said he does not need approval for the air strikes, despite the constitutional requirement that Congress authorize military action. The U.S.-led strikes have so far failed to halt an
advance by Islamic State fighters in northern Syria on Kobani, a Kurdish town on the border with Turkey where fighting over the past week caused the fastest
refugee flight of Syria’s three-year-old war.

At least 15 Turkish tanks could be seen at the frontier, some with guns pointed towards Syrian territory. More tanks and armored vehicles moved towards the
border after shells landed in Turkey on Sunday and Monday.

ARAB ALLIES

The United States has been bombing Islamic State and other groups in Syria for a week with the help of Arab allies, and hitting targets in neighboring Iraq since last month. European countries have joined the campaign in Iraq but not in Syria.

Islamic State, a Sunni militant group that broke off from al Qaeda, alarmed the West and the Middle East by sweeping through northern Iraq in June, slaughtering prisoners and ordering Shi’ites and non-Muslims to convert or die.

It is battling Shi’ite-backed governments in both Iraq and Syria, as well as other Sunni groups in Syria and Kurdish groups in both countries, part of complex multi-sided civil wars in which nearly every country in the Middle East has a stake.
The head of Syria’s al Qaeda branch, the Nusra Front, a Sunni militant group that is a rival of Islamic State and has also been targeted by U.S. strikes, said Islamists would carry out attacks on the West in retaliation for the campaign.

Obama has worked since August to build an international coalition to combat the fighters, describing them last week in an address to the United Nations as a “network of death”. His comments in an interview broadcast on Sunday that U.S. intelligence had underestimated Islamic State offered an explanation for why Washington appeared to have been taken by surprise when the fighters surged through northern Iraq in June.

The militants had gone underground when U.S. forces quashed al Qaeda in Iraq with the aid of local tribes during the U.S. war there that ended in 2011, Obama told CBS’s “60 Minutes”.

“But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” he said.

Obama’s remarks came under fire on Monday from several U.S. lawmakers and members of the intelligence community.
“This was not an intelligence community failure but a failure by policy makers to confront the threat,” said Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the House of Representative Intelligence Committee.

BATTLE ON BORDER

Gunfire rang out from across the border, and a plume of smoke rose over Kobani as periodic shelling by Islamic State fighters took place. Kurds watching the
fighting from the Turkish side of the border said the Syrian Kurdish group, the YPG, was putting up a strong defense.

“Many Islamic State fighters have been killed. They’re not taking the bodies with them,” said Ayhan, a Turkish Kurd who had spoken by phone with one of his friends fighting with the YPG. He said Kurdish forces had picked up eight Islamic State bodies.

At Mursitpinar, the nearby border crossing, scores of young men were returning to Syria saying they would
join the fight. More refugees were fleeing in the opposite direction.

“Because of the bombs, everyone is running away. We heard people have been killed,” said Xelil, a 39-year- old engineer who fled Kobani on Monday. “The YPG have got light weapons, but Islamic State has big guns and tanks.”

A local official in Kobani said Islamic State continued to besiege the town from the east, west and south and that the militants were 10 km (6 miles) from the outskirts.
“From the morning there has been shelling into Kobani and … maybe about 20 rockets,” Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister in a local Kurdish administration said by phone. He said the rockets had
killed at least three people in the town.
Turkey has not permitted its own Kurds to cross to join the battle: “If they’ve got Syrian identity or passports, they can go.
But only Syrians, not Turks,” said one Turkish official at the border where security has been tightened. A NATO member with the most powerful army in the area, Turkey has so far kept out of the U.S.-led coalition, angering many of its own Kurds who say the policy has abandoned their cousins in Syria to the
wrath of Islamic State fighters.

Source : Reuters

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WoW ! U.S., Arab partners launch first strikes in Syria

It is reported that the United States and several Gulf Arab allies have launched air and missile strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria, U.S. officials said, opening a new, far more complicated front in the battle against the militants.

