Despite the warning, the protests swelled, and faced an escalation in violent police raids on funerals, campuses and dormitories.
As anti-government unrest entered a seventh week in Iran, the commander of the country’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned protesters to go home.
Iran’s judiciary chief is the latest official to call for an end to protests.
The latest Iranian official to call for an end to the protests in Iran is Judiciary Chief Justice Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei.
During a speech today amongst judiciary officials, Mohseni Ejei referred to the protests as “riots” and said that those who support them “claiming to support the people of Iran” are also those who fund terrorists behind such attacks as the one on the shrine in Shiraz last Wednesday that killed at least 13 people. He asked rhetorically, “Who trains them, who arms them, who creates their fraudulent papers?”
According estimates, the number of the men and their family members from the Western Balkan countries exceeded 1000 person who travelled to the territory of Iraq or Syria for supporting their Muslim comrades. Most of them joined the Islamic State there, while the minority enriched the ranks of Jabhat al-Nusra or other smaller jihadist groups. However, hundreds of them have already returned from the Middle East to their country of origin in the recent years or months where they faced different treatment depending on their gender and age.
Abstract
Drawing upon the first author’s position within the Kosovo* Security Council Secretariat and utilizing internal government reports and statistics, this article provides an overview of the Kosovan experience dealing with returnee ‘foreign fighters’ from Syria and Iraq. So far, at least five returnees have been involved in planning domestic attacks, thus reaffirming academic analyses and recent reports suggesting that it is a minority of returnees who present an immediate terrorist threat. Nevertheless, a small number of returnees remain highly radicalized and are both willing and determined to attack at home. The Kosovan approach to managing this risk is discussed, to include challenges and lessons learned.
Rights groups deplore “hysterical and inappropriate language” framing crisis as an issue of security, rather than human rights.
Governments in the Balkans are beefing up borders and readying soldiers in the event of a new influx of migrants and refugees, with Serbia reportedly ready to seal its southern frontier with North Macedonia after Turkey abandoned a 2016 migration pact with the European Union.
The war in Syria has created tensions in Bulgaria’s Syrian community, one of the largest in Eastern Europe, and given some members a pretext to seek asylum elsewhere.
As protests swept Syria in 2011, Abu Kamal’s famous kebab restaurant in the heart of Sofia felt like an outpost of the revolution.
Israeli Army revealed on Sunday it destroyed 90% of Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria and aborted the Lebanese Hezbollah entrenchment in Syria.
“Israel has in recent years succeeded in almost completely curbing Iran’s ability to transfer weapons to Syria,” The Jerusalem Post cited officials in the Israeli Army as saying.
A source familiar with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria said the group is preparing for an election round likely to occur in December amid a rivalry between the old leadership of the elderly and the younger generation.
The source added in a statement to Syria TV that the main problem with the leadership of the group is that it believes that its project in the seventies and eighties of the last century, and its personalities, structure and previous working mechanisms worked with outside Syria can continue in the phase of the revolution and beyond.
Farid al-Qasim, the new commander of the Maghawir al-Thawra faction, has made several changes since he took over this position under the auspices of the “international coalition” forces. These modifications included renaming the faction as the Free Syrian Army, which raised question marks — especially as it coincides with the United States’ growing presence in Syria.
In remote villages across the Lebanese Bekaa region, Syrian refugees are packing their belongings and getting ready to return home. Starting Wednesday, and as part of Lebanon’s “voluntary return” plan, hundreds of refugees have returned to Syria.
Syrians Returning to Devastated Country, Escaping Economic Meltdown in Lebanon (Zaman al-Wasl)