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Libyan forces report gains against IS in battle for Sirte

SIRTE, Libya (Reuters) – Libyan forces said on Friday they had edged further into the center of Sirte as they seek to recapture the city from Islamic State, following heavy fighting until late the previous evening that left dozens dead.

Forces aligned with Libya’s United Nations-backed government in Tripoli advanced rapidly on the militant group’s Libyan stronghold in May, but they have faced resistance from snipers, suicide bombers and mines as they have closed in on the city center.

Sirte had been controlled by Islamic State since last year, becoming its most important base outside Syria and Iraq, and its loss would be a major setback for the group.

After a lull in fighting earlier this week, the government-backed forces launched a fresh assault on several fronts after first pounding IS positions with artillery and air strikes.

The brigades, made up mainly of fighters from the western city of Misrata, said in a statement that they had captured a hotel on the eastern front line used by Islamic State snipers, and also taken control of part of the “Dollar” neighborhood.

They said they had foiled three attempted car bomb attacks and destroyed an armored vehicle. A Reuters witness saw a tank belonging to the brigades being blown up, though it was not clear what caused the explosion.

The witness said shelling continued late into Thursday night, but it was quiet on Friday morning.

Nearly 50 bodies of Islamic State fighters killed during Thursday’s clashes were counted, the statement from the government-backed forces said. At least 25 brigade members were killed and 200 wounded, according to Misrata’s central hospital.

Since the campaign for Sirte began in May, more than 300 fighters from the brigades have been killed and more than 1,300 wounded, a spokesman for the forces said.

Islamic State expanded into Libya amid the political chaos and security vacuum that developed after long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in an uprising in 2011.

The group extended its presence along about 250 km (155 miles) of Libya’s coastline, but failed to win and retain territory elsewhere in the country.

(Reporting by Goran Tomasevic and Ahmed Elumami; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by John Stonestreet)

Shelling, air strikes in Libya siege on Islamic State in Sirte

MISRATA, Libya (Reuters) – Libyan forces allied with the U.N.-backed government have been shelling and carrying out air strikes on the center of Sirte city in a siege of Islamic State militants there, an official said on Tuesday.

Militants defending Islamic State’s last stronghold in Libya have been keeping Libyan forces back with sniper fire and mortars in Sirte where they are now surrounded after a two month campaign to take the city.

The fall of Sirte would be a major blow to Islamic State, which took over the city a year ago in the chaos of a civil war between rival factions who once battled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

“Our forces have…targeted militants with artillery and air force around Ouagadougou complex, Ghiza Asskariya district, and in the city center,” said Rida Issa, spokesman for Misrata forces fighting in Sirte.

“They have targeted Islamic State members, vehicles, ammunition stores, and control rooms.”

He said one Misrata fighter was killed and 20 others wounded in a mortar strike on their position in the Zaafran frontline, near the roundabout where Islamic State once crucified victims.

The bodies of around 13 Islamic State fighters were found, but Misrata forces were driven back by sniper fire.

Western powers are backing Prime Minister Fayaz Seraj’s government that moved into Tripoli three months ago in an attempt to unify two rival governments and various armed factions. Seraj is working with a unified National Oil Corporation to restart the oil industry.

But while powerful brigades from Misrata city support Seraj for now and lead the fight to liberate Sirte, other hardliners to the east are still opposing him and his government has made little progress in extending its influence.

After a rapid success in driving Islamic State back from a coastal strip of territory it controlled, the battle for Sirte has slowed to street-by-street fighting as Misrata forces clear out residential areas.

Misrata commanders say a few hundreds militants are dug in around the Ouagadougou complex, the university and a city hospital. They are cautious of advancing rapidly after more than 200 fighters died in the campaign so far.

