The Indian government has been faced with a strange dilemma since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.
On Aug. 31, within hours of US forces departing the war-torn nation, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) announced that its envoy to Qatar, Deepak Mittal, had met with the head of the Taliban’s political office, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai.
Turkey has risen to the world’s top three in combat drone technology, the Turkish president said on Sunday, reports Anadolu Agency.
“With our unmanned combat aerial vehicle Akinci, Turkey has become one of the three most advanced countries in the world in this technology,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the delivery ceremony for the Bayraktar Akinci combat drone in the northwestern Tekirdag province.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will today call on the US President Joe Biden not to withdraw American forces from Iraq and Syria, Israeli media reported.
Bennett was scheduled to meet with Biden yesterday on his first visit to the White House as prime minister, but the meeting was postponed after an explosion at Kabul airport, Afghanistan, killed ten US service members.
Israeli intelligence officials met privately this month with the son of Libya’s top warlord to discuss his 2021 presidential candidacy, a signal that Israel is supporting his bid, a source familiar with the meeting told the Washington Free Beacon.
Saddam Haftar has been quietly seeking Western backing for his campaign, which is expected to pit him against Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the son of former strongman Muammar Qaddafi. Haftar is seen as a proxy for his father Khalifa Haftar, a dual U.S.-Libyan citizen and commander of the Libyan National Army.
Thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are pouring into the European Union from Belarus, a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. The surge in illegal immigration is being orchestrated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of trying to blackmail the EU into reversing the sanctions it imposed over his disputed reelection and a crackdown on dissent.
The events of 9/11 encouraged al-Qaeda attacks in Turkey and led to the rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), issues that majorly impacted Ankara’s foreign and security policy.
U.S.-Turkey relations suffered in the post-9/11 era as a result of the power vacuum in northern Iraq, which helped the PKK gain a stronger foothold and divergence over the People’s Protection Units (YPG).
Local activists in Daraa said that the recent settlement reached by the central committees in the Daraa governorate with the regime’s security committee serves the interests of Daraa’s people and prevents the demographic change that Iran wants to impose.
The Ahrar Horan Group quoted the Syrian journalist Mohammed al-Aweed as saying that the agreed terms serve the interests of Daraa’s and amount to success for them. This is because the Fourth Division, which takes its orders from Iran, wanted to raze the area of Daraa al-Balad to impose demographic change on it, to create a new social structure imagined by Hezbollah and Iranian militias in southern Syria. In this way, Daraa would become a staging point for later reaching Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as a way of threatening Iran’s supposed enemy [Israel]. But Daraa undermined these plans because the local communities stood their ground and refused to yield their territory.
Three former ISIS fighters share their stories about how they joined the organization and their stay in Syria to Asharq al-Awsat.
The security authorities of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria granted Asharq Al-Awsat permission to interview three former ISIS members, at the anti-terror headquarters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in al-Hassakeh.
The three were young men when they decided to join the organization in Syria. They got married and had children in combat. Today, after their surrender and detention, they know nothing about the fate of their wives and children.
The Afghan Experience
A.N. is a German young man, born in 1987. He said he came from a small family, an older brother of two siblings, who had all completed their university studies. His parents, who are still alive, found out about his orientation during his university studies, due to his continuous talk about the “Afghan experience” and the Taliban movement, which fought the U.S. army and the international coalition for years, saying: “I was impressed by the defeat of the Soviet Union, but their project was not as clear as ISIS, who took control of areas.”
The young German man tells that while following the news bulletin in the summer of 2012 and the explosion of the Syrian radio and television building, he heard about the al-Nusra Front, only to know later that it was the Syrian arm of ISIS.
At the end of 2012, he flew to Egypt, from which he completed the trip towards Turkey, and entered the city of Idleb, western Syria, under fake names, to undergo a combat course, and remained there for nearly a year. After the separation of al-Nusra – currently known as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham – from ISIS, he joined the ranks of the latter and went to the city of Raqqa, which at that time was the organization’s administrative capital.
When asked about the organization’s expansionist wars during 2014 and 2015, he replied: “The biggest enemy was Bashar al-Assad, who was a war criminal, but the conditions of the war dictated a change in tactics and objectives at the time.”
After the battles intensified in Raqqa in the summer of 2017, and the geographic area under ISIS control receded, he went to the city of al-Mayadin in the eastern countryside of Deir-ez-Zor. In the spring of 2019, he surrendered to the International Coalition Forces.
A Tunisian Recruited By His Neighbor
Mustapha (H.A.), was born in 1989 in the city of Sfax in Tunisia but lived in Sousse, which overlooks the sea. He revealed that the famous 3-D game “Counter-Strike” changed the course of his life.
The game featured two teams – a terrorist group and a counter army – while players used to exchange roles.
He recounted that one day, as he was sitting before his computer, and saw pictures and clips showing the Syrian regime’s suppression of peaceful protesters, he said: “My neighbor was sitting next to me, and I asked him: What is happening there? He told me secretly that he intended to travel to rid the Syrians of the tyrant.”
Without the knowledge of his family, the young man traveled with his neighbor by land to Libya and from there by air to Turkey. Then, at the end of 2012, they entered the countryside of Lattakia, western Syria, where the al-Nusra Front had spread. He later went to Aleppo, where he joined ISIS.
Mustapha refused to comment on the killing scenes, but he spoke about his wife, saying: “I love my wife, and I have children with her…and this is a positive thing in my life, as for the rest, I am not content with it.”
He remained in the ranks of the organization until it was defeated in Baghouz. He tried to escape with his wife and children, but they were arrested on February 15, 2019.
A Syrian Man Joining “Work”
For Malik (37 years old), who comes from al-Bab in the countryside of Aleppo, the year 2014 was nothing but a date. That year, ISIS launched more than 100 suicide attacks on his hometown.
He recounted that after the militants of the organization tightened their control over the region, Malik was forced to join the ranks of ISIS to get work.
He worked first in the Court of Justice, then in the local police and combat. He said: “The marriage office offered me to marry a Syrian woman from Aleppo, and indeed I decided to marry her, and I did not marry a second woman.”
He said that he engaged in many battles and witnessed the organization’s losses from Aleppo to Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. He added: “I tried to escape when they were expelled from Manbij, and then I tried in Tabqa and Raqqa, but I did not succeed. I stayed until the battle of Baghouz, and surrendered to the coalition.”
Seven people in the town of Azaz were wounded after a car bomb attack, which the YPG is accused of, according to Zaman al-Wasl.
A car bomb wounded at least seven people in the Turkish-held northern town of Azaz on Monday, the rescue Civil Defence group said. The YPG-suspected attack has occurred in the town centre.
On Sunday at dawn, pro-Iranian factions targeted the besieged neighborhoods of the city of Daraa, southern Syria, with artillery and missile shells, causing massive damage to people’s houses, while Russia bombards Idleb in the North.
The factions targeted the neighborhoods of Daraa al-Balad, Tariq al-Sad, and the nearby IDP camps with more than 50 surface-to-surface missiles. The bombing left material damage and cut most of the roads, without any casualties reported, local sources told North Press.