Iraqi forces say they recaptured six districts from ISIL in city’s east and open new front as fighting spikes.

Iraqi civilians have had to make the dangerous journey fleeing the violence on foot [Reuters]

Iraqi special forces stepped up attacks against ISIL in Mosul on Friday, seeking to expand the army’s foothold in the east of the city after the leader of the armed group told his men there could be no retreat.

In a military statement, troops from the Counter Terrorism Service said that they had taken over the six neighbourhoods of Malayeen, Samah, Khadra, Karkukli, Quds and Karama. They raised the Iraqi flag over buildings in those neighbourhoods, and inflicted heavy losses on the fighters with ISIL, or ISIS, the statement said.

Columns of armored vehicles wound through open desert on Friday to open a new front, pushing through dirt berms, drawing heavy fire and calling in airstrikes to enter the middle-class neighbourhoods of Tahrir and Zahara – an area once named after former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi television footage from the east of the city showed heavy plumes of grey smoke rising into the sky.

Iraqi regular troops and special forces, Shia militias, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and other groups backed by US-led air raids launched a campaign two weeks ago to retake Mosul, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group’s last major urban bastion in Iraq.

Winning it back would crush the Iraqi half of a crossborder caliphate declared by ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque two years ago.

ISIL also holds large parts of neighbouring Syria, but Mosul is by far the largest city under its control in either country, and the campaign to retake it is the most complex in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein and unleashed a decade of turmoil.

Baghdadi: No retreat from total war

In a rare audio message released on Thursday, Baghdadi – whose whereabouts are unknown – said there could be no retreat in a “total war” against the forces arrayed against ISIL, telling fighters they must stay loyal to their commanders.

The city is still home to nearly 1.5 million people, who risk being caught up in brutal urban warfare. The United Nations has warned of a potential humanitarian crisis and a refugee exodus, although Iraqi officials say ISIL fighters are holding the civilian population as human shields.

“A lot of people here are telling us that they’re happy that they’re no longer under ISIL, that their lives were so difficult. But some are very frustrated, particularly one man who was waiting for a tent and sleeping out in the open. He said ‘life for us has been stopped’,” said Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from a campsite for internally displaced people in Khazir, north of Mosul.

Mosul residents, speaking to the Reuters news agency by telephone, said ISIL fighters were deploying artillery and rocket launchers inside and near residential areas.

Some were hidden in trees near the Wahda district in the south, while others were deployed on the rooftops of houses taken over by the militants in the Ghizlani district close to Mosul’s airport, they said.

“We saw [ISIL] fighters installing a heavy anti-aircraft machinegun alongside a rocket launchpad, and mortars as well,” one Mosul resident said.

Shia militias attacked

People in the southern and eastern neighbourhoods reported on Thursday night that barrages of artillery shells and rockets being launched from their districts towards the advancing troops had shaken their houses.

As well as the ISIL resistance in Mosul itself, the fighters have launched a series of diversionary attacks across the country since the start of the offensive.

In the town of Shirqat, about 100km south of Mosul, fighters stormed a mosque and several houses early on Friday, a local police officer said, killing seven soldiers and fighters from the Shia Popular Mobilisation Forces, or Hashid Shaabi.

The fighters crossed from the eastern side of the Tigris river into the town at 3am, taking over al-Baaja mosque and spreading out into alleyways. Security forces declared a curfew and said reinforcements from the Popular Mobilisation Forces were being sent to the town.

Iraqi troops and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have closed in on it for two weeks from the north, from the eastern Nineveh plains and up the Tigris from the south.

The Popular Mobilisation Forces of mainly Shia militia groups joined the campaign on Saturday, launching an offensive to cut off any supply or escape to the west.

A spokesman said that they had made progress but had not completely closed off the western flank, and their fighters had seen from a distance some cars leaving Mosul on Thursday.

Sharbat Gula, who became iconic photo of her country’s conflict, is accused of using fake ID cards to stay in Pakistan.

by Al Jazeera

A Pakistani court refused bail to an Afghan woman who became famous for her portrait on National Geographic cover 35 years ago, after she was arrested in Pakistan for using fake identity cards.

Pakistan last week arrested Sharbat Gula, whose haunting green eyes, captured in an image taken in a Pakistan refugee camp by photographer Steve McCurry in the 1980s, became one of the most recognisable photos of Afghanistan’s decades-long conflict.