While forces from the city of Misrata are fighting Islamic State in Sirte, rival brigades allied to Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army are fighting to the east on another front in Benghazi and around another eastern town. Haftar’s hardline backers reject Seraj’s government.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli; Writing by Patrick Markey; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Iraq’s war children face void without world’s help: UNICEF country chief

UNICEF Iraq Representative Peter Hawkins speaks with media at a school for displaced people who fled from Mosul, in Nahrawan district, southeast of Baghdad, Iraq December 16, 2015. Picture taken December 16, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad

By Tom Esslemont

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A generation of children face the bleak prospect of going without an education unless the Iraqi government, its allies and aid agencies rebuild communities torn apart by years of war, a senior U.N. children’s agency official said on Friday.

Peter Hawkins, UNICEF representative in Iraq, said recent fighting between government forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, and Islamic State fighters, had cut off thousands of children from school and healthcare.

“We are faced with a whole generation losing its way and losing prospects for a healthy future,” said Hawkins in an interview.

Government institutions, faced with financial deficit, are collapsing leaving them dependent on U.N. agencies to provide schools and teacher training, following more than a decade of sectarian violence, Hawkins said during a visit to London.

“What is needed is a cash injection through central government so that we can see it building the systems required for an economic turnover,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Conflict has worsened the situation across Iraq, with an estimated 4.7 million children – about a third of all children in the country – in need of assistance, the U.N. agency said in a report last month.

Mass movements of people forced from their homes by fighting in areas like Ramadi and Falluja, west of the capital, Baghdad, put one in five Iraqi children at risk of death, injury, sexual violence, abduction and recruitment into fighting, the report said.

UNICEF said earlier this year that at least 20,000 children in Falluja faced the risk of forced recruitment into fighting and separation from their families.

“A big problem is the lack of schools, with a lack of investment in recent years meaning the systems have all but collapsed,” Hawkins said.

CHILD RECRUITMENT

Thousands of civilians across much of western Iraq’s rugged Anbar province have been driven from their homes into the searing desert heat in the last two years, as a tide of Islamic State fighters took control of key towns and cities.

Despite losing considerable ground on the battlefield, a massive suicide bombing in Baghdad’s central shopping district of Karrada last weekend showed Islamic State remains capable of causing major loss of life.

In Anbar, where fighting has ruined scores of residential areas, many of the people displaced by the militants were now “in limbo”, waiting in displacement centers, Hawkins said.

Nearly one in five schools in Iraq is out of use due to conflict. Since 2014 the U.N. has verified 135 attacks on educational facilities and personnel, with nearly 800 facilities taken over as shelters for the displaced, UNICEF data shows.

But Hawkins said he expected thousands of families to soon return home and rebuild their lives.

In Ramadi, where government forces retook control last December, UNICEF will help the ministry of education reestablish schools, provide catch-up lessons and teacher training over the summer after it had been “flattened” by fighting, Hawkins said.

The veteran aid worker, who has also worked in Angola, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said his “biggest fear” was that children could get caught up in a battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s biggest northern city still held by the militants.

Protection of children must be part of a military strategy to retake Mosul, said Hawkins.

Pressures on UNICEF’s $170 million annual budget for 2016-17, which Hawkins said was short by $100 million, were hampering its ability to reach all those affected and may mean some child protection programmes are abandoned, he said.

(Reporting By Tom Esslemont, Editing by Ros; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

‘I study in a cave’: Going to school in Syria

Internally displaced children attend a class inside a cave in the rebel-controlled village of Tramla, in Idlib province, Syria

By Khalil Ashawi and Bassam Khabieh

TRAMLA/DOUMA, Syria (Reuters) – Syrian student Ali Khaled Stouf has to walk down several steps into a hole in the ground to get inside his school — a cave.

There for four hours each morning, he studies subjects like Arabic, English, maths and religion, sitting on a rug with dozens of children in the underground space in Tramla, an opposition-held village in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province.

“I study in a cave. The conditions are not very good but the professor and his wife treat us very well,” the 14-year-old, originally from neighboring Hama province, said. “We sit on the ground and often we don’t see clearly because it is dark.”

His teacher Mohamed and his wife, also from Hama, have opened up their underground home to teach some 100 children, whose families have been displaced by the Syrian conflict.

More than five years of war, which began as a peaceful protest against President Bashar al-Assad and has since drawn in foreign military involvement and allowed for the growth of Islamic State, has displaced millions of Syrian children and limited their access to education.