“I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against (Islamic State) terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter,
bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles,” Rear Admiral John Kirby, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement on Monday.

“Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time.”

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Bahrain were involved although their
exact roles in the military action were unclear. Qatar played a supporting role in the air strikes, the official said.

Another official said at least one U.S. ship had launched the surface-to-surface Tomahawk missiles. Armed U.S. drones were also used in the attacks. The United States has been building a coalition to combat Islamic State, an extremist Sunni Muslim force that has seized large expanses of territory in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a caliphate erasing borders in the heart of the Middle East.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to New York at the weekend, ahead of the start of United Nations General Assembly meetings, for talks with counterparts from Arab and European allies to discuss U.S. plans to defeat the Islamic State and hear
their views on how they might participate.

On Monday, he met Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al- Faisal and British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond,
and participated in a meeting of more than a dozen countries, including Arab Gulf States, on the conflict in Libya.

ARAB ALLIES
A senior administration official said U.S. plans “to expand our efforts to defeat (Islamic State) were discussed without specifics” during meetings but declined to elaborate. The addition of Arab allies was seen as crucial for the credibility of the American-led campaign. U.S. allies in
the Middle East are skeptical of how far Washington will commit to a conflict in which nearly every country in the region has a stake, set against the backdrop of
Islam’s 1,300-year-old rift between Sunnis and Shi’ites.

Several Arab states have powerful air forces, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has also already agreed to host U.S. training of Syrian opposition fighters. But many Gulf Arab states have been reluctant to be seen aggressively joining the U.S. campaign, fearing in some cases reprisals by extremists or forces loyal to
the Syrian government.

The strikes took place hours before Obama goes to New York for the U.N. General Assembly where he will try to rally more nations behind his drive to
aggressively take on Islamic State. Obama had shied away from getting involved in Syria’s civil war a year ago, seeing no positive outcome for the United States, but the rise of Islamic State and the beheading of two American captives forced him to change course.

General Lloyd Austin, commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command, made the decision to conduct the strikes under authorization granted to him by Obama, Kirby said.

“We will provide more details later as operationally appropriate,” Kirby said.

Source: Reuters

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WoW ! Three million refugees have fled Syria, says UN

More than three million Syrians have fled the civil war ravaging their country to become refugees – a million of them in the past year alone, the UN said on Friday.

“Syria’s intensifying refugee crisis will
today [Friday] surpass a record three million people,”

the UN’s refugee agency said in a statement, adding that the number did not include hundreds of thousands of others who had fled without registering as refugees.

Less than a year ago, the number of registered Syrian refugees stood at two million, the UNHCR said, pointing to
reports of “increasingly horrifying conditions inside the country” to explain the surge. It described “cities where populations are surrounded, people
are going hungry and civilians are being targeted or indiscriminately killed”.

The increasingly fragmented conflict raging in Syria has claimed more than 191,000 lives since erupting in March
2011. In addition to the refugees, the violence has also displaced 6.5 million people within the country, meaning that nearly 50% of all Syrians have been forced to flee their homes, the UNHCR said.

Over half of all those who have been uprooted are children, it said. Most of the Syrian refugees have found their way to neighbouring countries, with Lebanon hosting 1.14 million, Jordan 608,000 and Turkey 815,000. The strain on the host countries’ economies, infrastructures and resources is enormous, UNHCR stressed, adding that
nearly 40% of the refugees were living in sub-standard conditions.

The agency said its work to help the Syrian refugees now marked the largest operation in its 64-year-history.

“The Syrian crisis has become the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era, yet the world is failing to meet the
needs of refugees and the countries hosting them,” the UN refugee chief, Antonio Guterres, said in the statement.

“The response to the Syrian crisis has been generous, but the bitter truth is that it falls far short of what’s needed,” he added. Donors have given more than $4.1bn to help those affected by the conflict, but the UNHCR said another $2bn was needed by the end of this year alone to meet the urgent needs of the
refugees.