She was accused of living in the country on fraudulent identity papers following a two-year investigation into her and her husband, who has absconded.

Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, Pakistan’s interior minister, said on Sunday the country would review her case on the grounds that “she is a woman” and the government “should see it from a humanitarian angle”.

However a judge in the northwestern city of Peshawar rejected bail for Gula, saying she had failed to make her case.

She got both a computerised ID and a manual ID, Judge Farah Jamshed said in a written judgement, “meaning that on both occasions she impersonated herself as Pakistani citizen without legally adopting the status of same”.

Officials say Gula applied for a Pakistani identity card in Peshawar in 2014, using the name Sharbat Bibi.

‘Serious crime’

Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid, reporting from Islamabad, said Gula’s lawyer intends to challenge the decision in a higher court.

“It is a serious crime in Pakistan to be in possession of fake identity cards. It carries a 14-year-term in jail and on top of that a heavy fine,” our correspondent said.

“However, her case is being pursued by the Afghan embassy in Pakistan.”

The Pakistan government has stepped up its crackdown on Afghan refugees, insisting that many attacks in the country had links with Afghanistan and therefore the refugees must now go home.

Gula’s arrest highlights the desperate measures many Afghans are willing to take to avoid returning to their war-torn homeland as Pakistan cracks down on undocumented foreigners.

Pakistan has for decades provided safe haven for millions of Afghans who fled their country after the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Until recently the country had hosted up to 1.4 million Afghan refugees, according to UNHCR, making it the third-largest refugee hosting nation in the world.

A further one million unregistered refugees were also believed to be in the country.

But since July hundreds of thousands have returned to Afghanistan in a desperate exodus amid fears of a crackdown, as even Pakistan’s famed hospitality ran out.

Last month UNHCR said more than 350,000 Afghan refugees, documented and undocumented, had returned from Pakistan so far in 2016, adding it expects a further 450,000 to do so by the year’s end.

UN investigators say Syrian forces were behind a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Idlib province in March 2015.

People inspect damaged buildings targeted by air strikes in Deir al-Asafir district, in the Damascus suburbs [Mohammed Badra/EPA]

by Al Jazeera

An international inquiry has blamed Syrian government forces for a third chemical weapons attack, according to a confidential report to the United Nations Security Council.

The report, prepared by a joined committee set up by the UN and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and seen by Reuters news agency, was presented to the security council on Friday.

The UN experts behind the report said Syrian forces were responsible for a toxic gas attack in the village of Qmenas in Idlib province on March 16, 2015. The committee was unable to determine who was behind two other gas attacks – against Binnish in Idlib province in March 2015 and Kafr Zita in Hama province in April 2014.

“A joint investigative mechanism was set up by the international chemical weapons watchdog and the UN to investigate reports of chemical attacks in Syria,” Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said.

“Now in its fourth and final report it says it found a third chemical attack carried out by the Syrian army.”

The UN-led joint investigative mechanism (JIM) reported in late August that Syrian government forces had carried out at least two chemical attacks in 2014 and 2015 and that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters had used mustard gas on the battlefield.

Of the nine total alleged chemical attacks it is considering in its ongoing probe, the JIM has now attributed three to the Syrian government and one to ISIL.

In its fourth report, investigators concluded that there is now “sufficient information” that attack on Qmenas, near Idlib city, “was caused by a Syrian Arab Armed Forces helicopter dropping a device from a high altitude, which hit the ground and released the toxic substance that affected the population”.

Investigators say the substance may have been chlorine gas, based on the symptoms the victims displayed.

In Kafr Zita, however, the JIM could not confirm that the Syrian army had used barrel bombs to dump toxic substances because “the remnants of the device allegedly used had been removed”, the report said.

Investigators also said that a “canister with traces of chlorine” was found in Binnish, though the container could not be “linked to any of several incident locations identified”.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical weapons adviser to NGOs working in Syria and Iraq, welcomed the findings but said the report should had been made released earlier.

“The fact that it took 18 months for these results to be published is the real issue, and I think the UN need to look at that because having that amount of time before taking action is just not realistic in the current day,” he told Al Jazeera.

Calls for sanctions

Chlorine’s use as a weapon is prohibited under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013. If inhaled, chlorine gas turns to hydrochloric acid in the lungs and can kill by burning lungs and drowning victims in the resulting body fluids.

The inquiry’s mandate was extended until October 31 to finish the probe.

“Now this report will go to the security council which will discuss it in a close session in the coming week and certainly there is going to be a very heated discussion,” Hanna said.

