Kurdish forces have prevented displaced Arabs from returning to disputed areas of Iraq that Kurdish leaders want to incorporate in their autonomous region over Baghdad's objections, a report said Thursday. Human Rights Watch warned the Kurdistan regional government against meting out "collective punishment of entire Arab communities" for the Islamic State terrorist group's attacks,
Islamic State terrorists have abducted 220 Assyrian Christians from villages in northeastern Syria in recent days, a monitoring group said Thursday, more than twice as many as previously reported. "No fewer than 220 Assyrian citizens (of Syria) were abducted by ISIS over the past three days from 11 villages" in Hasakeh province, the Syrian
An Arab satellite television network report claimed Thursday that a US-led coalition airstrike against Islamic State targets in areas they control has killed a “large number” of the organization's top commanders. It is not yet clear if ISIS' top leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed. The report on Al Arabiya television quoted sources
Nearly 1,000 Assyrian Christian families have fled their homes in northeastern Syria after jihadists kidnapped dozens of members of their community, an activist said on Wednesday. Osama Edward, director of the Sweden-based Assyrian Human Rights Network, said they had fled in fear after jihadists from the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS) took the
The recent U.S.-hosted Conference on Countering Violent Extremism that brought together the representatives of 60 nations in Washington "did not give birth to a global strategy on terror," states an article in the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram. It "served instead to underline differences between various points of view, especially those of Cairo and Washington." As
The Islamic State group released a video Thursday in which terrorists in Iraq are seen destroying ancient artifacts that included idols, which are prohibited by the Muslim faith, AFP reports. The five-minute video shows terrorists at the museum in Mosul knocking statues off their plinths and smashing them to pieces with sledgehammers. In
Hamas denounced on Saturday night the decision by an Egyptian court to declare it a terrorist organization, accusing Egypt of being “a friend of the Israeli occupation”. According to the statement quoted by the Alresalah newspaper, Hamas said the ruling is “serious and shocking”. The statement added that the ruling targets “the whole
