Islamic State Launches New Offensive in Syria

The Islamic State detonated four car bombs overnight in an effort to capture the Syrian town of Marea, north of Aleppo, from Syrian rebel groups. Dozens of fighters from both sides have been killed in the clashes. The Islamic State has also captured the nearby village of Um Hosh, and a rebel commander in the area said the area was experiencing the fiercest attack by the jihadist group in several months.

The fighting in Marea lasted through dawn on Tuesday morning. An Islamic State cell reportedly initially infiltrated the town and opened fire on people in the area, before detonating themselves. At least 25 rebel fighters were killed in the attack.

Turkey Launches Retaliatory Airstrikes Against PKK Overnight

The Turkish military has launched additional airstrikes against Kurdish militants at over 17 different locations in Turkey’s Hakkari province, on the border with Iran and Iraq. The strikes began after nine people were killed on Monday during a wave of violence targeting Turkish security forces. At least 50 people have been killed over the past month, following Ankara’s decision to launch a two-front campaign against the Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Headlines

-Iraq’s parliament voted unanimously to approve Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s reform package aiming to fight corruption and ease sectarian tension.

-Forty-two people have been killed and dozens injured in the Diyala province in eastern Iraq as two car bombs detonated on Monday.

-The Nusra Front has announced its withdrawal from front-line positions in northern Syria against the Islamic State stating they disagree with coalition plans to clear the extremists from the border.

-Rebels continue to surrender to Hezbollah and the Syrian Army in the border city of Zabadani as the allied forces push closure to victory after six weeks of fighting.

-Prominent Syrian rights activist Marzen Darwish has been released after more than three years of being held in prison for allegedly ‘prompting terror attacks’.

Arguments and Analysis

“Ending the Middle East’s Civil Wars” (Kenneth Pollack, Markaz, Brookings)

“The Middle East just gets worse and worse. It is beset by a plethora of immediate crises, themselves fed by deep structural flaws in the state system of the Muslim Middle East. For the United States, securing its interests in the midst of the region’s interlocking and overflowing conflicts has never been more challenging. The age-old debate over whether to focus finite American resources on the immediate symptoms or the underlying causes has never been so acute. All that said, it has become self-evident that the first and most important set of problems facing the Middle East are the civil wars raging in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. It is the civil wars that are generating the flood tides of refugees washing across the region.”

“Erdogan’s High-Risk Strategy” (Gonul Tol, Middle East Institute)

“Turkey has responded by opening Incirlik Air Base for coalition strikes on ISIS and arresting hundreds of suspected members of both the Islamic State and the PKK. Ankara has lumped both campaigns together in a broad “war on terror,” but both the air strikes and the arrests have mostly targeted Kurds. Ankara’s response is aimed at undermining coalition talks, securing the nationalist vote ahead of potential early elections, undercutting the gains made by the pro-Kurdish HDP in the June elections, and preventing the Syrian Kurds from linking up the Kurdish enclaves in northern Syria.”

-Kyra Murphy

ZEIN AL-RIFAI/AFP/Getty Images