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US launches airstrikes on dozens of Islamic State targets in Syria

The US military conducted 10 strikes on more than 30 Islamic State targets in Syria between 3 and 12 February as part of a campaign against the extremist group in Iraq and Syria. US Central Command (Centcom) said in a statement on Saturday that the US had struck IS infrastructure and weapons storage targets. The attacks formed part of Operation Hawkeye Strike, in which the US killed or captured what it said were IS fighters and hit more than 100 IS targets. The campaign began after a member of Syria’s general security forces affiliated with IS ambushed US and Syrian forces in the city of Palmyra, killing two US soldiers and an interpreter, and wounding three members of the Syrian government forces. The US has led the international coalition to defeat IS in Syria and Iraq since 2014, partnering with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to defeat the radical group. In November, Syria officially joined the coalition and Washington has since turned towards Damascus as its principal anti-IS ally. Analysts warn that the group has been trying to reconstitute itself since the fall of Assad in December 2024, exploiting the security vacuum and weapons that flooded the country when Assad’s soldiers abandoned their posts. On Saturday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, praised Damascus for its participation in the anti-IS coalition, welcoming the Syrian government’s commitment to fully cooperate with the US and the global coalition. The US has steadily been evacuating male detainees accused of being IS fighters out of north-east Syria over the past month, announcing on Friday it had successfully transported 5,700 detainees to Iraq, where they are expected to stand trial. The US military is reducing its troop presence in Syria, evacuating its base in al-Tanf this week after nearly a decade there. Damascus took control of key IS prisons and camps last month as part of its offensive against the SDF, in which the SDF lost 80% of its territory. Among the camps Damascus now controls is al-Hawl camp, which previously held about 25,000 family members of suspected IS fighters. Humanitarians said on Friday that almost the entire foreigners’ annexe of the camp, which had held about 6,000 women and children from 42 different countries, had been emptied over the past month. It is unclear where the foreign residents went or who removed them from the camp.

Russia killed Alexei Navalny with frog toxin, UK and four European allies say

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, was killed by dart frog poison administered by the Russian state two years ago, a multi-intelligence agency inquiry has found, according to a statement released by five countries, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. The US was not one of the intelligence agencies making the claim. Navalny died in a remote Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence. Samples from his body were secured before his burial and sent to the laboratories of two countries. The UK, describing the poisoning as barbaric, said it would be reporting Russia to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as a flagrant violation by Russia of the chemical weapons convention (CWC). The intelligence agencies claimed laboratory testing found that the deadly toxin in the skin of Ecuador dart frogs (epibatidine) was found in samples from Navalny’s body and probably resulted in his death. The statement adds: “Only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin to target Navalny during his imprisonment in a Russian penal colony in Siberia, and we hold it responsible for his death.” “Epibatidine can be found naturally in dart frogs in the wild in South America. Dart frogs in captivity do not produce this toxin and it is not found naturally in Russia. There is no innocent explanation for its presence in Navalny’s body.” Although it had been widely assumed that Navalny had been poisoned by the Russian state, the evidence of the specific poison in his body is a new development. His wife, Yulia Navalny, posted in September that there was evidence of poison in his body at the time an autopsy was conducted. Yulia wrote in a post on X that the named poison “causes paralysis, respiratory arrest, and a painful death. I was certain from the first day that my husband had been poisoned, but now there is proof: Putin killed Alexei with [a] chemical weapon. I am grateful to the European states for the meticulous work they carried out over two years and for uncovering the truth. Vladimir Putin is a murderer. He must be held accountable for all his crimes.” The Kremlin has a long history of using poison as a weapon against its enemies. The death of Alexander Litvinenko in London from radioactive polonium in 2006, the nerve agent attack on the former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, and a previous poisoning attempt on Navalny have cemented Russia’s reputation for resorting to toxins to silence critics and defectors. The Foreign Office, which oversees the intelligence agencies, said it has pursued the truth of Navalny’s death with partners from Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The UK added: “We know the Russian state now used this lethal toxin to target Navalny in fear of his opposition.” The release of the information during the Munich Security Conference was designed to remind everyone that Russia announced the news of Navalny’s death just as the conference convened two years ago. His wife, after some hesitation, made a short address to the conference in 2024 saying: “I would like Putin and all his staff, everybody around him, his government, his friends, I want them to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country. With my family and with my husband, they will be brought to justice. And this day will come soon.” The UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “Only the Russian government had the means, motive and opportunity to deploy this lethal toxin against Alexei Navalny during his imprisonment in Russia. “Today, beside his widow, the UK is shining a light on the Kremlin’s barbaric plot to silence his voice. “Russia saw Navalny as a threat. By using this form of poison the Russian state demonstrated the despicable tools it has at its disposal and the overwhelming fear it has of political opposition.” The UK has led the way in trying to expose what it regards as nefarious Russian suppression of the regime’s opponents using poison, including the attempted killing of the UK agent Sergei Skripal with novichok on the streets of Salisbury in 2018. The UK has also led claims about Russian troops’ frequent use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. In it statement the UK said it was clear Russia did not destroy all its chemical weapons as claimed in 2017, and that it has not renounced biological weapons, as it is obliged to under the biological and toxin weapons convention.