David Miliband, former British foreign secretary and the current head of the International Rescue Committee, was quick to react to the new refugee tally.

“The three million refugees from the Syria conflict represent three million indictments of government brutality, opposition violence and international failure,” he said in a statement.

“This appalling milestone needs to generate action as well as anger,” he added, also calling for “greatly increased efforts”

to reduce the suffering of civilians left inside Syria. The UNHCR, meanwhile, warned that “increasing numbers of
families are arriving [in neighbouring countries] in a shocking state, exhausted, scared and with their saving
depleted”.

“Most have been on the run for a year or more, fleeing from village to village before taking the final decision to leave,” it added, pointing out that for most of the one in eight Syrians who have become refugees, crossing the border was a last resort.

More than half of those arriving in Lebanon had fled at least once before crossing the border, while one in 10 had fled more than three times, the UNHCR said, adding that one woman claimed to have moved 20 times before crossing into Lebanon.

There are worrying signs that the journey out of Syria is becoming more difficult, the agency said. Many people are being forced to pay bribes at a growing number of armed checkpoints along the borders, and those crossing the desert into eastern Jordan are being forced to pay smugglers hefty sums to take them to safety, it said.

The agency also voiced deep concern for several hundred Syrians trapped inside the remote al-Obaidi refugee camp in
Iraq after UN agencies and other groups were forced to abandon their offices and warehouses as the region became overrun by Islamic State jihadis.

“National partners are continuing to provide supplies and maintenance, but the situation is volatile,” it said.

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WoW ! Twin sisters who were set to train as doctors, now in Syria ‘training to be killers’

16 year olds Salma (centre left) and Zahra Halane (centre right), who were among the top 20 students at their girls’ school in Manchester, left their parents’
home in the middle of the night and caught a flight to Turkey, before crossing the border.

Police said the pair are thought to have followed their elder brother, who ditched his own ‘excellent’ academic career to
join the ISIS terror group around a year ago. Friends said the twins had appeared to be typical teenagers, pouting for selfies & shopping at Primark – but they
are now feared to be training for battle. Pictured left are visitors arriving at the family’s home.

Read the detailed story…

Twin schoolgirls who followed their jihadi brother to Syria were hard-working students who hoped to train as doctors. Sixteen-year-olds Salma and Zahra Halane, who last summer achieved 28 GCSEs between them, left their parents’ home in the middle of the night and caught a flight to Turkey, before crossing the border. Police said the pair are thought to have followed their elder brother, who ditched his own ‘excellent’ academic career to join the ISIS terror group around a year ago.

Friends said the twins had appeared to be typical teenagers, pouting for selfies and shopping at Primark – but they are now feared to be training for battle. Last night a rebel fighter boasted that he was teaching girls as young as 16 how to fight. Yilmaz, a Dutch national who has been in Syria for two years, told Sky News: ‘It’s extremely easy to get here. People go on holiday … they end up in Syria.’

The twins’ parents raised the alarm last month, after finding the girls’ beds empty and their passports and clothes missing. A former neighbour said the couple had been ‘quite strict’, and did not allow the girls to ‘mix with other children on the street’. Others recalled that the twins wore headscarves when they were as young as nine. But Rhea Headlam, who sat next to Zahra in primary school, said they were ‘just normal teenage girls’.
‘
I’m really shocked – I used to bump into them at Primark,’ she added. ‘They were both really clever.’ Last summer Salma achieved 13 GCSEs – 11 of them at grades A* to C – while Zahra passed 15, of which 12 were A*-C. The results put them in the top 10 per cent of their year group at Whalley Range High School for Girls in Manchester.

They went on to study at Connell Sixth Form College, where fellow students said they hoped to follow in the footsteps of their elder sister Hafsa, 25, who is at medical school in Denmark after graduating from Manchester University.

