January 17, 2016
IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT WAR ASSAD AND PUTIN PREFER TO FIGHT....:
Isis fighters abduct up to 400 civilians in major attack on Deir ez-Zor (Kareem Shaheen and Agence France-Presse, 17 January 2016, The Guardian)
Deir ez-Zor city, the capital of the province, is mostly under Isis control except for a few districts still held by forces loyal to the government of Bashar al-Assad. Residents there have endured months of siege by the militants.The offensive in Deir ez-Zor may be intended to burnish the terror group's image in its redoubts in Syria and Iraq, having lost much territory in recent months to different forces. In Iraq, it has lost the city of Ramadi to an army-led campaign, as well as the city of Sinjar, the ancestral home of the Yazidi community, to an offensive by the Kurdish paramilitary, the peshmerga.In northern Syria, close to the capital of their self-proclaimed caliphate in Raqqa, the militants have lost vast tracts of land to an American-backed offensive by Kurdish militias, whose forces are now just 30 miles from the city.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 17, 2016 3:06 PM