The Israeli military's Civil Administration on the West Bank has filed plans for establishing a new settlement in the Jordan Valley, where thousands of Bedouins will be forced to relocate. The Civil Administration is advancing several such plans. The current plan was drawn up without consulting the residents themselves, and is part of the Civil Administration's attempt to concentrate the Bedouins living in the West Bank's Area C in "permanent sites," with a view to annexing most of this area to Israel and leaving it free for settlement expansion. The new settlement for the relocated Bedouin, to be named Ramat Nu'eimeh, will be built in Area C near Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, and is slated to house about 12,500 people from Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley and the Ma'ale Adumim area.

Investigators from the Fiscalía, Peru's public prosecutor, exhumed 21 bodies from four mass graves in a remote area of Ayacucho region, the office announced Sept. 15. The find was made at the hamlet of Belen Chapi, in the Paccha area of Chungui district, in a zone of high jungle known as the Oreja de Perro which had been a stronghold of the Shining Path rebels in the 1980s. The victims were members of a peasant community who were summarily executed by security forces on July 14, 1984. The remains included those of nine children; a pregnant woman, whose fetus was counted among the 21 dead; four other women; and six men. Authorities will now begin the work of identifying the bodies, as well as naming the members of the army and National Police who were responsible for the massacre. The remains of nine other community members said to have been killed that day remain missing.

The president of Colombia's Ecopetrol, Javier Genaro Gutiérrez, announced Sept. 24 that the state oil company will process licenses for the use of fracking technology. Gutiérrez upheld Texas as an example of successful fracking, saying, "I invite you to see the fracking tower next to a hospital for the elderly" in the US state. In the Ronda Colombia 2014, the country's latest round of auctioning oil leases on public lands, 19 of the 98 bids sold were for the development of fracking sites. In March, a law was passed to expedite the process for allowing "non-conventional" drilling sites. Ecopetrol in a partnership with Canadian-based Talisman Energy acquired the country's two largest natural gas fields from BP in 2010. 

On Thursday Sept. 25, Peru's President Ollanta Humala will be honored at a $500-per-plate dinner by the free-trade-boosting Americas Society "in recognition of his extraordinary accomplishments as president of the Andean country." Sponsors of the event include mineral and oil giants Barrick Gold, Freeport-McMoRan and Pluspetrol. The event comes amid ongoing deadly attacks on indigenous leaders defending their traditional lands in Peru. Local New York activists will be protesting the event with the following demands:

US-based Newmont Mining is facing a new controversy concerning the pending Conga mega-mine, to be developed by its majority-owned subsidiary in Peru's Cajamarca region. Milton Sánchez, leader of the Interinstitutional Platform of Celendín, charged that the Yanacocha mining company is preparing to start removal of water from Laguna El Perol to an artificial reservoir in order to facilitate turning the site of the lake into an open-pit mine. He further charged that Peru's National Water Authority has changed the director of its local administrative region, VI Marañón, in order to allow this work to move ahead. Sánchez said the new regional director, Carlos Enrique Gastelo Villanueva, was brought in after his predecessor refused to sign off on "relocation" of the lake. Sánchez said his followers are prepared to begin a sit-in at the regional offices of the Water Authority if approval is given for the water transfer. (Celendin Libre, Sept. 11)

On Sept. 6, a confrontation at a protest roadblock in Peru's province of La Convención, Cuzco region, saw a vehicle fall into a canyon of the Rio Vilcanota, leaving two dead, including Rosalío Sánchez, mayor of the pueblo of Kepashiato. In a similar incident four days earlier, a 16-year-old youth was shot dead by National Police troops in a confrontation at a roadblock. The province has been paralyzed by a general strike since Aug. 27, to demand action on several outstanding petitions to the national government, some dating back five years. Demands include construction of a local gas processing plant; the remote jungle valley of La Convención is impacted by the Camisea gas pipeline, yet the price for gas is much higher locally than in Lima and other urban areas of the country. The Central Struggle Committee of La Convención is also demanding an investigation of local mayors and officials who they say have embezzled monies from the pipeline "canon," compensation funds to local communities for development of the project in their area. Some 1,500 National Police troops have been mobilized to the valley. (La República, Lima, Sept. 8; El Pais, Spain, Sept. 6)

The US-led coalition carried out air-strikes against both ISIS and Nusra Front positions in Syria on Sept. 23. At the same time, US planes took unilateral action against the so-called "Khorasan Group" of ex-Qaeda members "to disrupt the imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests," as a Central Command statement put it. The statement provided no details on the plotting. The Khorasan Group targets were said to be near Aleppo. Reports indicate the group is led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a Qaeda operative who was supposedly privy to Osama bin Laden's 9-11 plans prior to the attack. The US State Department calls al-Fadhli a "senior facilitator and financier" for al-Qaeda. (Times of Israel, MJ) Meanwhile, the Israeli military shot down a Syrian MiG-21 fighter jet that it said had infiltrated it airspace over the Golan Heights. The wreckage fell on the Syrian-controlled side of the plateau. (Al Jazeera)

The US carried out its first air-strikes against ISIS targets in Syria on Sept. 22. In a statement, Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said the US used "a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles" launched from the USS George HW Bush in the Persian Gulf. Kirby said that because these strikes are ongoing, he could not give details about where they took place. But an unnamed Pentagon official told NPR the strikes targeted positions near Raqqa, the ISIS de facto capital. Planes from five Arab countries participated in the strikes—also not named by Kirby, although FoxNews identified them as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar. There was no indication that the Syrian government had been consulted on the strikes, as Damascus had demanded.