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Added on the 14/04/2024 22:19:35 - Copyright : AFPTV - First images
Thousands of invaluable ancient manuscripts were under threat from the so-called Islamic State Iraq's largest Christian city, Qaraqosh, after the city came under attack from the terrorist militant group in August 2014. Luckily, one daring Dominican priest managed to save countless historical documents. Father Najeeb Michael fled with the manuscripts alongside thousands of other Christians. However, after taking the books to relative safety in the nearby city of Mosul, Father Michaeel was forced to flee once more, this time to Erbil, just days before the arrival of IS fighters to Mosul.
This little toddler named Bilal Tagirov was just two years old when his father kidnapped him and forced him to travel to Syria in October 2015. Bilal's father Hassan Tagirov left the Chechen Republic in order to fight for the self-proclaimed Islamic State. His mother Zalikha Ashakhanova only found out that her son was located in Mosul by chance when she saw a video of him online on July 15, 2017. The toddler was found by Chechen security forces in Mosul and finally reunited with Zalikha in Grozny on Thursday, returning to her waiting arms.
Women living in Haji Ali, a group of villages numbering about 40,000 people in northern Iraq about 40 miles south of Mosul, have taken up arms to protect the area from Islamic State militants. IS-controlled villages are only about a mile away, so women have learned how to use weapons and have started guarding their families' houses at night, in order to help their men, which rotate in and out of the frontline. Villagers fear that IS could sneak across the Tigris river and into the village under the cover of night, and are complaining that locals don't have enough weapons to defend themselves.
European foreign policy chief Josep Borrell gives a press conference in Capri, Italy ahead of the Foreign Affairs Ministers' Meeting in which he warns that 'We are on the edge of a war with the Middle East which will be sending shock waves to the rest of the world and in particular to Europe." SOUNDBITE
Tensions in the Middle East and shipping disruptions in the Red Sea could push eurozone inflation higher again, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde warns at a press conference in Frankfurt. SOUNDBITE
U.S. President Barack Obama attends an outdoor arrival ceremony in heavy rain, as the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).