“After JIM’s previous report the US and Russia agreed that they would agree between themselves what action to take next.

“But other members of the council, in particular Britain and France, will likely now be pushing for far more drastic measures to be taken by the security council and certainly there will be intense debate about what the security council is going to do next,” our correspondent said.

Governments in Paris, London and Washington have already called for sanctions against perpetrators of chemical attacks in Syria, including against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

But the Syrian government has been shielded by its ally Russia, which has questioned the JIM findings and said the evidence is not conclusive enough to warrant sanctions.

“To drop these weapons on civilians is absolutely deplorable and reprehensible,” de Bretton-Gordon, the chemical weapons adviser, told Al Jazeera.

“I think the UN should seriously consider a no-fly zone for Syrian helicopters to prevent this from happening in the future.”

Syria agreed to get rid of its chemical stockpile and refrain from making any use of toxic substances in warfare when it joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013, under pressure from Russia.

The Syrian government has also been accused of using chemical weapons in rebel-held areas in Syria in 2016 and investigations one these occasions are still on going.

Meanwhile, security concerns forced the UN to delay planned evacuations from Syria’s Aleppo, the world body said, as Russia extended a truce that was largely holding into a third day on Saturday.

Moscow said it was extending the unilateral “humanitarian pause” in the Syrian government’s Russian-backed assault on opposition-held east Aleppo until 16:00 GMT.

But there was no sign that civilians or rebels were heeding calls to leave, with Damascus and Moscow accusing opposition fighters of preventing evacuations.

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has demanded an end to air strikes on Aleppo’s residential areas.

Speaking at a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday, she described the situation in Aleppo as “barbaric”.

On the same day in Geneva, the UN rights council called for a special investigation into the violence in Aleppo in a resolution fiercely critical of Syria’s government.

East Aleppo, which the rebels captured in 2012, has been under siege by the army since mid-July and has faced devastating bombardment by the government and Russia since the September 22 launch of an offensive to retake the whole city.

Nearly 500 people have been killed, more than a quarter of them children, since the assault began. More than 2,000 civilians have been wounded.

The scale of the casualties has prompted international outrage, with Washington saying the bombardment amounted to a possible war crime.

Russia announced a halt to its air strikes from Tuesday and the unilateral ceasefire from Thursday.

The Syrian army says it has opened eight corridors across the front line for the more than 250,000 civilians in rebel-held areas to leave, but so far almost none have taken up the offer.

“There has been no movement in the corridors in the eastern district. For the moment, we haven’t seen any movement of residents or fighters,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

Asked if he would concede a loss to Hillary Clinton, Republican candidate said “I will look at it at the time”.

by Al Jazeera

Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee for US president, has refused to say that he would accept the election result if he loses, as he clashed with rival Hillary Clinton in their third and final debate.

Declining to be drawn on what he would do, he said: “I will look at it at the time.”

Trump has leaned on an increasingly brazen strategy in the campaign’s closing weeks, including peddling charges that the election will be rigged, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in previous US presidential contests.

“The biggest issue [from the debate] is his unwillingness to accept the outcome of the election,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a prominent civil rights leader and member of the Democratic Party, told Al Jazeera. “That could sabotage the entire American process.”

Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from Las Vegas, said that it was the first time in three debates that “we saw real policy differences” between the two candidates.

“They argued about them in substantive terms,” Fisher said.

One of the hotly debated topics on stage was immigration, which has been a key issue in Trump’s campaign. He repeated a pledge that if he becomes president, a wall will be built on the Mexico border to stop people entering the country illegally.

After discussing the wars in Syria and Iraq, the discussion turned to refugees in need of protection. While Trump repeated his claim that the US does not know who it is letting into the country, Clinton said: “I am not going to let anyone into this country who is not vetted … but I am not going to slam the door on women and children.”

But D’Angelo Gore, a fact-checker with the website Politifact, told Al Jazeera that both candidates mischaracterised each other’s policy proposals during the debate.

“Trump said that Clinton’s immigration policy was to simply grant amnesty to all the immigrants living in the United States, which is inaccurate,” Gore said. “The reality is that Clinton’s immigration reform is much more comprehensive, including increased border control.”

According to Gore, Clinton’s accusation that Trump wanted to abolish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was also inaccurate, as Trump has thus far only expressed frustration that NATO has not focused enough on “fighting terrorism” as well as the notion that the US carries most of the financial burden.