‘The twins both have aspirations to become doctors – that is their ambition,’ said one. Another claimed it was ‘typical’ of the girls to head to Syria ‘after they had finished term’, adding: ‘They wouldn’t want to mess up their education.

‘I’m shocked they have gone. They didn’t seem to be radical or extremist in their views.’

It emerged yesterday that the girls’ devoutly Muslim Somali refugee parents and their 11 children had been moved from an estate made famous by the TV series Shameless to an upmarket suburb, after telling the council they needed more bedrooms.

They were given a six-bedroom end-terrace despite the protests of the existing tenant. Yesterday the large back and front gardens were strewn with discarded household items and children’s plastic toys.

The house’s previous resident – a 40-year-old Army heroine who served in Bosnia – said last night she had been booted out of the house by Manchester City Council so the twins and their family could move in. Former lance corporal Dawn Benjamin told The Sun she had thought the house -her childhood home -would be ‘going to a good family’.

She added: ‘I lost my life, memories, everything I’d grown up with, to house jihadi wannabes’. Ms Benjamin and her young son had to move out after they were served with a court order. The council confirmed the house had been needed for a larger family.

Neighbours said the twins’ parents were keen to share elements of Somalian culture with them, taking round dishes of traditional delicacies for them to try. The twins’ father Ibrahim is understood to teach at a nearby mosque, where leaders this week issued a statement repudiating extremism and opposing violence of all kinds.

Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadan Foundation, said the family were moderate Muslims who know all about the dangers of war-torn countries. ‘They were desperately unhappy to discover [their son] had gone to Syria, and they thought they were keeping a watchful eye on their other children. Then this happens,’ he said.

Sources believe Salma and Zahra were inspired by their brother’s transformation into a jihadi fighter, and became radicalised themselves while viewing extremist Islamist material online. According to police sources, their brother also travelled to the family’s native Somalia, where he may have linked up with another Islamist terror group al-Shabab.

A friend told The Sun the brother was known for his ability to recite long passages of the Koran. Officers are investigating how the girls funded their own trip, over fears they have been bankrolled by jihadi fighters who want them as their wives.

Source: UK Daily Mail

WoW ! U.S. increases security at overseas airports amid bomb concerns

The United States said on Wednesday it would increase security at overseas airports with nonstop flights to the country, and U.S. officials cited concerns al Qaeda operatives in Syria and Yemen were developing bombs that could be smuggled onto planes. The new security measures would be required at airports in Europe, Africa and the Middle East that have direct flights, the U.S. officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The Department of Homeland Security said “enhanced security measures” would be implemented in the next few days at “certain overseas airports with direct flights into the United States.” It did not specify which airports or what countries would be affected, nor did it say what triggered the extra precautions.

“We are sharing recent and relevant information with our foreign allies and are consulting the aviation industry,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. Johnson said he directed the Transportation Security Administration to implement the measures in the coming days. The move comes during the summer travel season and days before the July 4 holiday.

A U.S. official told Reuters some of the new measures would involve additional inspections of passengers’ shoes and property. The official said Washington had legal authority to enforce new security requirements on foreign governments or airports because the flights go directly to the United States.

Asked about the enhanced security steps in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday night, Johnson said: “We continually evaluate the world situation and we not infrequently make changes to aviation security. We either step it up or we feel sometimes we’re in a position to dial it back.

“So this is something that happens periodically and people should not overreact to it or overspeculate about what’s going on,” he said.

Adding there is “a terrorist threat to this country that remains,” Johnson said: “We continually evaluate the world situation and if we think that there are improvements that we can and should make without unnecessarily disrupting the traveling public, we’ll do that.” Earlier, law enforcement and security officials told Reuters the United States and European authorities were discussing measures that could include installation of additional bomb-detection machines.

Bombmakers from the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, and Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, are believed to be working together to try to develop explosives that could avoid detection by current airport screening systems, U.S. national security sources said.