With schools themselves at times attacked, teachers make do with the basics to provide education.

Mohamed said the primitive, six-month-old school floods when it rains, forcing him to teach outside or in a tent, although he prefers the security underground. “We believe the cave is the safest place from shelling and air strikes and all the students are in one place,” he said.

For a Reuters Wider Image photo presentation, please click on: http://reut.rs/28RYM88

Idlib province is a stronghold of insurgent groups including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and has been regularly targeted in air strikes by the Syrian government, whose war effort has been boosted by the Russian air force.

At the Souriya al-Ammal (Syria the hope) school, in the town of Maarat al-Numan, corridors and classrooms are bullet-ridden and sometimes crumbling. In one less damaged area, walls have been repainted and the school now has some 250 pupils.

“War has affected education massively; most schools, if not destroyed completely, are damaged,” school supervisor Abdullatif al-Rahoum said, adding those who missed out on education are now playing catch up with younger students.

“The biggest challenges we face are the warplanes, which never leave the skies. This always worries students.”

In the nearby town of Saraqib, a mobile caravan serves as a classroom, run by a group aiming to reach children who have no access to schooling in the area.

Lack of books is problematic. Teachers in Idlib said they relied on charities or used books printed in neighboring Turkey by the opposition run Directorate of Education.

In the rebel-held town of Douma, outside Damascus, Mounir Abdelaziz, a member of the opposition-run education body, said local schools were using old textbooks, but with changes.

“We follow the same curriculum as the education ministry but with some modifications and articles related to the (Assad) regime deleted,” he said.

(Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Hezbollah to send more fighters to Syria’s Aleppo

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement said on Friday it will send more fighters to Syria’s Aleppo area, a battleground where it has suffered heavy losses fighting alongside Syrian government forces against insurgent groups.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said thousands of Hezbollah’s Sunni militant foes had recently entered Syria via the Turkish border with the aim of taking over Aleppo and its surrounding countryside.

“We are facing a new wave…of projects of war against Syria which are being waged in northern Syria, particularly in the Aleppo region,” Nasrallah said in a speech broadcast live on the group’s Al Manar TV.

“The defense of Aleppo is the defense of the rest of Syria, it is the defense of Damascus, it is also the defense of Lebanon, and of Iraq,” he said.

“We will increase our presence in Aleppo,” he said. “Retreat is not permissible.”

Shi’ite, Iranian-backed Hezbollah has long supported President Bashar al-Assad against mostly Sunni insurgents.

Aleppo has been a focus of intensified fighting in the months since peace talks in Geneva broke down and a ceasefire deal brokered by Washington and Moscow unraveled. Russia intervened in the five-year-old conflict in September with an air campaign to support Assad.

“It was necessary for us to be in Aleppo … and we will stay in Aleppo,” Nasrallah said.

Aleppo city is split between government and rebel control. Russian and Syrian warplanes have pounded a road leading from the rebel-held areas north towards the Turkish border. That major rebel supply line from Turkey to Aleppo city was effectively cut by government advances earlier this year.

A pro-Damascus source recently told Reuters government forces and their allies are trying to encircle rebels in the Aleppo area. Assad, for whom the recapture of Aleppo would be a strategic prize, has vowed to take back “every inch” of Syria from what he calls terrorists.

Russia’s intervention has helped government forces and their allies advance against insurgents, and separately against Islamic State, in some areas.

But some of those battles have been costly, including around Aleppo.

Islamist insurgents including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in May inflicted heavy losses on a coalition of foreign Shi’ite fighters including Iranians and Hezbollah members south of Aleppo.

Nasrallah said that 26 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in June alone, a rare acknowledgment of the toll their involvement is taking. Several of its senior military commanders have died in the Syrian conflict, alongside hundreds of fighters.

Nasrallah also denied Hezbollah was in imminent fiscal trouble as a result of a U.S. law targeting the group’s finances. The law, passed in December, threatens to bar from the American financial market any bank that knowingly engages with Hezbollah. It has ignited a standoff between Hezbollah, a dominant political force in Lebanon, and the Lebanese central bank.

