ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is reported to have fled to Afghanistan via Iran, to escape "Operation Roundup," a final offensive against remnant Islamic State pockets in Syria's eastern desert. The operation was launched last week by the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). London-based pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Baghdadi is believed to have reached Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, on the border with Pakistan. According to Pakistani security sources, Baghdadi crossed through the Iranian border city of Zahedan. The sources claimed Baghdadi received protection from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as he passed through the country's territory. ISIS now holds only three towns in Syria—Hajin, a-Baghouz and al-Sussa, all close to the Iraqi border.

A Turkish court has sentenced a former British soldier to seven-and-a-half years for alleged links to Syria's Kurdish YPG militia, considered a "terrorist" group by Ankara. Joe Robinson of Leeds was arrested in Turkey in July 2017 after he apparently posted photos of himself in camouflage, posing beside fighters of the People's Protection Units (YPG) in Syria. A court in the western city of Aydin sentenced the 25-year-old for "membership of a terrorist organization" on Sept. 15. Robinson did not attend the trial for health reasons. He is currently on bail and planning an appeal. His Bulgarian fiancée, arrested along with him, was sentenced to nearly two years for "terrorist propaganda," but she is currently in the United Kingdom. The BBC reports that the fiancée, Mira Rojkan, was given a suspended sentence.

At least 24 people, including 12 Revolutionary Guards, were killed and more than 60 were wounded when gunmen attacked a military parade Sept. 22 in the city of Ahvaz, capital of Iran's restive southwestern province of Khuzestan. A representative of the Iranian armed forces said the attack was carried out by four "terrorists," adding that security forces were in possession of the bodies of three of them and had taken the fourth into custody. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blamed "a foreign regime" backed by the United States for the attack, which left at least eight troops and several civilians dead. "Terrorists recruited, trained, armed & paid by a foreign regime have attacked Ahvaz," Zarif stated. "Iran holds regional terror sponsors and their US masters accountable for such attacks."

The Venezuelan government is responsible for the "worst human rights crisis in its history," intentionally using lethal force against the most vulnerable in society, Amnesty International said Sept. 20, as it published its latest research into violence and systematic abuses in the country. The report, This is no way to live: Public security and the right to life in Venezuela, shows how the Venezuelan government is failing to protect its people amid alarming levels of insecurity in the country, instead implementing repressive and deadly measures.

According to tradition, only men can inherit the chieftaincy title in Lesotho, the land-locked mountain kingdom of southern Africa,  Now, one woman, Senate Masupha, is seeking to change this. Masupha is the daughter and only child of David Masupha, former chief of the Ha Mamathe, Teyateyaneng, Thupa-Kubu and Jorotane villages and a direct descendant of King Moshoeshoe I, founder of Lesotho's reigning dynasty. When her father died in 1996, her mother took up the position, as tradition allowed widows of chiefs to become custodians of the title until a male heir is ready. When her mother died in 2008, the title went to her uncle, her father's younger brother. She decided to take the matter to court when the family started moving to evict her from her father's house. "My parents were chiefs for all of their lives—that was their right. I felt very secure when I was growing up. But when my mother passed on, I was taken out of my comfort zone," he told CNN.

In Episode 18 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks back at the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement of the closing years of the Cold War, when the Western Shoshone people, whose traditional lands were being contaminated by the nuclear blasts at the US government's Nevada Test Site, made common cause with the Kazakh people of Central Asia who opposed Soviet nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk site. Kazakh activists travelled to Nevada to join protests at the Test Site, while Western Shoshone leaders travelled to Kazakhstan to join protests at Semipalatinsk. This initiative eventually evolved into the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which as recently as 2016 held an International Conference on Building a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World in Astana, Kazakhstan, again attended by Western Shoshone leaders. The story of indigenous peoples impacted by nuclear testing on their usurped lands has come to us from several places around the world, including the French test site at Gerboise Bleue in Algeria—known to the local Tuareg nomads as Tanezrouft. Other examples are the Chinese test site at Lop Nur, on lands of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, and British testing on Aboriginal lands at Maralinga, in the Australian outback. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement provides an inspiring example of indigenous peoples and their supporters building solidarity across hostile international borders and superpower influence spheres. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Iran's northern Kurdish region was effectively shut down by a civic strike that began Sept. 12, with most businesses and markets closed. The strike was called to protest the executions of six Kurdish militants and air-strikes on the headquarters of Iranian-Kurdish opposition parties across the border in Iraq. The missile strikes on the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) in town of Koya, outside Erbil, left at least 15 dead and several wounded Sept. 9. The air-strikes were claimed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in a statement that called the parties "terrorist" groups. The civic strike was called by the Coordination Center of Rojhelat, an umbrella group that includes the KDPI, PDKI, Komala and other Iranian Kurdish parties. "The criminal regime of the Islamic Republic added a new black page of its history of crimes and barbarism against the Kurdish nation," read the statement by the Coordination Center. Rojhelat (East) is the Kurdish word for Iranian Kurdistan. (Rudaw, Kurdistan24, Al Arabiya, RFE/RL)

Following up on his pledge to address the matter within 30 days of taking office, Colombia's new right-wing President Iván Duque spoke this week about his conditions for resuming his predecessor's peace dialogue with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country's last significant guerilla group that remains in arms. Duque listed three conditions: the concentration of guerilla fighters in pre-determined areas (akin to the "concentration zones" used in the FARC demobilization), the liberation of all captives held by the guerillas, and a firm time-table for the dialogue process. The president spoke just days after the ELN freed three soldiers who had been taken captive the same week Duque was inaugurated last month in Arauca department. But some 20 other captives remain in the guerillas' hands, including six soldiers who were also seized a month ago in Chocó department.