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Baked clay tablets from ancient Assyria, dating back as much as 4,000 years, could reveal the locations of 11 'lost cities' in modern-day Turkey. Harvard researchers analysed tablets found in the ancient city of Kanesh, the 12,000 cuneiform trade records include business transactions, accounts, seals and contracts. The researchers used mathematical models based on the price of goods and how frequently goods travelled between trade hubs to track down the locations of the ancient cities. Researchers reconstructed an economic network of trade goods such as wool, wine and precious metals across the Anatolian plateau in the 19th Century BC. The...

Iraqi forces have seized the strategically important town of Tal Afar from ISIS, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Thursday. An operation to retake the northwestern town, captured by the extremists on June 16, 2014, began 10 days ago. Tal Afar was the last town still under the control of ISIS militants in Iraq's Nineveh province following the liberation of Mosul, about 45 miles to the east. "The joy of victory has been completed and the entire province of Nineveh has become in the hands of our heroic forces," al-Abadi said, in a statement released Thursday by his media office. "I...

TrevorLoudon: National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster: A legend or a lie?(language warning)Fresh on the heels of a successful offensive in Mosul, Iraq, the Iraqi military is now poised to Operation Restoring Rights. His reputation as a brilliant military strategist rests largely on the results of that one battle. Given the widespread support for McMaster in the media and Washington establishment, it is ironic that current reporting largely fails to mention this battle or McMaster’s central role in it. McMaster’s widely-hyped strategic acumen has been called into question by high-level military sources with personal knowledge of his conduct in the...

In an unannounced trip to Iraq, a country that has seen horrific war and terrorism over the last decade, Secretary of Defense General James Mattis was making a statement. The general landed in Iraq Tuesday morning, just hours after President Trump made an announcement that America will be sending more troops to Afghanistan. Trump made it clear in his remarks that he is going to be empowering his generals to kill the enemy, whom he referred to as “losers.”

Full Title:Tied to a bed, injected with morphine to stay 'silent' and beaten so badly she couldn't walk for two months: Two Yazidi sex slaves relive the unspeakable cruelty they suffered at hands of ISIS fighters Two Yazidi women have told of the unimaginable cruelty they suffered at the hands of ISIS fighters who kept them as their sex slaves after raiding their homes in Iraq. One, a 19-year-old mother, says she allowed her first captor who 'bought her' to rape her 'whenever he wanted' because he would beat her one-year-old baby son if she resisted. Her son was the...

The Islamic State is turning Christian churches in Iraq and Syria into dungeons and torture chambers after stripping them of priceless artifacts to sell on the black market, according to reports. Ancient relics and even entire murals are being torn from the houses of worship and smuggled out through the same routes previously established for moving oil and weapons in and out of the so-called caliphate, a vast region the jihadist army has claimed as sovereign under Sharia law. "ISIS has a stated goal to wipe out Christianity,” Jay Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice and the...

I have been spending the past few days with American military forces in the Persian Gulf region. Everywhere I have gone with a group from the Council on Foreign Relations, military briefers have sheepishly prefaced their remarks by saying, “I read that story about PowerPoint, but I have a few PowerPoint slides I’d like to present anyway.” The story they’re referring to is this New York Times article, which suggests that the military is dangerously over reliant on this Microsoft program, which makes it all too easy to substitute glib bullet points for serious thought about pressing issues. Granted, PowerPoint...

The clamour is growing in America and Britain for troops to be brought home. Violence grips large parts of the country. But elsewhere the green shoots of recovery are showing through the rubble The cycle of murder and vengeance grinds quickly in Iraq. Last week, in the western city of Tal Afar, it was all over in 10 minutes. No one saw how Jamil Salem Jamil, aged 19, arrived. If he was driven to his target, then the car stayed out of sight. A slim Sunni youth, with a thick crop of black hair above his elongated features, he walked...

WASHINGTON, March 31, 2007 – Coalition and Iraqi forces are working with city leaders to secure the Iraqi city of Tal Afar after a bombing at a market killed more than 80 people earlier this week, a military official said today in a briefing from the city. “It’s been a tremendously busy four days, tremendously stressful four days,” Army Lt. Col. Malcom Frost, commander of 3rd Squadron, 4th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, told journalists from Forward Operating Base Sykes in Tal Afar. “But … the city is now secure and going back to...

The Iraqi government raised the death toll on Saturday from a truck bomb in the town of Tal Afar to 152, making it the deadliest single bombing of the four-year-old war. Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Abdul Kareem Khalaf said 347 people were wounded in Tuesday's attack on a Shi'ite area. Khalaf said 100 homes had been destroyed in the main blast, which officials have blamed on al Qaeda. The explosion left a 23-metre (75-ft)-wide crater. "It took us a while to recover all the bodies from underneath the rubble of the homes ... What did they achieve by using two...

