WASHINGTON: About 1,000 volunteers from the Asia-Pacific region have sought to join the Islamic State (IS) group, a senior military officer said yesterday.
Admiral Samuel Locklear, who oversees American forces across Asia as head of Pacific Command, gave the estimate a day after the United States pushed for a resolution committing major powers to block the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria.
“It certainly is an issue that we’re paying very close attention to today,” Locklear told a press conference in Washington.
“There’s probably been about 1,000 potential aspiring fighters that have moved from this region, based on kind of our overall assessment.
“That number could get larger as we go forward, but certainly that’s about the size or the magnitude that we perceive at this point in time,” the admiral said.
Locklear also said the expanded air war against the IS group in Iraq and Syria did not mean a strategic US “rebalance” to the Asia-Pacific would be scaled back, saying that the American military would continue to pursue its plan to bolster its presence and defense ties in the area.
President Barack Obama underscored growing concerns about foreign fighters flocking to the Middle East at a special session of the UN Security Council yesterday.
Obama chaired the meeting that saw the adoption of a resolution demanding governments prevent recruitment and all forms of aid to foreign fighters, making it illegal to collect funds or help organize their travel.
The militants who rule Iraq’s northern city of Mosul have executed a female rights activist who criticised the group on social media, several sources said yesterday.
According to rights groups and residents, Samira Saleh Al Nuaimi was executed on Monday. A source at Mosul morgue confirmed that her body was brought in earlier this week.
“I have also had contact with the morgue and sadly I can confirm that she is dead,” Hana Edward, a prominent Iraqi rights activist who knew Nuaimi, said.
The slain activist’s parents were informed on Tuesday that the body was at the morgue, one of their neighbours said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the militants.
A neighbour said she was kidnapped a week ago and the body brought back to the morgue earlier this week.
“When the family asked what she had done to deserve this, they said she had failed to express regret for making comments on Facebook condemning the demolition of the shrines,” he said.
The IS has destroyed several religious and historical monuments across Iraq, notably on the grounds that revering shrines built on graves amounted to idolatry.
The Gulf Centre for Human Rights said the lawyer had described as “barbaric” the destruction of Iraq’s heritage.
“A group of masked armed men who belong to (IS) opened fire and killed her in a public square in the very heart of Mosul,” the organisation said in a statement.
An Islamist militant band in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf, has threatened to kill one of two German hostages unless a ransom is paid and Berlin withdraws its support of a US-led air war against the IS group in Iraq and Syria.
AFP