‘It still rankles’: the French town living in the shadow of being an ayatollah’s refuge

Every February, members of the Iranian diaspora descend on an abandoned plot of land in an unremarkable street in the French town of Neauphle-le-Château, a 90-minute drive west of Paris. On the nominated Sunday, a marquee is hastily thrown up and framed photographs of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hung on the canvas. Green baize is laid on the muddy garden path between posts painted with equal bands of green, white and red, the colours of the Islamic republic’s flag. They come to remember the supreme leader who, in a chapter of history little known outside France, spent four months in the town in the late 1970s before his triumphant return to Tehran as the leader of the Islamic revolution. The fact this is commemorated every year in a small town in Île-de-France evokes a deep grievance among local people, and particularly this year. That their home has become synonymous with a regime in Tehran accused of killing thousands, some say tens of thousands, in a continuing crackdown, feels, they say, like a betrayal. Rather than remembering, they would rather forget. “People prefer not to speak of it. It’s a moment in history that has nothing to do with us,” says Pascal Pagand, who owns the Café des Sports in the town square, the hub of local life. “I know it still annoys people. They don’t understand why he was given sanctuary here … The town wasn’t asked or consulted. It was imposed; people had no choice. I wasn’t here back then, but those who were here remember it as a difficult time.” Visitors have been making the annual pilgrimage to Neauphle-le-Château for 47 years. In October 1978, the then French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, agreed to allow Khomeini to settle in France after his expulsion from Iraq. D’Estaing was persuaded that the Shia cleric would be a democratic alternative to the autocratic Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the erratic shah whose regime was in its dying days. The Frenchman also believed Khomenei would reward Paris’s hospitality with lucrative contracts establishing France as a counterweight to US influence in the region. Photographs and newsreel from the time show Khomeini meditating under an apple tree in the garden of 23 Route de Chevreuse. Inside, his acolytes prepared hundreds of cassette recordings of Khomeini urging Iranians to rise up, tapes that were flown to Tehran to be spread secretly across Iran. Nowadays there is nothing left of the two-storey house that was destroyed many years ago. Locals believe it was “plastiqué” (blown to bits), either by French secret services or by angry Pahlavi supporters after Khomeini left. The force of the explosion cracked the windows of neighbouring homes, they say. In France, leftwing intellectuals hailed Khomeini as the new Gandhi, among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, who would later regret setting up a Khomeini support committee, ignoring Simone de Beauvoir’s warnings that the radical version of Islam he espoused threatened women’s rights. On 1 February 1979, 15 days after Pahlavi fled into exile, Khomeini flew – first-class on Air France courtesy of the French government – to Tehran. He was greeted by ecstatic crowds and within days had established the theocratic dictatorship that has ruled Iran ever since. In Neauphle-le-Château, what irks locals is the sense that the town is on the map for the wrong reason. Why can it not be remembered for the novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras who lived and wrote there? Why not for Grand Marnier Cordon Rouge, the Cognac and bitter-orange liqueur, created and produced there until, like Khomeini, it moved elsewhere? Sitting under a photograph of Duras at a corner table in the Café des Sports, Jean-Claude Cintas, an artist and film-maker, summed up the collective dismay. “Most people here would rather Neauphle-le-Château was known for Marguerite Duras and Grand Marnier,” he said. Cintas remembers seeing Khomenei on his way to pray and recalls the widespread support for him in France. “At the time, the left was very much for Khomeini and didn’t have a word to say against him,” he said. “It was only 10 years after May 1968,” he added, referring to the leftwing student-led revolt that almost brought down the French government. “It was an extraordinary era. The shah was basically in the bin and if you were leftwing you were for Khomeini. “But he was not at all welcome locally. It wasn’t aimed at him personally, because people didn’t know who he was at first; it was because the town was suddenly overrun with journalists and police and it caused chaos.” Cintas added: “Suddenly every time the town was mentioned, it was in connection with Khomeini. It’s been like it for 47 years now and we feel that’s not what we are about.” In Tehran, long after Khomenei’s death aged 86 in 1989, Neauphle-le-Château has become part of the city’s geography. The street on which the French embassy sits was changed to rue Neauphle-le-Château. While most French people over the age of 50 will immediately associate Neauphle-le-Château with Khomeini, the town has been making efforts to bury the memories. Three years ago, during the protests resulting from the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested three days earlier for allegedly breaching the Islamic dress code for women, a commemorative board at the property on Route de Chevreuse bearing Khomeini’s portrait was vandalised. The town hall ordered its removal and decreed there should be no permanent sign marking his stay. Elisabeth Sandjivy, the mayor of Neauphle, told French media at the time: “I would like the town of Neauphle to no longer be associated with this part of history that has been imposed on it, because it was the government that gave permission for the ayatollah to stay here.” French media reported that an official request from Tehran to create a museum on the site had been met with a definitive “non”. Attempts by the Guardian to speak to Sandjivy were unsuccessful. “Locals will tell you they don’t care about the town’s association with the Ayatollah Khomeini and they don’t want to talk about it, but deep down it still rankles,” said Cintas. “It’s not what we want our town to be remembered for. “Khomeini spent only four months living on the very outskirts of the town, but his stay has thrown a shadow over the entire place especially with what has happened since. “There is a sense of betrayal: we gave him sanctuary and instead of democracy this is what he did.”

