#counter-isis

#counter-isis

Israeli forces killed six Hezbollah fighters in an exchange of fire in the area of Bint Jbeil, southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that two people were killed in an Israeli air strike in the southern area of Touline.

Chief Warrant Officer Arnaud Frion died for France while stationed in the Erbil region, Macron said on Thursday, in what he condemned as an unacceptable attack. Their presence in Iraq is strictly within the framework of the fight against terrorism. The war in Iran cannot justify such attacks, Macron said in a post on X.

We are on the trigger finger. After 22 years in the movement, we have never been this busy. The American-Israeli effort to bring down the Iranian regime is not likely to succeed without the help of PJAK and other Kurdish armed groups.

Numbering between 30 and 40 million worldwide, most live amid the peaks and valleys straddling the borders of Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds link their history to that of the Medes, an ancient Middle Eastern people. They were left stateless a century ago when the borders of the modern Middle East emerged from the collapsing Ottoman empire.

A US military refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq on Thursday, in an incident US Central Command said involved another aircraft but was not the result of hostile or friendly fire. The United States has surged a large number of aircraft into the Middle East to take part in operations against Iran.

The calls were the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another source said. Israel has had close security, military and intelligence ties with the Kurds in Syria, Iraq and Iran for decades. "It is the general view, and certainly Netanyahu's view, that the Kurds are going to come out of the woodwork ... that they're going to rise up," one official said.

The United States has started withdrawing from a key military base in northeastern Syria and redeploying its forces to northern Iraq, marking the first phase of a pullout expected to last several weeks. Heavy machinery, personnel and trucks carrying armoured vehicles could be seen moving on Monday in the northwestern city of Hasakah from the Qasrak base, the largest US base in Syria. They were headed towards the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.