Following violent fighting between opposition groups in Afrin in October, Turkey has begun reorganizing the National army factions. In this context, leaders of Syrian National Army factions held a meeting in Turkey on Wednesday to unite the ranks under one command.
The latest issue of “Voice of Khurasan,” an English-language monthly magazine published by Al-Azaim Foundation, the media arm of the Islamic State’s Khurasan Province (ISIS-K), eulogizes the slain Indian jihadi fighter Abu Khalid al-Hindi, condemns Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi for digressing from shari’a and for supporting the regimes in Qatar and Turkey, and is sharply critical of Hamas, the Afghan Taliban, and the Muslim Brotherhood, all of whom, the magazine declares, are working for Iran and the U.S.
Turkey carried out airstrikes against what it said are bases for armed Kurdish groups in northern Syria and Iraq, claiming that they were used as a base for attacks on Turkey, including the explosion at a popular pedestrian mall in downtown Istanbul last weekend that left six dead and dozens wounded. The main suspect in the bombing, a Syrian national identified as Alham Albashir, was arrested soon after the explosion.
The president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Mohammad Eslami, condemned a draft resolution proposed by the United States, Britain, France and Germany that was passed late last week by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors, that calls on Iran to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigators regarding the alleged “traces of uranium” at a number of its undeclared nuclear sites.
Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu said in a statement in parliament on 18 November that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was an arm of US intelligence and reiterated his earlier comments by denouncing Washington for its support for the Kurdish militia.
On 14 November, US occupation troops in Syria looted a new batch of the country’s oil from the al-Jazira region, in coordination with their Kurdish proxy militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
“The American occupation forces took out a new batch of stolen Syrian oil, in 76 tankers, to their bases in northern Iraq, through the illegal Mahmudiyah crossing,” local sources told Syrian media.
On 14 November, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar posted an article that disclosed documents exposing Saudi, Bahraini, Emirati, and US involvement in the Iran riots.
The article recalled a statement by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in 2017 about moving the battle to the Iranian territories to keep the kingdom “safe,” considering that this was the launching point of the strategic endeavor to undermine Iran by striking its internal front.
In what it called retaliation for the deadly Istanbul blast on 13 October, the Turkish military launched over a dozen airstrikes against Kurdish positions in northern Syria in the late hours of 19 November and into the morning of the next day, killing members of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).
On the evening of 16 November, two members of Iran’s security forces were killed and at least eight others were injured in the neighborhood of Khane Esfahan in the city of Isfahan. The assailants who carried out the attack reportedly drove by on motorcycles and opened fire on the security forces stationed in the street.
In the past few days, social media has been flooded with unsubstantiated reports alleging that the Islamic Republic of Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death in the wake of street protests and violent riots sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.
The misleading allegations largely stem from a 6 November report by the UK-based and Saudi-funded Iran International news outlet regarding a letter signed by a majority of Iranian lawmakers.