Last major IS city in Iraq is falling fast

(AP) — Iraq's military said Saturday it has driven Islamic State militants out of 90 percent of the northern town of Tal Afar and retaken the town center.
Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, a military spokesman, spoke hours after Iraq's foreign minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said that 70 percent of the town west of Mosul had been retaken. Al-Jaafari spoke during a news conference with his French counterpart.

IS chased out of central Syria

(Reuters) - The Syrian army and allied forces have captured one of the last major Islamic State enclaves in the central Syrian desert, a monitor and a Hezbollah military media unit said on Saturday.
The pocket of territory totals around 2,000 square km (770 square miles), said the media unit run by Hezbollah, which fights alongside Syrian government forces in the war.
The Syrian army -- supported by Russian air power and Iran-backed militias -- secured al-Sukhna this month. It was the last major town in Homs province that Islamic State held.

U.S. bombs another hospital

U.S.-led airstrikes on Friday destroyed parts of the general hospital of Raqqa city in northeastern Syria, a monitor group reported, as the Islamic State (IS) group launched a counter offensive against the Syrian army in eastern Raqqa, killing 34 soldiers.
The "violent" shelling by the U.S.-led coalition also led to an electricity outage in other parts of the hospital, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The SDF has already captured 60 percent of Raqqa city since unleashing an attack on the city two and a half months ago.
In an earlier report, the observatory said that as many as 773 civilians have been killed by U.S.-led strikes and shelling of the SDF since the operation against Raqqa began in June of this year.
The London-based watchdog group said 197 children and 119 women were among those killed during the battles in Raqqa.

U.N. asks U.S. to stop killing civiians

The soaring civilian death toll from US airstrikes against the ISIS capital city of Raqqa has gotten so bad that yesterday, it actually fueled a statement from the UN requesting the US pause their airstrikes to allow more civilians to flee the city.
US officials are rejecting this call, however, with SPecial Envoy Brett McGurk insisting that the war against ISIS is going very well, and that the “number one thing that we have to do to” to help civilians in Raqqa is continue the war and defeat ISIS outright.

Killing civilians in Somalia

Ten civilians, including three children, were killed in a raid by foreign and Somali forces on a farm in southern Somalia, a deputy governor said Friday, as the U.S. military confirmed it supported a counter-terror operation in the area and said it would look into the allegations.
The deaths raise questions about growing U.S. military involvement in the Horn of Africa nation after President Donald Trump approved expanded operations against the al-Qaida-linked extremist group al-Shabab, often in support of Somali forces.
The farmers were killed “one by one” after soldiers stormed into Barire village early Friday, the deputy governor of Lower Shabelle region, Ali Nur Mohamed, told reporters in the capital, Mogadishu, as victims’ bloodied bodies were on display.

No way out in Afghanistan

We’ve tried killing terrorists. Lots and lots of them. As many as 42,000 Taliban and other insurgents have been killed and another 19,000 wounded in fighting since 2001, according to one rough 2016 estimate. The United States has also carried out more than 400 drone strikes in Pakistan, decimating Al Qaeda’s core leadership. Last year a drone took out the Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour.
Result: The Taliban’s numbers in 2005 were estimated at anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 fighters. Within a decade, those numbers had grown to an estimated 60,000 fighters.

Boris Johnson is welcomed in Libya (yes, this is real)