Danish state could face legal action over deal that gives US powers on its soil

Denmark could face legal action over an agreement that gives the US sweeping powers on Danish soil, over claims it is “unconstitutional” and could pose problems in talks with Washington over Greenland. The agreement, which was signed under the Biden administration in 2023 and was passed by the Danish parliament last year, gives the US “unhindered access” to its airbases and powers over its civilians. Since then, Donald Trump has made threats to invade Greenland, part of the kingdom of Denmark, resulting in a diplomatic crisis between the longtime allies and a deployment of soldiers to Greenland by a number of European countries. Theresa Scavenius, an independent MP, plans to sue the Danish state over the agreement on the basis that she believes it to be unconstitutional. The Danish constitution states that its sovereignty can be transferred to “international authorities” but only with a constitutional amendment that requires the support of five-sixths of parliament, which the defence agreement does not have. “The law is unconstitutional because it delegates authority to the US governmental bodies or soldiers on Danish territory over Danish civilians. That is explicitly not allowed in our constitution,” Scavenius told the Guardian. While the agreement does not apply to Greenland, critics claim the Trump administration’s statements on Greenland show the US could be willing to use force on civilians. It was essential that any constitutional matters be resolved urgently before beginning negotiations over Greenland, said Scavenius. Despite strong criticism from politicians and human rights experts – and heightened tensions between the US and Denmark after Trump’s previous push to acquire Greenland – MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of the defence agreement in June 2025. The agreement keeps US soldiers in Denmark under US jurisdiction, gives them access to Danish airbases in the Danish cities of Karup, Skrydstrup and Aalborg, and grants American soldiers and military police powers over Danish civilians at these locations and outside them. At the time, the government said it did not have the potential to surrender Danish sovereignty and was not a violation of the Danish constitution. The prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said tensions between Denmark and the US made it even more necessary to maintain close ties. “The problem is not too much involvement from the US in Europe,” she said at the time. “On the contrary, the risk is that the US will withdraw and move troops away or stop donations to Ukraine.” Scavenius has submitted a request for free legal aid, a process that is expected to take several weeks, after which she plans to sue the Danish state. The Danish Institute for Human Rights has said the agreement risks giving US soldiers the right to stop demonstrations outside their bases and would prevent Denmark from prosecuting them if they used excessive force. Peter Vedel Kessing, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, told the Guardian in May: “If the bill is passed and American soldiers carry out illegal acts in Denmark, it will be beyond Danish control and outside the reach of the Danish legal system to prosecute such actions.” The Danish defence ministry said it had noted that a claim was expected to be filed but declined to comment further. A spokesperson said: “As the ministry has not received such a claim at this time, the ministry has no comment.”

