Six In The Morning

Iraq ‘struggling’ against Isis militants, say diplomats

 22 June 2014 Last updated at 03:50

 BBC

Iraq’s government is struggling in its battle against militants, diplomats and politicians have told the BBC.

Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) said they seized a border crossing to Syria and two towns in north-west Iraq on Saturday.

Correspondents say Isis appears to be better trained, better equipped and more experienced than the army.

The Sunni extremists attacked the city of Mosul in June and have since seized large swathes of territory across Iraq.

Rebranded insurgents gain whip hand on streets of Baghdad

The Mahdi army, now renamed the Peace Brigades, parades its power in the Iraqi capital as it prepares to do battle with Sunni rebels in the north

Martin Chulov in Baghdad

The Observer, Sunday 22 June 2014

For the past week the young and old of the Mahdi army had been preparing. New recruits, only children the last time the Shia militia all but ran Iraq, had been learning how to march and to clean weapons. Veterans of the insurgency against US forces and civil war that followed had been signing up cadres and receiving bodies from battlefields.

On Baghdad’s streets, battered pickups shuttled weapons from depots to mosques where the rapid rearming has transformed the already militarised capital into a war zone in waiting.

 Syria civil war: Hundreds of radicalised fighters are already back in the UK, warns former MI6 chief

Fighters returning from Syria will ‘inevitably’ pose domestic threat, warns counter-terrorist report

JONATHAN OWEN   Sunday 22 June 2014

Hundreds of veteran fighters from Syria and Iraq are already back in Britain, among them radicalised jihadists intent on mounting terror attacks. And British intelligence services face an “impossible” task in trying to track them, a leading security expert warned last night.

The grim warning from Richard Barrett, the former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, who spent more than a decade tracking the Taliban for the United Nations, comes amid escalating fears over the threat posed by returning foreign fighters from the twin conflicts. Mr Barrett estimated that “possibly up to 300 people have come back to the UK” already.

The scale of the threat is placing an impossible burden on British intelligence, he said. “If you imagine what it would cost to really look at 300 people in depth, clearly it would be completely impossible to do that, probably impossible even at a third of that number.”

Gaza in Crisis: The Strong Female Voice of Hamas

Isra al-Mudallal is the outspoken, strong-willed new spokesperson for the Hamas government in Gaza. Her goal is to become a role model for young girls — but first she has to overcome the region’s conservative traditions.

By Julia Amalia Heyer

Give me a minute, the delicate-looking woman behind the giant desk says. With her right hand, Isra al-Mudallal pulls a prayer rug out of her handbag, with her left, she lifts her daughter from the floor onto her lap. She places a sheet of paper and crayons in front of the child, kisses her on the temple, and then the first female spokesperson for the Islamist organization Hamas disappears into the next room to pray.

But I have an appointment, says a gray-suited employee of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the German center-left political foundation, as she rushes past him. “You’ll have to wait,” Muddallal says, and leaves the man sitting there in her office on the third floor of a dusty high-rise in Gaza City.

Sea disputes should be settled through direct talks, Chinese official says



June 22, 2014 – 12:50PM

Beijing: China will be firm in upholding its territorial integrity and believes disputes in the region should be settled through direct talks with the countries concerned, the nation’s top foreign policy official said.

“We will never trade our core interests or swallow the bitter fruits that undermine our sovereignty, security and development interests,” Yang Jiechi said in a speech at the World Peace Forum in Beijing at the weekend. Dr Yang, a former foreign minister, held talks last week in Vietnam to defuse tensions over a Chinese oil rig in waters claimed by both countries.

Fear, shock among Sri Lankan Muslims in aftermath of Buddhist mob violence

 

 By Iqbal Athas and Tim Hume, CNN

In the areas surrounding the southwest Sri Lankan town of Aluthgama, an idyllic coastal settlement popular with tourists, Muslims and Buddhists have lived side by side peacefully for generations.

But a wave of deadly communal violence that followed a rally Sunday by hardline Buddhist nationalist monks has changed that.

“The house I owned was burnt down. My family has nowhere to go,” Muhsin Shihab, a father of eight children, told CNN Tuesday.

His family, which has been sheltering at a local mosque since being displaced by the rioting, hadn’t eaten for a day and a half, he said.