The main concern is that militant groups could try to blow up U.S.- or Europe-bound planes by concealing bombs on foreign fighters carrying Western passports who spent time with Islamist rebel factions in the region, the sources said.

‘STEALTH EXPLOSIVES’

AQAP has a track record of plotting such attacks. It was behind a 2009 attempt by a militant with a bomb hidden in his underwear to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner.

There was no immediate indication U.S. intelligence had detected a specific plot or time frame for carrying out an attack. U.S. officials believe Nusra and AQAP operatives have carried out operational testing of new bomb designs in Syria, where Nusra is one of the main Islamist groups fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, a national security source said. The “stealth” explosives the bombmakers are trying to design include non-metallic bombs, ABC News reported.

But officials are especially worried that the recent battlefield successes of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, an al Qaeda splinter group, have drawn a growing number of militants from America and Europe to the jihadist cause and they would have easy access to flights headed for American cities.

Source : Reuters

WoW ! How girl, 13, was kidnapped by her dad, taken to Syria and forced to marry her cousin

An Australian girl who was kidnapped, beaten and married off to her older cousin by her father’s family in Syria at the age of 13 has spoken out about her horrific five-year ordeal for the first time. Rania Farrah (pictured bellow) was on what was meant to be a trip of a lifetime to Egypt to visit the pyramids with her older brother but instead ended up being turned into a child bride by her own family.

Appearing on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Ms Farrah revealed she planned to commit suicide if her escape plan on her 18th birthday didn’t work, and said: ‘I was just in a depression the whole time I was there… I just thought of Australia.’

Ms Farrah, who grew up living in Sydney’s southwest and is the daughter of a Syrian Muslim and his Australian convert wife, was married off to her cousin who she had never met and endured terrible beatings after being taken to Syria’s capital Damascus from Egypt. Her mother, who had previously fled Ms Farrah’s father after 20 years of violent marriage, knew about her daughter’s kidnapping but told her during phone calls from that she could not afford to bring her home to Australia.

On arrival in Damascus, Ms Farrah was subjected to a virginity test because her father decided she had been under bad influences when in Year 7 at school, when she started smoking cigarettes and talking to boys. ‘They wanted to check for my virginity. They said to enroll in a school they needed to check I was a virgin,’ Ms Farrah explained.

She felt ‘confusion and fear’ as nurses came and held her down. After the virginity test – despite the results showing she was indeed a virgin – her father and brother beat her at her Auntie’s house. ‘It’s quite a normal thing to kill your daughter for not being a virgin,’ she noted. On Sunday, Ms Farrah described her father as ‘an evil person, he’s the most evil person you’ll ever meet’.

Opening up to Liz Hayes about the shocking crime of forced marriage that affects hundreds of Australian women every year, she explained that she shut off her emotions and played along with her family’s plan while dreaming of her escape. Living in a strict Muslim world, she attended an Islamic school and learned Arabic. ‘I did all the things they asked me to do… I was taught how to pray and fast for Ramadan,’ she said.

Her second cousin, who she was forced to marry, was in his early thirties and Ms Farrah avoided ‘eye contact’ and never spoke to him. ‘We had the engagement party, I got given the gold… I put on the face. But I didn’t feel anything because by that stage I was already planning my escape.’

Ms Farrah hatched an escape plan to return to Australia on her 18th birthday and was helped by the British Embassy to return to Sydney. A neighbour, who was around the same age as Ms Farrah, had passed her the phone number for the embassy. But she had to wait until she was 18 before officials were legally allowed to help her.

When she was legally an adult, they told her a woman would wait for her at the Four Seasons hotel in Damascus. Ms Farrah crept out her house and jumped into a taxi while her grandmother was asleep after morning prayer. Feeling trapped and desperate, she said: ‘If I didn’t get out I was going to kill myself that day.’