Gisèle Pelicot plans to meet ex-husband in prison for answers on other allegations

Gisèle Pelicot has said she needs to visit prison to look her abusive ex-husband “straight in the eye” after his conviction for drugging her and inviting dozens of men to rape her in a case that shocked France and the rest of the world. Pelicot, 73, said she needed “answers” from Dominique Pelicot over the potential abuse of their daughter and the case of an estate agent who was raped and murdered in 1991, which he is under investigation for. Dominique Pelicot was jailed for 20 years by a French court in December 2024 after being found guilty of the attacks, alongside 50 other men whom he invited to rape and sexually assault his wife. There are thought to have been at least 70 perpetrators but police have not been able to identify them all. Questions also remain over whether the couple’s daughter, Caroline Darian, was also abused by Dominique, something that caused a rift when Darian accused her mother of not believing her when police discovered two photos of her unconscious and wearing underwear she did not recognise. Pelicot said the revelations had not brought the family together, instead describing them as “an explosion that blows everything away”, but she is rebuilding her relationship with her daughter whom she now speaks to every day on the phone. She told the New York Times that the uncertainty for Darian was “inescapable hell”. “There are those two photos of her asleep that open up a lot of questions. But I don’t have any answers, and Monsieur Pelicot didn’t give her any answers either.” Pelicot said of her ex-husband: “I hope that when we’re face to face, he’ll be able to tell me the truth, both about his daughter and about everything else he’s now accused of. Maybe he’ll have some remorse. I’m still holding on to that hope. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I won’t get an answer.” Pelicot described the day in November 2020 when she had been brought into the station to discuss, she thought, an incident where her then husband was caught filming up women’s skirts. She saw a police officer’s “face start to change” as he pointed to a stack of files. She was asked if she recognised herself in a photo of a woman being raped by a man she did not know. “And of course I didn’t recognise myself, because I was with a man I didn’t know, who was raping me. I said: ‘I don’t know this man’ … He shows me a second photo, which is pretty much the same, and he says: ‘That’s you there.’ I say no, and he says: ‘This is your room, Madame Pelicot, these are your bedside lamps. We searched your home, these are your belongings.’” The police officer told her Dominique was in custody and that 53 people had been arrested. “He tells me that I have been raped about 200 times. I say: ‘But that’s not possible.’ And then I ask for a glass of water because I can’t talk any more.” She described later watching the videos. “I’m a rag doll. It’s as if I’ve come out of surgery, because I’m completely anaesthetised. These men, when you see what they’re doing to me – how is it possible that my body couldn’t feel anything? … Fortunately for me, I have no memories, because I think I would have killed myself afterward.” She described feeling shame and spending “hours in the shower trying to wash away this filth, this dirt that makes you feel dehumanised”. Pelicot also talked about specific incidents, including a crown on one of her teeth coming loose, which she later realised was caused by oral rape. “When I discovered the videos showing the violence these men inflicted on me, in my limp mouth – they have to hold my head because my face is falling, I have no muscle tone – and Monsieur Pelicot doesn’t even react. There is no empathy, no pity for this woman who is there, completely dead in her bed. It was incredibly violent to tell myself that even that, they didn’t spare me.” During the trial, Pelicot waived her right to anonymity as a survivor of sexual abuse. “The shame is theirs,” she famously stated of her abusers – and became a global feminist icon, leaving court each day to applause from gathered crowds. Support poured in from high-profile people, including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who thanked her for her “dignity and courage”, and Queen Camilla of the UK. In a letter, Camilla wrote to express her “heartfelt admiration for the courage, grace and dignity with which you have faced the horrific crimes committed against you”. Speaking to BBC Newsnight at the weekend, Pelicot said: “I felt moved and very honoured that she had become aware of what had happened to me. I am grateful to her.”

