Obama to host anti-Daesh group summit

Croatian hostage Tomislav SalopekFILE - This image made from a militant video posted on a social media site on Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2015, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, purports to show a militant standing next to another man who identifies himself as 30-year-old Tomislav Salopek, kneeling down as he reads a message at an unknown location. An online image purports to show the Croatian hostage being held by an Islamic State affiliate in Egypt has been beheaded. (Militant video via AP, File)

US President Barack Obama will host a summit in New York next month of leaders of the international coalition fighting Daesh militants in Syria and Iraq, diplomats said.
The summit on countering violent extremism on September 29 comes one year after Obama vowed to crush Daesh during his United Nations speech.
Since then, the militants have captured territory in Syria and Iraq and gained a foothold in Libya, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, with alliances as far afield as Nigeria's Boko Haram.
The United States last year assembled a coalition of 50-plus countries to beat back Daesh, which declared a caliphate in June 2014 after seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Diplomats said the summit, to be held on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly meeting, will allow leaders to take stock and chart a way forward in the campaign to defeat Daesh.
Obama last year hosted a Security Council meeting during which a resolution was adopted to curb the flow of foreign fighters joining Daesh extremists on the battlefields in Iraq and Syria.
But UN monitors report that the number of foreign militants has grown to at least 22,000 and there is no sign that the flow is abating.
On Wednesday, an Egyptian group allied to Daesh has published a photograph it says showed the beheaded body of a Croatian hostage it threatened to kill last week, the SITE monitoring service said on Wednesday.
Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the pic ture, which carried a caption that said: "Killing of the Croatian hostage, due to his country's participation in the war against Daesh, after the deadline expired."
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said authorities were examining the image.
"It is my duty to break the silence and tell the Croatian public that we cannot confirm with 100 per cent certainty that it is true what we see, and which is horrifying," he told a news conference.
"I don't know if we will be able to do it in the coming days, but what we see does not look good ... I'm afraid that for the first time, what has happened to the citizens of other countries has happened to a Croatian citizen."
The photograph, circulating on Twitter accounts of Sinai Province supporters, shows a man's severed head placed on his body, with a knife driven into sand next to it and the black Daesh flag in the background. Next to the picture are screenshots of Arabic language news articles with the headlines: "Croatia confirms its support for Egypt in efforts to fight terrorism and extremism" and "Croatia affirms its continued support for the Kurdistan region".
A spokesman at the Egyptian Interior Ministry's Press office said: "We have seen this news on line but are currently making our own checks. If we confirm that it is indeed true, we will inform the media through a statement."
Last week, an online video purportedly from Sinai Province showed a man who identified himself as Tomislav Salopek and said the group would kill him in 48 hours unless Muslim women in Egyptian jails were freed.
Ardiseis Egypt, a unit of French oil and gas geology company CGG, confirmed the video showed one of its employees who was kidnapped on July 22 while travelling to Cairo.
A spokesman for CGG could not confirm this, adding the firm had no information other than what was circulating on the Internet and was trying to find out more from Croatian and Egyptian authorities.
The spokesman said the hostage was an expert contractor rather than employee of its subsidiary.
Last December, Sinai Province said it was behind the killing of an American petroleum engineer whose body was found in a car in a desert region almost four months earlier. The group has also posted videos appearing to show the killings of Egyptians it accuses of helping the Egyptian government or Israel.
Sinai Province is at the forefront of a militant insurgency in Egypt that has killed hundreds of soldiers and police in the two years since the military ousted Islamist President Mohammed Mursi after protests against his rule in 2013.
In July, the group was involved in the deadliest fighting in the lawless Sinai Peninsula in years. More than 100 militants and 17 soldiers were killed, following simultaneous assaults on military checkpoints in North Sinai.
The group changed its name from Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis to Sinai Province after it pledged allegiance to Daesh, which controls large areas of Syria and Iraq.
Daesh has over the past year beheaded an unknown number of hostages, both Western prisoners and Middle Easterners ranging from soldiers fighting it to Muslims who reject its hardline version of Islam. - Agencies

• MENA