STIRI

• Has Syria’s Dictator Assad Suffered a Stroke?

  Newsweek

  Mar 8, 2017

  This article first appeared on the Atlantic Council site. Bashar al-Assad finally made a public appearance to women from the Alawite religious sect who had been kidnapped. It was notable that on this occasion Assad spoke for a long time, gesturing with both hands, and denied rumors that he suffered a stroke. Read More

• Daring nighttime raid turns to deadly trap in Mosul

  Hours after Mosul’s municipal complex was declared liberated by the country’s top military commanders and U.S.-led coalition officials, the wounded began pouring into a small frontline clinic just a few hundred meters away. “Daesh had everything planned,” said Hamza Daoud of the Federal Police who helped rush his wounded comrades out of a battered Humvee and onto stretchers in the garden of an abandoned building. “As we first advanced there was no resistance (from the Islamic State group), but once we entered, they woke up,” Daoud said, explaining he was only able to get out by ramming through a makeshift roadblock. Iraqi forces launched a daring nighttime raid in the early hours of Tuesday morning on the sprawling complex of municipal buildings in western Mosul along the Tigris River.

  Washington Post

• 'We are not meant to sit at home' — Meet the female Peshmerga fighters battling ISIS

  The Kurdish Peshmerga has been battling the ISIS terror group since it swept through much of Iraq...

  Business Insider

• Turkish gunman who killed Scottish toddler is killed at own wedding six days after prison release

  Daimi Akyuz was killed on Saturday as he stepped out for a cigarette, only six days after being released from prison. Akyuz, 46, had been jailed for life after he killed 2-year-old Alistair Grimason in the seaside resort of Foca almost 14 years ago.

  Yahoo News UK

• Donald Trump's Barack Obama wiretapping claims could get him impeached, says Harvard law professor

  Donald Trump’s claims that Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of his phones during the presidential campaign could lead to the Republican being impeached, a leading US law professor has said. Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the unsubstantiated claims, if proved false, could be a “major scandal” that “could get the current president impeached”. It comes after Mr Trump posted a series of early-morning tweets in which he accused his predecessor of ordered the wiretap.

  The Independent

• Iraqi PM tells ISIS to surrender or die

  As Iraqi forces enter the old city of Western Mosul, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi tells ISIS to surrender or die. CNN's Ben Wedeman reports.

  CNN