Iraqi officials say airstrike wounds Islamic State group leader al-Baghdadi
Iraqi officials say airstrike wounds Islamic State group leader al-Baghdadi
BAGHDAD — Iraqi officials said Sunday that the head of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was wounded in an airstrike in western Anbar province. Pentagon officials said they had no immediate information on such an attack or on the militant leader being injured.
Iraq’s Defense and Interior ministries both issued statements saying al-Baghdadi had been wounded, without elaborating, and the news was broadcast on state-run television Sunday night.
The reports came at a time when President Barack Obama said the U.S.-led coalition was in a position to start going on the offensive against the Islamic State militants.
Al-Baghdadi, believed to be in his early 40s, has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Since taking the reins of the group in 2010, he has transformed it from a local branch of al-Qaida into an independent transnational military force.
He has positioned himself as perhaps the pre-eminent figure in the global jihadi community. His forces have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq, killed thousands of people, beheaded Westerners and drawn the U.S. troops and warplanes back into the region, where Washington is leading a campaign of airstrikes by a multinational coalition.
Libyan city becomes the first outside of Iraq, Syria to join Islamic State group’s ‘caliphate’
CAIRO — On a chilly night, bearded militants gathered at a stage strung with colorful lights in Darna, a Mediterranean coastal city long notorious as Libya’s center for jihadi radicals. With a roaring chant, they pledged their allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.
With that meeting 10 days ago, the militants dragged Darna into becoming the first city outside of Iraq and Syria to join the “caliphate” announced by the extremist group. Already, the city has seen religious courts ordering killings in public, floggings of residents accused of violating Shariah law, as well as enforced segregation of male and female students. Opponents of the militants have gone into hiding or fled, terrorized by a string of slayings aimed at silencing them.
The takeover of the city, some 1,000 miles from the nearest territory controlled by the Islamic State group, offers a revealing look into how the radical group is able to exploit local conditions. A new Islamic State “emir” now leads the city, identified as Mohammed Abdullah, a little-known Yemeni militant sent from Syria known by his nom de guerre Abu al-Baraa el-Azdi, according to several local activists and a former militant from Darna.
Brown University student who drank punch at frat party tests positive for date-rape drug
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — One of two Brown University students who reported rapid intoxication followed by memory loss after drinking punch at a fraternity party tested positive for a date-rape drug, a university official announced in a campus-wide email.
The email sent late Saturday by Margaret Klawunn, vice president for campus life and student services at Brown, said tests on the other student remain pending, The Providence Journal reported. One of the students also reported being sexually assaulted.
The student tested positive for gamma hydroxybutyrate, a date-rape drug also known as GHB, Klawunn wrote.
“GHB is a colorless, odorless drug that can be hard to detect in a drink,” the email said, “but has a strong sedative effect that is incapacitating.”
The two students reported they experienced “a rapid onset of intoxication” beyond what they expected from the amount they drank, and “memory loss for a significant period of time” after drinking the punch, Klawunn wrote.
By wire sources