Showing posts with label Attack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Attack. Show all posts
Syrian rebels have breached part of Aleppo’s central prison, releasing several hundred inmates in a bloody skirmish with regime troops, activists reported Thursday.
The prison, which the rebels have had under siege for almost a year, has become a Syrian army base but still has up to 4,000 prisoners languishing in its cells, disease-rived and starving.
Up to 300 prisoners were released in the operation, led by Jabhat al-Nusra, a group affiliated with al-Qaida, and Ahrar al-Sham, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The rebels were forced to fall back when regime troops counter-attacked, dropping barrels filled with TNT from helicopters, activists in Aleppo said. The counter-attack reportedly killed the Nusra commander, who went by the name Saif Allah. Photographs of his body on a stretcher circulated on Twitter.
Yesterday’s attack began when a bomber from Nusra blew himself up at the gates. Rebel fighters swarmed in, fighting corridor by corridor to take over much of the compound.
Families and friends of prisoners waited anxiously for news, afraid that the fighting might kill their loved ones, but hopeful that this was also their chance to be released. “I have four nurses imprisoned there,” said a doctor in an opposition-held part of Aleppo. “Their crime was caring for patients in field hospitals in Aleppo.”
Iraq on Thursday hanged 11 people convicted of terrorism-related offenses, the Justice Ministry said, pursuing what a U.N. official has criticized as a “conveyor belt of executions.”
All those executed were Iraqi nationals, Justice Ministry spokesman Haider al-Saadi said in a text message. The hangings brought the total number of people executed in less than one week to 37.
Violence in Iraq has surged in the past year to its highest levels since the Sunni-Shiite sectarian bloodshed that peaked in 2006 and 2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed across the country.
Police said Thursday that they had thwarted an attack against a meeting of the provincial council in the central province of Diyala, killing seven suicide bombers and dismantling five car bombs that were apparently to be used during the foiled assault.
Gunmen also attacked an Iraqi army base in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib neighborhood, killing two soldiers, and a roadside bomb exploded when a minibus was passing near Tarmiyah, north of the capital, killing another person, police said.
Iraq hanged at least 151 people in 2013, up from 129 in 2012 and 68 in 2011, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in its annual world report, which was published Tuesday.
The United Nations’ human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has frequently condemned Iraq’s mass executions.
“This continued conveyor belt of executions by the government of Iraq is simply deplorable,” her spokesman, Rupert Colville, said Sunday after 26 people were hanged.
“Iraq’s justice system still has huge deficiencies which mean that resorting to even a small number of executions is risking a grave and irredeemable miscarriage of justice,” Colville said. “When people are executed by the dozen, it means that such miscarriages of justice are virtually certain to be occurring.”
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