Wednesday’s face-off at the University of Nevada came as early voting was already under way in more than 30 states – at least 2.1 million voters have cast ballots already.

For Trump, the debate was perhaps his last opportunity to turn around a presidential race that appears to be slipping away.

In an average of national polls , Clinton has a lead at 48.6 percent over Trump’s 42.1 percent.

His predatory comments about women and a flood of sexual assault accusations have increased his unpopularity with women and limited his pathways to victory.

Discussing the sexual assault claims in the debate, Trump said he did not apologise to his wife, because he “didn’t do anything”.

Clinton took the stage with challenges of her own.

While the electoral map currently leans in her favour, she is facing a new round of questions about her trustworthiness, concerns that have trailed her throughout the campaign.

The hacking of her top campaign adviser’s emails revealed a candidate who is averse to apologising, can strike a different tone in private than in public, and makes some decisions only after political deliberations.

When the moderator brought up quotes from a Clinton email released by WikiLeaks in which she seemed to express a stance on trade that differs from what she has said publicly, she quickly deflected the question.

She proceeded to say, “What’s really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans … this has come from the highest levels … from Putin himself … to influence this election”.

UN agency passes resolution that criticises Israeli policies around al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

The resolution caused Israel to suspend its cooperation with the agency. (AFP/File)

by Al Jazeera

Palestinian leaders have welcomed a decision by the United Nations cultural agency to adopt a resolution on occupied East Jerusalem that sharply criticises Israeli policies around the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, while Israel says it ignores Jewish ties to the key holy site.

A spokesman for Paris-based UNESCO said on Tuesday that the resolution, which caused Israel to suspend its cooperation with the agency, was adopted without a new vote after being approved at the committee stage last week.

The text, which touches on Israel’s management of Palestinian religious sites, refers throughout to the al-Aqsa mosque compound site in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City only by its Muslim names: al-Aqsa and al-Haram al-Sharif.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is the third-holiest site in Islam. Jews refer to the site as the Temple Mount.

Palestine’s deputy ambassador to UNESCO, Mounir Anastas, told reporters the resolution “reminds Israel that they are the occupying power in East Jerusalem and it asks them to stop all their violations”, including archaeological excavations around religious sites.

The UNESCO resolution also condemned Israel for restricting Muslim access to the site, and for aggression by Israeli police and soldiers, while also recognising Israel as the occupying power.

“By criticising the report for the omission of the words Temple Mount, [Israel] glosses over more than two dozen detailed criticisms of Israeli actions in and around the Old City, which is after all occupied territory,” Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennan, reporting from West Jerusalem, said.

The resolution was submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan – and was originally passed with 24 votes in favour, six against, and 26 abstentions.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said in a statement on Thursday that UNESCO had lost its legitimacy by adopting this resolution.

“The theatre of the absurd at UNESCO continues, and today the organisation adopted another delusional decision which says that the people of Israel have no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall,” Netanyahu said.

In April, UNESCO also passed a resolution condemning “Israeli aggressions and illegal measures against the freedom of worship and Muslims’ access to the al-Aqsa Mosque”, also failing to mention the site’s Jewish name.

In 2011, the Palestinians were admitted as a member state of the organisation, which led the United States to suspend its payments to UNESCO.

The latest resolutions created unease at the top of the organisation, with Michael Worbs, who chairs UNESCO’s executive board, saying he would have liked more time to work out a compromise.

“We need more time and dialogue between the members of the board to reach a consensus,” he told AFP news agency.

UNESCO chief Irina Bokova had distanced herself from Thursday’s vote, saying in a statement: “Nowhere more than in Jerusalem do Jewish, Christian and Muslim heritage and traditions share space.”

But Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign minister, responded to Bokova by describing her comments as “completely unacceptable”.

“The Palestinian government expects Ms Bokova to focus her efforts on implementing the will of member states and preserving Jerusalem from the Israeli systematic colonisation and assault on its Palestinian character,” said Maliki.

Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed following its invasion in 1967 – in a move never recognised by the international community – as part of its subsequent military occupation of the West Bank.

Jewish settlers and Zionist organisations have called for complete Jewish control over the mosque compound.

Jewish groups’ incursions into the mosque compound have continuously led to Palestinian protests across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military and armed settler incursions have resulted in Palestinian deaths and injuries in recent years in particular. Muslim access to the religious site has also been tremendously limited by the army.