Most of those families are either foreign or Arabs and have chosen to relocate from Syria’s northeastern province of al-Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS, to the Iraqi city of Mosul, Xinhua quoted the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights as saying.
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As Russia forms a new alliance with France and Russian warplanes rain down bombs on Islamic State targets in Syria, the Paris attacks might be nudging Moscow and Washington closer together.
On Sunday, the French defence ministry said 30 air strikes destroyed an ISIL training camp and munitions dump in Raqqa.
But impoverished civilians run much of the group’s oil operations, including oil tanker trucks, said Hassan Hassan, who co-wrote the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” and is an analyst at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
“We are deeply disturbed by language that demonises refugees as a group”, United Nations spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said after government officials in Poland, Slovakia and the German state of Bavaria cited the Paris attacks as a reason to refuse refugees.
The named mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is now in Syria after being convicted in absentia in Brussels earlier this year of recruiting jihadists for Islamic State.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, on an unscheduled stop in Paris, said Tuesday that Islamic State was losing territory in the Middle East and that the Western-backed coalition is making inroads against the group.
As the investigations expanded, authorities were zeroing in on the role of a man they believe is a key figure in the Islamic State’s operations in Europe and possibly played a coordinating role in the Paris plot from Syria.
He also said he would ask parliament to extend for three months a state of emergency he declared on Friday, which gives security forces sweeping powers to search and detain suspects.
France targeted the IS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria during a fresh wave of airstrikes.
“The targets had been in the works, and we accelerated the strikes due to great interest from the French after the attacks”, said the United States of America official.
“They are coming under increasing economic pressure, and passing this down on the population”, Strack said.
Poverty, he added, is an important recruitment tool for the Islamic State. In the town of Atareb, according to local insurgents, a group that has been battling the Islamic State and receiving US support was hit.
There are signs Islamic State has been planning for impending attacks. Shadi said the fighters had been pressuring males as young as 15 to join them to “fight the Kurds” and, if they refuse, imposing a “tax” to be used to buy a weapon for a fighter.
“The skies of Raqqa were crowded with warplanes yesterday”, said a member of the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently.
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It posted a video with audio of the rumble of jets overhead which it said was from inside Raqqa city. The activists said that despite the fear, some residents enjoyed a few moments of freedom when fighters took cover during airstrikes, especially women who step out on their balconies without worrying that the fighters will order them to cover up.