Nose for trouble: Italian town seeks ‘odour evaluators’ to sniff out bad smells

An Italian town is seeking a crew of sniffers to identify bad smells in its quest to improve air quality. Bruno Beltrame, the mayor of Brendola, a small town in the northern province of Vicenza, said he began the recruitment campaign for six “odour evaluators” after complaints about “unpleasant smells” from people living in neighbourhoods close to industrial zones. The main prerequisite for the role is not to suffer from allergies or respiratory diseases such as asthma. The recruits must have a car and a smartphone, which will be used to record the odour data on a dedicated app. Led by a firm specialising in odour measurement, they will be trained in how to distinguish between smells, for example those typically emitted from factories or which originate from industrial waste or sewage. They will then be given the task of going to targeted areas to carry out sensory assessments. If an unsavoury smell is detected, they will spend time sniffing the air before recording their perceptions on the app. The ultimate goal of the initiative, which is expected to last six months, is to trace the origin of the odours. “We did a similar investigation about five years ago in an industrial area close to where the bad smells are coming from now,” said Beltrame. “From that, we were able to identify the companies emitting the odours. Now we are broadening the geographical scope to find out if the same companies have resumed the release of bad smells or if there are different ones.” Vicenza falls within the Po valley, a huge geographical area straddling the provinces around the Veneto region as well as Piedmont, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. The Po Valley is among the worst areas in Europe for air pollution. “We’re at the end of the valley just before the Alpine foothills,” said Beltrame. “So it’s a huge undertaking because these areas are among the most productive, but they’re also the ones at risk of creating pollution.” He said several province-wide initiatives work continuously to improve air and water quality. “We have a lot of protocols in place, and if businesses break the rules they are heavily fined.” Brendola is home to about 4,000 people who over the years have become more committed to protecting their environment. Beltrame said: “Whereas previously they might have been a bit careless, today they are more inclined to want to improve their quality of life and surrounding environment. So when they see abandoned waste or smell foul air, they report it. We’re happy because it allows us to promptly intervene in order to prevent potentially worse catastrophes.” The local authority initially advertised for the jobs, which are paid, before Christmas but there were no takers, “perhaps because it was published so close to the holidays, many might have turned their noses up,” said Beltrame. But since reposting the advert on Facebook this week, about a dozen people applied. “They were mostly university students who have a few hours to spare around their studies, and they seem very keen.”

‘The time of monsters’: everyone is quoting Gramsci – but what did he actually say?