(The story is refiled to change city to area in lead)

(Reporting by John Davison and Laila Bassam; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

U.S.-backed Syrian forces clash with Islamic State militants inside Manbij: monitor

AMMAN (Reuters) – U.S.-backed Syrian forces fought Islamic State militants on Thursday inside the city of Manbij for the first time since they laid siege to the militant stronghold near the Turkish border, a monitor said.

The British-based Observatory for Human Rights said heavy clashes were taking place in western districts of Manbij after the alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters swept into the city near the Kutab roundabout, almost 2km from the city center.

The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), including a Kurdish militia and Arab allies that joined it last year, launched the campaign late last month with the backing of U.S. special forces to drive Islamic State from its last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish frontier.

If successful it could cut the militants’ main access route to the outside world, paving the way for an assault on their Syrian capital Raqqa.

Manbij is in a region some 40 km (25 miles) from the Turkish border and since the start of the offensive on May 31, the SDF has taken dozens of villages and farms around it but had held back from entering the city with many thousands of people still trapped there.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Alison Williams)

Libyan forces take losses in battle for Sirte against Islamic State

By Aidan Lewis

TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Libyan forces fighting Islamic State in its stronghold of Sirte said on Wednesday that 36 of their men had been killed and nearly 150 wounded in the previous day’s clashes, one of the heaviest tolls in their month-long campaign.

Islamic State militants had been fighting hard to defend the shrinking territory they still control in the residential center of Sirte, said Abdalla Binrasali, a spokesman at the forces’ media center in Misrata.

“The resistance was fierce and they were firing with everything they’ve got, mortars, rockets and rifles,” he said. “They fear that if they lose more ground they will be defeated.”

Brigades largely composed of fighters from Misrata launched a campaign to retake Sirte from Islamic State last month. They rapidly recaptured ground west of Sirte at the end of May, but their advance slowed as they closed in on the center of the coastal city.

On Tuesday fighting escalated and the brigades said they had taken control of parts of the “700” neighborhood, the broadcasting and electricity company headquarters and a mosque.

The “700” neighborhood is strategically important because Islamic State snipers have been positioning themselves on the district’s taller buildings.

The brigades based in Misrata are aligned with a U.N.-backed unity government that arrived in Tripoli in March. It is seeking to replace two other rival governments that were set up in Tripoli and the east in 2014, and to unite Libya’s many political and armed factions.

Islamic State took advantage of Libya’s political turmoil to establish a presence in several of the country’s towns and cities from 2014.

It took full control of Sirte, the hometown of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, last year, creating its most significant base outside Syria and Iraq. However, the jihadist group has struggled to retain territory elsewhere in Libya.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Tearful Nepal relatives of Kabul attack victims receive bodies

Family cries over Nepali soldiers killed in an attack

By Gopal Sharma

KATHMANDU (Reuters) – Sobbing and weeping relatives of 12 Nepali nationals who were killed when a suicide bomber struck a minibus in Kabul received the bodies of their loved ones on Wednesday after they were flown from Afghanistan.

The victims were security guards working at the Canadian embassy in Kabul and came under attack on the way to work early on Monday. Two Indian nationals were also killed in the attack which left seven Nepalis wounded.

“This is the most difficult job for me to receive him dead,” said Sanjita Kumari, wife of Jitendra Singh Thapa, who came to the airport in Kathmandu with her 4-month-old son, to receive her husband’s body. “But there is no alternative and I must face it,” Kumari told Reuters, her baby pressed to the chest as tears streamed down her face.

Thapa, a former Indian army soldier, had served as a security guard in Iraq before going to war-torn Afghanistan in February this year with a promise to come back in November.

Relatives of the victims like Kumari heard of Monday’s attack in the media. She prayed for her husband until being told by the recruitment agency that he was dead.

“This came as a shock to me,” the 30-year-old said.

She said Thapa wanted their baby to serve in the British Army that has been recruiting Gurkha soldiers from the foothills of Nepal for 200 years.