WASHINGTON, March 28, 2007 ? U.S. and Iraqi officials have condemned a terrorist attack that killed dozens of civilians in Tal Afar, Iraq, yesterday. ?The Multinational Force Iraq commander joins the Iraqi prime minister in condemning the acts of violence and in calling upon the citizens of Tal Afar and all parties to cooperate in stemming the violence,? officials said in a statement released today. ?The coalition force stands ready to lend assistance to our Iraqi partners in the coming days as well as to assist in enforcing the rule of law.? Press reports put the number of dead...

Excerpt - BAGHDAD - Security and police officials said off-duty Shiite policemen enraged by massive bombings in the northern town of Tal Afar went on a revenge killing spree there Wednesday, gunning down an unspecified number of Sunni residents. They said the policemen began roaming the town's Sunni neighborhoods early in the morning, shooting at Sunni residents and homes. Dozens of Sunnis were killed or wounded, they said, but they had no precise figures. The shooting continued for more than two hours, the officials said. ~ snip ~

HH: Pleased to welcome Chief Warrant Officer Chris to the program. Chris has completed three tours in Iraq. Thank you for your service, Chris. What’s on your mind? Chris. Thank you, sir. Well, I wanted to comment on your last, and a number of other callers. His first point, to keep the soldiers in the Green Zone, and your counter, keep them on other bases, not an option. As soldiers, we know that it’s not a safe job. If we wanted a safe job, we’d do a checkout at a grocery store or some similar job. We know it’s a...

The investigation into the shooting death of Spc. Alyssa Peterson found her suicide came soon after she was reassigned for objecting to prisoner interrogation techniques but did not specifically give a reason for her action. A Flagstaff soldier who died in Iraq committed suicide after she refused to participate in interrogation techniques being practiced by her U.S. Army intelligence unit, according to a report about an Army investigation aired by a Flagstaff radio station. U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson, 27, died Sept. 15, 2003, in Tel Afar, an Iraqi city of about 350,000 residents in the northern part of...

BAGHDAD, Sept 12 (KUNA) -- Al-Iraqiya satellite television channel on Monday aired video footage showing dead bodies of Iraqi people, including children, mutilated by gunmen in the city of Tal Afar, northern Iraq. It showed photos of Iraqi children between the ages of six and 17, with their bodies and faces mutilated while lying down in their bedrooms, in addition to other photos of demolished and looted houses. The station also aired video footage of Tal Afar residents in camps outside the city, as they were forced to leave due to bombings and terror threats.

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. Army commander asserted Tuesday that extremist fighters in northern Iraq committed atrocities against civilians, including beheadings, torture and the booby-trapping of a murdered child's body. "The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine _ in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents; beheadings and so forth," McMaster said in an interview from Tal Afar with reporters at the Pentagon. His comments came two days after the...

TALL AFAR, Iraq, Sept. 4 -- Under the cover of a moonless night, U.S. soldiers on Sunday strung nearly a mile of razor-sharp concertina wire across the northern edge of a neighborhood dominated by insurgents to prevent them from fleeing without a showdown. Several small teams of five or six troops quickly uncoiled spools of wire and fastened it along the deserted sidewalk of a broad thoroughfare. The cordon was intended to prevent insurgents from blending in with the hundreds of people who fled the city during heavy clashes Sunday. "The idea is to trap them in Sarai or force...

COLORADO SPRINGS - An Iraqi mayor stood before troops lined up on the lawn at Fort Carson on Friday morning and said only two words in English. But those two words brought the crowd to its feet. "Thank you." It was a telling gesture from Tal Afar Mayor Najim Al Jibouri, who spoke for about 20 minutes in his native tongue praising the 3rd Armored Cavalry for saving his city from certain ruin.

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2006 – For the third straight day, coalition aircrews targeted an abandoned train station in Ramadi today, and a terrorist bomb detonated in a crowded area of Tal Afar last night, military officials in Iraq reported. Coalition forces have delivered precision munitions at the same train station multiple times in the past three days in response to hostile insurgent activity, officials said, adding that the station is a known hub of insurgent activity. Officials did not provide a casualty or damage assessment. Last night's Tal Afar attack left at least 16 Iraqi civilians dead and 134 others...

TAL AFAR, Iraq — Staff Sgt. Jeff Anderson had barely searched the room before he got a bad vibe. The rest of the house was filled with furniture and “lots of nice things,” he said, but this room was different. It had a simple wood couch, a wall closet and a framed poster. That’s all. The 24-year-old Montgomery, Ala., native tugged the poster off the wall. There was a ventlike opening behind it — the kind of place where insurgents stash weapons. He dragged the couch over to boost himself up and have a peek. “I pulled the couch away...