ISIS Advances in Northern Syria

The Los Angeles Times reports that militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized several towns in Aleppo province Wednesday, “dealing a blow to rival rebel factions who were forced to withdraw from areas they took this year.” The group is trying to hold off the Syrian regime, which has intensified its siege of Aleppo in an attempt to wrest it from opposition forces.

“With the capture of the strategic town of Akhtarin and a few surrounding villages, fighters with the breakaway al-Qaida group have moved farther west and now threaten to cut off the rebels’ main access highway to neighboring Turkey,” writes Raja Abdulrahim.

E.U. Looking at How to Stop ISIS Oil Sales from Syria

Reuters reports that as ISIS makes headway in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor, the European Union is looking into how it could tighten sanctions to stop the Sunni extremist group from selling oil from fields they have overrun in Syria.

“The issue could come up at an emergency meeting of E.U. foreign ministers called for Friday to discuss the humanitarian and security crisis in Iraq,” the wire says. ISIS “is selling crude oil and gasoline to finance their newly declared ‘caliphate’ after seizing oil fields in both Iraq and Syria.

“The E.U. banned imports of Syrian oil in 2011 to intensify pressure on President Bashar al-Assad’s government over its suppression of unrest. But in April 2013, it eased sanctions to allow purchases of oil from the moderate opposition in Syria. EU experts are looking into whether the EU sanctions now need to be tightened up to make it harder for Islamic State fighters to sell oil from Syria.”

Snowden Claims NSA Knocked All of Syria’s Internet Offline

TIME reports that Edward Snowden has said a team of NSA hackers “was responsible for effectively knocking the entire country of Syria offline two years ago during a period of intense fighting in its still-ongoing civil war.”

Snowden makes the claim in a new interview with Wired magazine. The claim is significant “because many observers believed one of several other parties to be responsible for the outage, including Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, hackers aligned with but perhaps not a part of Assad’s government, or Israel.”

The NSA team, he alleges, “essentially tried to get access to a primary component of Syria’s main Internet Service Provider. Syria only has one big ISP, making it a particularly inviting target for electronic snooping; setting up that back door would have given the U.S. unparalleled access to nearly all digital communications within Syria, a major intelligence advantage.”