US defy jihadists’ threat and strikes Iraq

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US warplanes Thursday mounted new airstrikes against the militant Islamist State’s targets in northern Iraq, media reported, despite the terrorist group’s threat to kill a captured American journalist.

IraqAt least 35 Islamic State fighters were killed in a US airstrike in the northern province of Nineveh, a local security official told independent Iraqi site Alsumaria News.

Seven armoured vehicles manned by jihadists were destroyed in the attack, the unnamed official said.

On Tuesday, the Islamic State – an al-Qaeda splinter group – released a video showing a masked extremist with a British accent beheading US reporter James Foley, who went missing in Syria in November 2012.

The executor was identified to the British newspaper Guardian by one of his former hostages as the ringleader of three British jihadists, calling himself John and thought to be the main guards of foreign nationals in the north-eastern Syrian city of al-Raqqa, a stronghold of the Islamic State.

The radical group threatened to execute a second American reporter, identified as Steven Joel Sotloff, if US President Barack Obama did not end the strikes that started in Iraq on August 8.

The European Union Thursday condemned the killing of Foley as an “outrageous murder.”

“The EU will continue to promote the safety of journalists in the Middle East and worldwide,” Sebastien Brabant, a spokesman for the bloc’s foreign policy chief, said in Brussels.

Obama Wednesday vowed that the US would continue the campaign against the Islamic State.

Obama authorized the strikes after the militants made sweeping advances in northern Iraq, forcing many thousands of the country’s minority Christians and Yezidis fleeing.

A Yezidi militia Thursday killed at least 22 fighters from the Islamic State in clashes in the northern town of Sinjar, a member of the militia said.

A force from the Yezidi group, Malik al-Tawus (King Peacock), clashed with Islamic State insurgents in Sinjar, west of the rebel-held city of Mosul, and killed 22 of them, militia spokesman Khudida al-Haskani, told Alsumaria News.

The Yezidi fighters suffered no casualties, according to him.

The Islamic State – an extremist Sunni group – has in recent weeks overrun areas inhabited by the Yezidis in northern Iraq, forcing an exodus.

The group reportedly killed dozens of the Yezidis after they refused to convert to Islam.

The militants consider the Yezidis, followers of a religion with pre-Islamic origins, to be infidels.

Malik al-Tawus is a self-defence group, believed to have been set up in 2007 to protect the Yezidi community in Iraq against attacks by radical Islamists.

In June, the leader of the Islamic State declared himself to be the ruler of an Islamist caliphate in the parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria under the group’s control.

GNA
PDC

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