ISIS Militants Add Cluster Bombing to Tactics, Rights Group Says
The New York Times reports that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ISIS) has attacked enemies with banned cluster bombs, Human Rights Watch said on Monday. It was unclear how the Sunni militant group had acquired the weapons.
Stephen Goose, HRW’s arms division director, said in a statement that “‘credible evidence’ had emerged that ISIS forces used ground-fired cluster munitions on July 12 and Aug. 14 during fighting with Kurdish militia members in Aleppo Province near the northern Syrian border with Turkey,” the paper writes.
“The use of cluster munitions by non-state actors such as the Islamic State shows the urgent need for Syria and all nations that have not yet done so to join the ban on cluster munitions and destroy their stockpiles,” the organization said in the statement, citing reports by Kurdish officials and photographic evidence to corroborate the allegations.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the day after raising the U.K.’s terror alert to its second-highest level, Prime Minister David Cameron has announced plans to “strip suspected Islamist militants of their passports temporarily, to combat the threat posed by radicalized Britons returning from Syria and Iraq.”
He also said ISIS posed Britain’s greatest-ever security risk. A video released by ISIS last month depicted the beheading of American journalist James Foley at the hands of a man with a London accent, in a video released last month, increasing concerns about British citizens fighting in the region.
“We have all been shocked and sickened by the barbarism we have witnessed in Iraq this summer,” Cameron told Parliament. “There are two key areas where we need to strengthen our powers to fill specific gaps in our armory. These are around preventing suspects from traveling and dealing decisively with those already here who pose a risk.”
And “heavy fighting” erupted on Monday between the Syrian army and Islamist rebels – led by Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS’s extremist enemy and the Syrian arm of al-Qaida – on the Golan Heights, where the militants are still holding 44 U.N. peacekeepers from Fiji.
Pro-Government Syrian Activist Arrested After Public Dissent
Reuters reports that Syrian government authorities have arrested Mudar Hassan Khadur, a pro-government Alawite lawyer and activist who had launched a social media campaign asking regime officials to provide information about hundreds of missing soldiers.
“The arrest on Friday has fueled an already unusually bold push by some government supporters to hold officials accountable for the rising death toll among President Bashar al-Assad’s loyalists,” the wire writes.
Before his disappearance, Khadur “represented a rare but growing voice of public dissent among Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam to which Assad and many of his top military and security advisors belong.”