Free Republic

Beirut (dpa) - A US-backed alliance of Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces were Saturday closing in on a strategic dam held by Islamic State in northern Syria, a monitoring group said. The Tishreen Dam is located about 22 kilometres from al-Raqqa, Islamic State's de-facto capital in Syria. It is one of three major dams on the Euphrates River that flows from Turkey through Syria and into Iraq, and supplies much of northern Syria with electricity. The Democratic Forces of Syria (DFS), a coalition comprising mainly local Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians, seized the eastern bank of the Euphrates close to Tishreen...

Syria’s new government will relocate ISIS families from camps, with Kurdish and US support. The new Syrian transitional government is seeking to find a way to deal with thousands of ISIS families who have been housed at camps in eastern Syria since ISIS was defeated in Syria in 2019. When ISIS was defeated in several villages near the Euphrates River in 2019, some of the terrorist group chose to surrender, and thousands of families of ISIS fighters ended up in the hands of the US-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The thousands of families were sent to several camps and detention facilities...

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was informed by several reliable sources that the Euphrates Dam which is located on the Euphrates River north of al-Tabaqa city in the western countryside of al-Raqqah has stopped working, the reasons are still unknown until now, where the sources of the observatory suggested that the Dam has stopped because of a power outage, which is being generated from the dam automatically, also the intersecting sources confirmed to the Syrian observatory for Human Rights that the main body of the Dam and the main turbines are still under the control the “Islamic State” organization...

As the civil war in Syria enters its third year, there is much discussion of the regimeÂ’s chemical weapons and whether SyriaÂ’s Bashar al-Assad will unleash them against Syrian rebels, or whether a power vacuum after AssadÂ’s fall might make those horrific tools available to the highest bidder. The conversation centers on SyriaÂ’s chemical weaponry, not on something vastly more serious: its nuclear weaponry. It well might have. This is the inside story of why it does not. Relations between the United States and Israel had grown rocky after IsraelÂ’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006, for Secretary of State Condoleezza...

The Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, al Qaeda in Iraq's affiliate in Syria, led an assault today that resulted in the takeover of a major dam on the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Additionally, the terror group claimed credit for a suicide assault on an intelligence headquarters in the city of Palmyra. The Al Nusrah Front spearheaded today's assault on the "strategic" dam in Thawra in Raqqa province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Nusrah Front led "other factions" of the insurgency to take control of Thawra, which "is considered one of the...

Syria is experiencing an economic holocaust. There is no other way to describe what the Syrian regime is so much trying to hide. The country is drying up, and no less than 250,000 farmers were forced in the past three years to abandon their land and migrate to the large cities. They live in tents there, completely neglected by the regime. These figures appeared in a special study undertaken by the United Nations and published on the al-Arabiya website. The immense Euphrates River, Syria’s main source of water, is drying up. The Turks are stopping its water in their territory,...

Iraq Suffers as the Euphrates River Dwindles By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON JUBAISH, Iraq — Throughout the marshes, the reed gatherers, standing on land they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat. “Maaku mai!” they shout, holding up their rusty sickles. “There is no water!” The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it...

FALLUJA, Iraq, Monday, Nov. 8 - Explosions and heavy gunfire thundered across Falluja on Sunday night and Monday morning as American troops seized control of two strategic bridges, a hospital and other objectives in the first stage of a long-expected invasion of the city, the center of the Iraqi insurgency. Hours earlier, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, faced with an expanding outbreak of insurgent violence across the country, formally proclaimed a state of emergency for 60 days across most of Iraq. The proclamation gave him broad powers that allow him to impose curfews, order house-to-house searches and detain suspected criminals and...