Turkiye detains 2013 bombing suspect inside Syria

Turkish security forces members stand guard as a delegation from the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) arrives at Saydnaya prison to search for prisoners, in the town of Saydnaya about 28 kilometres north of Damascus on December 16, 2024. (File/AFP)
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Updated 13 January 2025
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Turkiye detains 2013 bombing suspect inside Syria

ANKARA: Turkiye’s intelligence agency conducted a cross-border operation inside Syria and seized a man suspected of perpetrating a 2013 bomb attack near the Syrian border that killed dozens of people, a Turkish security source said on Monday.
Twin car bombs ripped through the border town of Reyhanli in Hatay province on May 11, 2013, killing 53 people. At the time, Turkiye accused a group loyal to Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad of carrying out the attacks. Damascus denied any involvement.
Turkiye’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT) found out that Muhammed Dib Korali, who was suspected of planning the attack and providing the bombs, was inside Syria, the source said. The MIT captured him in a cross-border operation into Syria and handed him over to Hatay police, the source added.
Yusuf Nazik, a Turkish national who was sentenced to life in prison for planning the 2013 bomb attack, was also seized inside Syria by the MIT in 2018.


Iraq’s Kataeb Hezbollah says commander killed in strike

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Iraq’s Kataeb Hezbollah says commander killed in strike

BAGHDAD: The Tehran-backed Iraqi group Kataeb Hezbollah said on Thursday that one of its commanders was killed in a strike in southern Iraq the previous day.
Ahmad Al-Hamidawi, the secretary-general of the armed faction, mourned in a statement the loss of a “great commander,” Ali Hussein Al-Freiji, who had joined the group more than two decades ago.
Two sources from the faction told AFP on Wednesday that a strike hit a vehicle near the group’s main base in southern Iraq, killing two fighters.
The toll then rose to three, including the commander.
One source described the attack as a “Zionist-US strike.”
The group’s Jurf Al-Nasr base was the first Iraqi target of strikes blamed on Israel and the US, which later expanded to other areas.
Since the start of the war, the strikes have killed 15 fighters, mostly from Kataeb Hezbollah.
Iraq, which has recently regained a sense of stability but has long been a proxy battleground between the US and Iran, had said it did not want to be dragged into the war. But it has not been spared.
Several Iran-backed armed groups — known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, to which Kataeb Hezbollah also belongs — claim daily drone attacks on US bases.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq on Thursday warned European countries not to join the war, threatening their “forces and bases in Iraq and the region.”
Earlier on Thursday, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported that security forces seized two rockets and a launchpad in the southern Basra province, that were set up to target a neighboring country.