Coalition remains committed to defeating IS ‘on all fronts’
US reports 13 air strikes against militants in Iraq
LONDON, Oct 29, (Agencies): British Minister for the Middle East and North Africa Tobias Ellwood said Wednesday the Global Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) remains committed to defeating the group “on all fronts.” Speaking to reporters after a meeting by representatives from 32 countries of the Coalition, Ellwood said the meeting was meant “to specifically discuss one strand: the communications effort against ISIL.” The meeting, hosted by Ellwood, was held at the Coalition’s Strategic Communications Working Group here.
“As well as the military campaign, the Coalition is working together to counter ISIL’s poisonous narrative and to challenge its ideology, as well as cutting off their finances and reducing the influx of foreign fighters,” he affirmed.
“As the Prime Minister (David Cameron) recently announced, the UK has set up a new anti-ISIL Strategic Communications Cell for which we have committed an initial GBP 10 million,” the minister pointed out.
Meanwhile, the United States and its allies conducted 13 air strikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq on Wednesday, according to a military statement released on Thursday.
The strikes hit Islamic State weapons, boats, fighting positions and other targets near six Iraqi cities, including Ramadi and Mosul, the statement said. No attacks on the militant group in Syria were listed.
A US-led coalition has been bombing Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria since last year.
Nearly 600 people have been killed in Russian air strikes in Syria nearly a month into Moscow’s campaign, twothirds of them opposition fighters, a monitor said on Thursday.
A total of 595 people have been killed in Russian strikes since September 30, two-thirds of them fighters with opposition forces including the jihadist Islamic State group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The other third, some 185 people, were civilians, including 48 children, the Britain-based monitor said.
Russia has carried out strikes throughout Syria, with only four of the country’s 14 provinces untouched by the aerial campaign since it began, according to the group.
Air strikes in northern Syria have hit at least 12 hospitals in recent weeks, killing at least 35 patients and medical staff in a new escalation of fighting, international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said.
The violence has also caused the displacement of thousands of civilians since
the end of September, MSF said, reporting a significant increase strikes on medical facilities.
The charity did not specify which country had carried out the air strikes. Russian and Syrian jets have been carrying out an intense air offensive in the west and northwest Syria.
In a related story as his family crammed alongside strangers into a small, exposed makeshift tent in Syria near the border with Turkey, Mohammed
Musa slept outside in the mud through the first heavy rainfalls of autumn.
Aweek earlier the 24-year-old, his wife, child, parents and siblings fled their home in southern Aleppo province with just the clothes on their backs, after Russian warplanes and Syrian helicopters pounded their village in raids whose intensity they had never seen in four years of conflict.
He described the conditions in an interview with Reuters held via internet from a displaced people’s camp in Idlib
province. A local aid worker sent photos and videos from the camp.
The family joined the 120,000 Syrians who the United Nations says have been displaced in the four weeks since Moscow’s air force joined the war on the side of ally President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, Qatar’s Foreign Minister Khalid al-Attiyah has ruled out sending troops to fight Syria’s government, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera English quoted him as saying.
he said.
Darusman praised a construction company in Qatar for dismissing 90 North Korean workers in May — nearly half its workforce — for alleged repeated violations of domestic labor legislation. According to the company, which was not named, supervisors were forcing them to work more than 12 hours a day, he said.
Darusman cited a report by the International Network for the Human Rights of North Korean Overseas Labor in 2012 that North Korea is believed to earn between $1.2 billion and $2.3 billion annually from these workers.
The UN investigator put the spotlight on forced labor as a human rights violation in his report that also cited summary executions, arbitrary detention, torture, massive ill-treatment of individuals in political prison camps and severe discrimination based on social class.
“The near total denial of human rights in the country revolves around ... instilling fear within the minds and hearts of the population,” Darusman said.
He said he “remains convinced” that the Security Council should refer North Korea’s human rights situation to the International Criminal Court, to speedily bring to justice those most responsible the denial of human rights “including those at the highest level of decisionmaking.” Such a move, however, is likely to be vetoed by permanent council member China and perhaps Russia. Pyongyang has tried to cultivate both over the years as rare allies.