Prime Minister K.P. Oli paid tributes to victims by placing marigold garlands on the wooden coffins which were then handed over to the relatives for funerals.

Monday’s attack in Kabul was the latest in a surge of violence that highlights the challenges faced by the government and its Western backers, as Washington considers whether to delay plans to reduce the number of its troops in Afghanistan.

At least 8,000 Nepali nationals are working in Afghanistan, according to the labor department, but actual numbers could be higher as many cross over to India, which shares an open border with Nepal, and then travel on to Afghanistan.

Nepal allows its citizens to work in Afghanistan as security guards at the UN, foreign embassies and their missions.

“The government will study the situation in which Nepalis were targeted after which we will decide whether to continue this,” Labor Minister Deepak Bohara told Reuters.

(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Douglas Busvine)

Assad tasks minister with forming new government: Syria state media

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad tasked Electricity Minister Emad Khamis with forming a new government on Wednesday, state news agency SANA reported, without giving an immediate reason for the formation of a new cabinet.

SANA gave no details on why Khamis would replace Wael al-Halaki as prime minister, or whether Halaki would be included in the new administration or had left government. Halaki himself replaced a prime minister who defected to the opposition.

The Damascus-based government controls most of the war-torn country’s major population centers in the west, with the notable exceptions of Idlib, which is held by insurgents, and Aleppo, where it controls half of the city.

Kurdish forces are in control of vast areas along the Turkish border, and Islamic State holds Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in the east.

Parliamentary elections were held in government-controlled areas in April, which the opposition said were meaningless.

Syria’s conflict, which began as a peaceful uprising against Assad, is now in its sixth year and has drawn in military involvement from regional and world powers and allowed for the growth of Islamic State.

Damascus formed a new government more than a year into the war in 2012, but its prime minister at the time, Riad Hijab, fled Syria soon afterwards. Hijab is now a prominent member of the main Syrian opposition that attended failed peace talks this year.

Assad ally Russia said last week there were U.S. proposals to incorporate parts of the opposition into the current Syrian government. Washington denied any such proposals and insists Assad must leave power.

The war has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced more than 11 million, half Syria’s pre-war population.

It has damaged the economy, causing the Syrian pound to lose more than 90 percent of its value.

(Reporting by John Davison and Lisa Barrington; Editing by Alison Williams)

Colombia to agree bilateral ceasefire with rebels this week: president

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia will reach agreement on a bilateral ceasefire at peace talks with leftist FARC rebels this week, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Tuesday, in what he said would mark a key advance in the negotiations to end 50 years of war.

Santos said this week the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels will complete the more than three-year-old negotiations by July 20.

“If the negotiators make a final effort to finish the definitive point that is a ceasefire and the end to hostilities, we will have taken a fundamental step in attaining peace,” Santos said in a speech at an education event in Bogota.

“I appeal to God that he gives us the strength to finish these accords this very week, because we have almost completed them.”

Government sources said the agreement would likely not mean the ceasefire would begin right away, but rather that the announcement would lay out the details of a ceasefire set to begin when a final peace deal is signed.

A ceasefire accord will likely include details on how the rebels will demobilize, the sources said, and FARC leader Rodrigo Londono, better known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, may sign the accord with Santos on Thursday or Friday.

The two sides have reached agreements on more than half a dozen topics but have yet to agree terms for the ceasefire or on how exactly a referendum for Colombians to approve the peace deal will be organized.

The FARC called a unilateral ceasefire nearly a year ago and the government responded by halting air strikes on rebel camps.

Negotiators missed a self-imposed deadline for signing a deal in March, and Santos has come under fire over the past week for comments about the referendum he has promised will take place to approve a deal.

Timochenko took to Twitter earlier on Tuesday to say he was against announcing a date by which the talks would finish.

“Practice has demonstrated that setting dates hurts the process, even more when there isn’t an accord,” the rebel leader tweeted. “Although we are advancing, we aren’t there yet.”

Latin America’s longest war has killed some 220,000 people and displaced millions of others since 1964. Tens of thousands have gone missing.

(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb, additional reporting by Monica Garcia; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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