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Added on the 03/01/2024 20:18:31 - Copyright : AFPTV - First images
The United States is seeking a "de-escalation" in the Middle East despite its strikes on Huthi positions in Yemen, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan says. "We seek to stop the spread of conflict and to create the conditions for de-escalation," he tells the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. SOUNDBITE
The United States has seen no "evidence of de-escalation" at the Russian border with Ukraine, State Department spokesperson Ned Price says at a briefing in Washington. SOUNDBITE
Thousands of invaluable ancient manuscripts were under threat from the so-called Islamic State Iraq's largest Christian city, Qaraqosh, after the city came under attack from the terrorist militant group in August 2014. Luckily, one daring Dominican priest managed to save countless historical documents. Father Najeeb Michael fled with the manuscripts alongside thousands of other Christians. However, after taking the books to relative safety in the nearby city of Mosul, Father Michaeel was forced to flee once more, this time to Erbil, just days before the arrival of IS fighters to Mosul.
This little toddler named Bilal Tagirov was just two years old when his father kidnapped him and forced him to travel to Syria in October 2015. Bilal's father Hassan Tagirov left the Chechen Republic in order to fight for the self-proclaimed Islamic State. His mother Zalikha Ashakhanova only found out that her son was located in Mosul by chance when she saw a video of him online on July 15, 2017. The toddler was found by Chechen security forces in Mosul and finally reunited with Zalikha in Grozny on Thursday, returning to her waiting arms.
Women living in Haji Ali, a group of villages numbering about 40,000 people in northern Iraq about 40 miles south of Mosul, have taken up arms to protect the area from Islamic State militants. IS-controlled villages are only about a mile away, so women have learned how to use weapons and have started guarding their families' houses at night, in order to help their men, which rotate in and out of the frontline. Villagers fear that IS could sneak across the Tigris river and into the village under the cover of night, and are complaining that locals don't have enough weapons to defend themselves.