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20 April 2024

'Freedom will come' airdropped over Raqqa

In this photo released on Jan. 6, 2015, by a militant website, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, a militant, center, speaks to youths during a street preaching event at Tel Abyad town in Raqqa province, northeast Syria. (AP)

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By AP

A US-led coalition dropped new leaflets over the de facto capital of the Daesh (IS) group in Syria, promising those below that "freedom will come" to the region, activists said Sunday.

An anti-Daesh group called Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the leaflets had drawings showing dead extremists and their flag turned upside down.

Four fighters with the main Kurdish militia, the People's Protection Units, or YPG, walked down a street in the picture, with two words in Arabic below translated as "Freedom will come”.

The latest leaflet drop comes as YPG fighters have been advancing in northern Syria as close as 50km (30 miles) north of Raqqa.

Coalition warplanes have dropped such leaflets in the past. A previous one had a cartoon showing masked extremists at a "hiring office" feeding people into a meat grinder.

Also Sunday, the extremists gave Internet cafes in Raqaa four days to stop offering wireless Internet connections to nearby homes, the Observatory and Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered said.

The move comes two weeks after extremists released a video purporting to show the killing of two Syrian men in Raqqa, allegedly for spying.

Meanwhile in Iraq on Sunday, a series of bombings killed at least eight people and wounded about two dozen others.

In Diyala on Sunday, a roadside bomb killed four people and wounded nine near the Diyala Bridge, southeast of the capital, police said.

In al-Ameen, a district in east Baghdad, police said two people were killed and eight wounded when a roadside bomb detonated near a busy cafe, police said. And in the Baghdad suburb of Nahrawan, two people were killed and six wounded when a bomb exploded on a busy commercial street.

Hospital officials corroborated the deaths. All spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to brief journalists.