Six In The Morning Tuesday December 22

Afghanistan Taliban: Police resist siege of HQ in Helmand’s Sangin

Afghan forces are struggling to hold the police HQ in the town of Sangin in Helmand province, amid a siege by Taliban fighters, officials say.

But there are conflicting reports as to who controls the whole district.

The Helmand governor and police dismissed Taliban reports that it now controlled it as “totally false”.

Sangin district has fallen to Taliban control several times and the fighting has caused significant casualties among Afghan and international forces.

In the east, a Taliban attack near Bagram on Monday killed six US soldiers. It was one of the deadliest attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan this year.

Three rockets were also fired into Kabul overnight on Monday.

Why Sangin matters

Who are the Taliban?

Some 12,000 foreign soldiers are deployed in the country as part of the Nato-led Resolute Support international coalition, which is meant to underpin Afghan security forces.

Britain has announced that a small number of UK personnel have been deployed to Camp Shorabak in Helmand province in an advisory role.

My husband the warlord: an extract from the memoir of Joseph Kony’s wife

Abducted when she was 11 years old, Evelyn Amony spent more than a decade at the brutal LRA leader’s side. In her new book, she recounts her past

Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army abducted Evelyn Amony a few months before she turned 12 years old, in August 1994. Trained as a child soldier by the rebel leader and now indicted war criminal, Amony was raped by Kony at 14, and told that she has become his wife.

Amony spent 11 years with Kony in Uganda as one of his more than 60 wives. She gave birth to three of his daughters while he waged a campaign of destruction against local populations in the country’s north-west.

In the following excerpt from her new book, she recalls how a bushfire took the lives of Kony’s favourite wife, Fatima, and her son, also called Kony. Amony describes how she had to coax the guerrilla leader from the brink of suicide, knowing the remaining wives and children would have little chance of surviving without him.

This is who FIFA should replace Sepp Blatter with

FIFA needs new blood, and not just to fuel their vampiric powers

It has finally happened. Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have received eight year bans from all football activity as a result of the former’s suspicious payment of two million Swiss francs to the latter in 2011, for work so vague neither man could convincingly describe it. This was apparently undertaken between 1998 and 2002 and they argued that this was due to FIFA’s difficult financial situation at the time. We’ve all been there.

“You need some work done but you’re a bit tight? Don’t worry about it. Just pay me in nine to thirteen years. No need for a contract. I’m sure everything will be fine. See you down the banquet hall.”

There was insufficient evidence to prove bribery or corruption charges but this is football’s version of Al Capone’s conviction for tax evasion. With his face adorned with curiously unsettling stubble, a plaster and a healthy dollop of figurative egg, Blatter’s words after the verdict sounded just like that of a desperate mob boss; part threat, part commitment to his increasingly ludicrous story. He said:

Report: ‘Islamic State’ loses 14 percent of territory

The “Islamic State” has lost 14 percent of the territory it held at the start of the year, suggesting the group may have overstretched. The Syrian Kurds have increased territory under their control by 186 percent.

The IS “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq suffered a series of battlefield defeats over the past year that have reduced territory under its control, the military and defense think tank IHS Janes said in a report released on Monday.

While IS made gains in the historic Syrian city of Palmyra and Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, these gains came at the expense of losing large swaths of territory in northern Syria to the US-backed Syrian Kurds (pictured) and allied Arab forces, known at the Syrian Democratic Forces.

In order to take and hold Palmyra and Ramadi, IS had to redeploy fighters from the Kurdish front, IHS said.

“This indicates that the Islamic State was overstretched, and also that holding Kurdish territory is considered to be of lesser importance than expelling the Syrian and Iraqi governments from traditionally Sunni lands,” said Columb Strack, senior Middle East analyst at IHS.

“The Kurds appear to be primarily an obstruction to the Islamic State, rather than an objective in themselves,” he added.

Fukui gov. OKs restart of Kansai Electric nuclear reactors

(Mainichi Japan)

FUKUI, Japan (Kyodo) — As Japan seeks to push ahead with the resumption of nuclear power generation following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis, the Fukui governor announced Tuesday he has approved the restart of two nuclear reactors in the prefecture.

Gov. Issei Nishikawa gave the go-ahead for Kansai Electric Power Co. to reactivate the Nos. 3 and 4 reactors at its Takahama plant on the Sea of Japan coast. The utility is looking to restart the No. 3 unit in late January and the No. 4 unit in late February.

However, a court injunction issued in April bans Kansai Electric from reactivating the Takahama units due to safety concerns. The Fukui District Court will make a decision Thursday on an objection filed by the utility against the injunction.

Pakistan hunting for network of female ISIL fundraisers

Police in Karachi searching for 20 women from well-off families accused of funding attacks and arranging wives for ISIL.

| ISIL, Pakistan, War & Conflict, Asia

Police in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi are hunting down a network of women from wealthy families who are allegedly acting as fundraisers for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and arranging marriages for its followers.

Security officials on Monday said the search was launched after police arrested a suspect believed to have financed a gun attack on a bus carrying Pakistani Shias that killed 44 people in May.

The assault, which targeted members of the Shia Ismaili minority, was the first attack claimed by ISIL inside Pakistan.

Raja Umar Khattab, chief of Sindh province’s counterterrorism unit, said a suspect confessed that his wife had established a religious organisation in the city called Al Zikra Academy to fund the group’s activities, AFP news agency reported.