At a time when geopolitical certainties of old are crumbling away, it has become the go-to quote to make sense of the current moment in all its seeming senselessness. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” is a line attributed to the former Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci. Over the last two months alone, it has been quoted – and often mangled – by a rightwing Belgian prime minister, a leftwing British political leader, an Irish central banker and in the title of the most recent BBC Reith lecture, given by the author Rutger Bregman. “We can’t let the monsters win,” influencers earnestly warn their followers on Instagram; on LinkedIn, business consultants post graphs that visualise the “Gramsci gap” and its relevance to corporate strategy. The only problem is, Gramsci never said or wrote such a thing. Or at least not in the snappy wording that has made it go viral. “The time of monsters” powerfully sums up the repulsion and disbelief many people feel about the news in 2026 – whether it’s emanating from the White House, the Epstein files or the battlefields of Ukraine. It evokes Goya’s famous etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as much as contemporary pop culture. “It has an apocalyptical feel, like when the Demogorgon appears at the end of Stranger Things,” said Peter Thomas, a historian of political thought and a Gramsci expert at Brunel University of London. But in the notebooks that Gramsci filled with his thoughts on political theory, philosophy and linguistics after being imprisoned by the Italian fascist government in November 1926, there is no mention of monsters. In the original Italian, he wrote: “In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.” The most widely used translation of the Prison Notebooks, by the British academics Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith in 1971, renders this as: “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Not quite so pithy. An alternative 1996 edition by Joseph Buttigieg, the late father of the former US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, talks of morbid “phenomena” instead of “symptoms”. Still, no mention of monsters. The first recorded English use of “time of monsters” in connection with Gramsci is in a 2010 article in the New Left Review by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek titled A Permanent Economic Emergency. In this context, the quote lends poetic gravitas to the challenge that the eurozone’s banking crisis posed to the left. However, when approached about why he had chosen to poetically refashion the original Italian, Žižek insisted the monsters were not his. “I DON’T REMEMBER anything about it, but I am sure that I took the word from somewhere else,” he told the Guardian in an email. In fact, a French version of the same phrase predates the moment it was popularised by Žižek in English. “Dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres,” the French economist and urbanist Gustave Massiah wrote in a 2003 essay – “in this twilight monsters arise”. The phrase “dans cet interrègne surgissent les monstres” was used in the pages of Le Monde as early as 1996. While the exact origin of Gramsci’s monsters remains elusive, there are wider reasons why the Italian intellectual’s ideas remain so potent today. Published in 1947, years after Gramsci’s death, the Prison Notebooks were written during concentrated periods in which the communist thinker was allowed pen and paper in his cell. “They distill a lot of things Gramsci had on his mind, so they are incredibly precise, at least for an Italian,”said Silvio Pons, the president of Rome’s Gramsci institute. The notebooks did not go truly global until after the cold war, with translations into more than 40 languages, but their central idea has proven electric for activists for much longer. “When Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks, he was trying to make sense of why there hadn’t been a socialist or communist revolution in Italy before the fascist takeover,” said Marzia Maccaferri, a political historian at Queen Mary University in London. “And the key concept to emerge from that thought process is his theory of hegemony: that the ruling class can rule not only through coercion, but also through the intersection of popular and high culture, through intellectual and civil society.” In continental Europe, this cultural turn inspired many of the student revolutionaries of 1968, while in Britain it provided a theoretical framework that Marxist sociologists such as Stuart Hall applied to Thatcherism in the 1980s. As early as the 1970s, however, Gramsci’s ideas were co-opted by the chief thinker of France’s Nouvelle Droite, or “new right”, Alain de Benoist. The attempt to centre far-right politics on cultural rather than racial identities can be seen in the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s dictum that “all politics is downstream of culture”, and in many of the key figures of the contemporary European far right. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s master’s thesis applied Gramci’s ideas to Poland’s Solidarność (Solidarity) movement; in Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s culture minister recently published a book called Gramsci è vivo (Gramsci is Alive). The “time of monsters” quote may have captured the minds of politicians and thinkers of today but many feel it strips Gramsci of the activist zeal that he embodied for previous generations. “Monsters are something exceptional, an inverted miracle that comes out of nowhere with no real explanation,” Thomas said. “It’s a metaphor that shuts off the possibility of trying to think through what is occurring. We get outraged or shocked at the monstrosity of these Trumpian figures, rather than trying to work out what produced it.” Before his imprisonment, Gramsci spent two formative years in revolutionary Russia, where he is said to have witnessed proof that a new world, in spite of its struggles, could eventually be reborn. “It was almost inconceivable for him that whatever temporary setbacks he would have to suffer, we wouldn’t eventually arrive at a victory,” Thomas said. “We probably find it a little bit harder to think like that.”