The United States is helping thousands of Syrian rebel fighters as they try to encircle Raqqa and cut that city off from Iraq’s Mosul, which the group also controls, U.S. officials say.
Advertisement
“However, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian Arab coalition essentially work together to counter ISIL”, he said, referring to the main Kurdish group fighting the Islamic State in an area near the Turkish border. He says it was hard to assess damage because of the ongoing airstrikes.
Palmyra, seized by the IS group in May, is home to world-famous Roman ruins. The Islamic State group has destroyed a number of its renowned sites.
There was no immediate comment from Russian officials. The Islamic State accused al Moussa of supplying a hidden camera to activists in Raqqa. The new expansion brings the IS group closer to a highway linking Damascus to the central Homs province, threatening to endanger government supply routes.
RBSS, which works through a network of secret correspondents operating in and around ISIS-controlled cities and provides credible accounts of life there, was formed in April 2014 just after ISIS started to take control over Raqqa.
IS did not claim responsibility for the killings, although a few of its supporters praised it. One posted their photos on Twitter and tweeted: “The slaughter occurred silently, as they used to lie silently”. The “member” was Ibrahim Abd al Qader, a founder and executive director of R.B.S.S., who had been arrested and tortured by ISIS and who later fled to Turkey; his friend was Fares Hamadi, a journalist with a Syrian media collective called Eye on Homeland.
They are refugees from the Islamic State (IS) group’s stronghold of Raqqa and they are posting online videos and text that defy the group’s agenda. The video, cited by the AP, shows a dark room with Hamadi’s body and his throat being slit, but Qadir is not shown in the video.
In an interview Qader’s brother, Ahmed, said that an acquaintance from Raqqa, Tlas Surur, had approached the men in Sanliurfa claiming to have defected from Isis.
Abdul Qader had escaped to Turkey a little over a year ago.
Advertisement
In July, IS shot dead two activists in the head inside Raqqa after accusing them of sending information to Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently and taking pictures of IS positions. Last week two special forces members were killed in a gun battle with ISIL militants in southeastern province of Diyarbakır.