Luckily an official was waiting for her at the hotel and gave her a ‘big hug’. They then travelled to the Jordanian border with two body guards and after a tense conversation with Syrian border patrol, Ms Farrah was on her way to freedom and back to Australia.

‘It was early morning when we arrived and we flew over Sydney Harbour,’ Ms Farrah recalled tearfully of arriving back in her homeland. She said her mother and family in Australia has never asked about her time in Syria or asked how she was feels to be home.

And although she is out of Syria, she is still terrified her father will track her down and has taken out a restraining order against him. Unfortunately Ms Farrah’s story is not as rare as it might seem.

The Immigrant Women’s Health Service
in Fairfield, in Sydney’s west, has rescued 62 child brides from Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, Indian, Egyptian, Turkish and Sudanese families over the past three years.

Source: UK Mail Daily Mail

WoW ! US suspends diplomatic relations with Syria

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior State Department
official says the Syrian government has been told it
must immediately suspend its diplomatic and
consular missions in the United States.
The order Tuesday essentially shutters the Syrian
embassy in Washington and its honorary consulates
in Troy, Mich., and Houston, Texas, and forces all
personnel who are not legal U.S. residents to leave the
country.
It comes three years since the start of the bloody civil
war in Syria that has killed more than 140,000 people.
U.S. special envoy to Syria Daniel Rubenstein said the
order responds to a decision by the government of
Syrian President Bashar Assad to suspend its own
consular services.
However, Rubenstein said the U.S. wants to continue
diplomatic relations with Syria and maintain a
relationship if Assad steps down from power.

Source : Yahoo News

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WoW ! Rockets in Bekaa as Lebanon struggles to contain Syria spillover

Just today AL-LABWA, Lebanon – Two rockets struck a
mainly Shi’ite town near Lebanon’s border with Syria
on Monday and security forces blew up a suspected
car bomb as they struggled to contain sectarian
violence fuelled by a Syrian army offensive across the
frontier.
The rocket attack on Al-Labwa was the latest strike on
a Shi’ite target inside Lebanon after Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their Lebanese allies
Hezbollah recaptured the border town of Yabroud from
Sunni Muslim rebels on Sunday.
The rebel defeat at Yabroud sent a stream of refugees
and fighters across the border towards the Lebanese
Bekaa Valley town of Arsal, and was followed hours
later by a suicide car bombing against a local
stronghold of Shi’ite Hezbollah.
The border area has been steadily sucked into Syria’s
nearly four-year-old conflict as Syrian troops and jets
targeted rebel bases on the frontier and suspected
Syrian rebels fired rockets at Shi’ite towns to punish
Hezbollah for supporting Assad.
But the rebel loss of Yabroud could exacerbate
sectarian tensions across Lebanon and the flight of
2,000 defeated rebels – some of them into Lebanon –
would further destabilize the already volatile Bekaa
Valley.
Prime Minister Tammam Salam met army chief
General Jean Kahwaji on Monday and called on the
military to “take all necessary measures to control the
situation in Bekaa’s border areas”, a statement from
his office said.
When the two rockets struck Al-Labwa, a mainly
Shi’ite town about five miles (eight km) west of the
Sunni town of Arsal, gunmen took up positions on the
street and others leapt into cars. Reuters journalists in
the town heard sirens of emergency vehicles, but
there were no immediate reports of casualties.
The attack on Al-Labwa followed a suicide bombing
which killed three people in the nearby town of Nabi
Osmane on Sunday. Two radical Islamist groups with
suspected ties to Sunni al Qaeda militants in Syria
claimed responsibility.
At the site of the blast yellow Hezbollah banners were
flying on Monday. “Dear criminals, our blood is
stronger than your terror,” read one of them, next to
the group’s logo.
The blast blew apart buildings in the area, including a
barber shop where the twisted remains of a barber
chair were visible through the door. A damaged grey
Mercedes was in the road and the twisted charred
remains of a car.
One person was killed in the same town on Saturday
after several rockets were fired from near Arsal.

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