Israeli strikes on Saturday morning killed four Syrian regime soldiers and wounded one in central and western districts, Syrian state media reported. “At about 06:30 am (0330 GMT), the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack” which resulted in “the death of four soldiers, the wounding of one soldier and material losses”, a military source told the regime-controlled SANA news agency. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the strikes targeted pro-Iranian groups in Homs and Hama provinces, hitting weapons and ammunition sites. Israel also targeted a Syrian air defence battery in Latakia province, it added.
Islamic State group militants attacked an Iraqi army position in the northwestern governorate of Kirkuk early Saturday killing four soldiers, security sources and a local government official said, according to AP. IS fighters in the district of Dibis took the soldiers’ weapons and communications gear and left the scene, security sources said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give statements to the media. It was the first such attack in nearly a year. In January, Islamic State gunmen broke into a barracks in the mountainous al-Azim district outside the town of Baqouba, where they killed a guard and shot dead 11 soldiers as they slept. Rakan Saeed al-Jiboury, the governor of Kirkuk, told The Associated Press that the attack “is a result of negligence and lack of care by the security forces.” He added that the site of the attack is an area where authority is divided between the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga forces “so there is no coordination, and (IS) takes advantage of this.”
The Syrian military found the bodies of a number of Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) ringleaders during a combing operation in Tariq al-Sad neighborhood of Daraa province, Iranian Tasnim reported. The bodies of prominent Daesh leaders, who had taken up residence in the neighborhood during the security operation that resulted in the establishment of complete control over the Daraa neighborhoods, were discovered by the Syrian authorities. A security source told SANA that Muhammad Qassem Sobeihi, also known by his alias Abu Tariq Qassem al-Naran, was one of the most notorious terrorists. He was responsible for numerous crimes and massacres of innocent civilians in Daraa, including the murder of nine police officers at the Muzayrib police station in the city’s western countryside.
An Italian drug trafficker, one of Europe’s most-wanted criminals, has been arrested in Syria and extradited to Italy, according to Italian officials and a Syrian jihadist rebel group. Euronews reported that the last major drug trafficker from the Naples region still on the run, Bruno Carbone was detained when he got off the plane on Tuesday at Rome’s Ciampino airport, the Neapolitan police said in a statement. Carbone, 45, sentenced in absentia in Italy to 20 years in prison for international drug trafficking along the Spain-Naples-Sicily route, had been on the run since 2003. Carbone is known as a close associate of Camorra’s Raffaele Imperiale. Imperiale — himself considered to have been one of the biggest drug traffickers in the world — was arrested in Dubai in 2021.
