Anonymous ID: 8728e2 Jan. 19, 2019, 5:40 p.m. No.4828069   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>8099 >>8151

20 killed as air strikes hit IS in Syria

 

BEIRUT: At least 20 Islamic State group jihadists were killed on Saturday in Iraqi air raids on their embattled enclave in eastern Syria, a war monitor reported.

The raids come a day after a US-led air strike on the Euphrates Valley village of Baghouz killed six civilians, including four children, and 10 IS fighters, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

 

There were no immediate comments from the Iraqi army or from the US-led coalition.

 

Baghouz is part of an enclave of less than 15 square kilometres (less than six square miles) that is all that is left of IS territory in eastern Syria after a gruelling Kurdish-led offensive launched with coalition support.

 

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that Saturday’s air strikes "carried out by Iraqi aircraft killed at least 20 IS fighters in Baghouz".

 

He said at the same time the Iraqi army units stationed nearby on the border with Syria fired artillery.

 

Abdel Rahman said the US-led coalition had stepped up its air strikes against IS since the jihadists killed 19 people, four of them Americans, in a suicide bombing on a restaurant in the flashpoint northern town of Manbij on Wednesday.

 

"The strikes are continuing, and have intensified since the Manbij attack," he said on Saturday.

 

"Residential buildings in Barghouz were hit," he said.

 

Wednesday’s US losses were the biggest since Washington deployed troops in Syria in 2014 in support of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

 

Previously it had reported just two combat losses in separate incidents.

 

The Manbij bombing rekindled controversy triggered by President Donald Trump last month with his surprise announcement of a full withdrawal from Syria.

 

The US president justified the order with the assertion that the jihadists had now been "largely defeated" in Syria, a claim that the attack threw into renewed question.

 

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/421100-20-killed-as-air-strikes-hit-is-in-syria

Anonymous ID: 8728e2 Jan. 19, 2019, 5:43 p.m. No.4828098   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>8151

Bulgaria extradites Russian hacker to America

 

January 20, 2019

 

Agence France-PresseMOSCOW: Bulgaria has extradited a Russian indicted by a US court for mounting a complex hacking scheme to the United States, the Russian embassy in Washington said on Saturday.

 

The Russian embassy, in a statement on its VK social network, said Alexander Zhukov had been extradited on Jan.18 and was being held in a jail in Brooklyn, New York.

 

“Employees of the Consulate General in New York will visit him in jail soon,” the embassy said.

 

Zhukov is one of eight people, most of them Russian, indicted in November for creating fake advertising schemes through remote data centres and malware-infected computer networks.

 

Their activity cost businesses tens of millions of dollars, says the indictment.

 

Zhukov’s group is accused of organising two schemes in 2014 and 2015.

 

In the first, dubbed “Methbot,” it rented computer servers and simulated humans viewing ads on webpages, tricking businesses into paying more than $7 million (6.16 million euros) for the fake views, according to US prosecutors.

 

In the second scheme, two of the group members operated a fake ad network through 1.7 million malware-infected computers to falsify billions of ad views, costing businesses $29 million for the views.

 

Zhukov, originally from Saint Petersburg, is known as Nastra in hacker circles, according to reports. He was arrested in Bulgaria, where he had lived since 2010, in November.

 

According to Kommersant newspaper, which claims to have spoken with a friend of Zhukov, the hacker stood out on the dark web for the selective way he chose his jobs, staying away from credit-card theft or child pornography.

 

Zhukov was earning about $20,000 per month on his fake ad-view contracts, but was exposed after a conflict with his US client, Kommersant said.

 

http://gulftoday.ae/portal/1e714158-f6c0-49c8-8ee3-c178bafa3295.aspx