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A woman rests near rubble in the Syrian town of Darat Izza in Aleppo Province on February 28.
A woman rests near rubble in the Syrian town of Darat Izza in Aleppo Province on February 28.

Live Blog: Tracking Islamic State

Follow all of the latest developments as they happen.

Latest News For February 29

-- The United States Army's elite Delta Force is on the verge of beginning operations to target, capture or kill top IS operatives in Iraq, after several weeks of covert preparation, an administration official with direct knowledge of the force's activities told CNN.

-- Syrian government forces have regained control of a road used by the army to access Aleppo, after making advances against Islamic State fighters, a monitoring group and state television reported.


-- Authorities in Iraq say the death toll from a double bombing at a market in Baghdad’s Shi’ite neighborhood of Sadr City rose to 73 on February 29 after several critically wounded victims died overnight.

-- Tajik media are reporting that a woman known to be the second wife of Gulmurod Halimov, the fugitive Tajik colonel who defected to the IS group, has left for Syria along with the couple's four young children.

-- The UN is poised to begin delivering aid to people living in besieged areas of Syria, making use of a truce brokered by the United States and Russia. The first deliveries are planned for Feb. 29, with aid due to reach about 150,000 Syrians in besieged areas over the next five days.

-- A truce negotiated between Syrian rebels and the government has caused a dramatic decrease in airstrikes around rebel-held territory, but there were few celebrations, with many residents suspecting a trick, CNN report.

* NOTE: Live blog posts are time-stamped according to Central European Time (CET).

11:27 6.1.2016

Ali al-Hassi, the spokesman for Libya's Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), the armed group that protects Libya's national oil facilities, has said that the IS group's fighting lines have been broken but they are trying to regroup.

IS attacked Libya's oil crescent including the oil terminal Sidra on January 4 and 5.

11:24 6.1.2016

Idriss al-Maghrebi of Libya's House of Representatives, has called on the international community to "assume its responsibilities" towards the oil terminal of Sidra, which has been under attack from the IS group since January 4.

The House of Representatives, one of Libya's main political factions, fled to the eastern city of Tobruk in summer 2014 after being forced from Tripoli. Both it and its rival General National Congress have described themselves as Libya's legitimate governments.

Libya's warring factions signed a UN-brokered peace deal in December to form a national unity government.

11:10 6.1.2016

More reports are emerging that one of the IS car suicide bombers involved in the attack on the Libyan oil port of Sidra on January 4 was a 15-year-old boy from Tripoli.

11:07 6.1.2016

Libyan journalist Ali Al-Rahqan has posted on Facebook what he says are details of one of the car suicide bombers used by the IS group on January 4 in an attack on the oil terminal of Sidra.

Al-Rahqan claims the suicide bomber was a 15-year-old boy named Abdel Moneim Dwilla, originally from Tripoli.

According to Al-Rahqan, Abdel Moneim's family said the boy had become more religious, telling his mother that he was going to pray at a different mosque because his usual mosque belonged to a Sufi and was therefore "haram" or forbidden for him.

After some time, Abdel Moneim disappeared and his family thought that he had been abducted. But a day or so later, his father was contacted from a strange number and informed that his son was "in the land of the Caliphate," in other words in IS-controlled Sirte.

10:55 6.1.2016

The IS group in Raqqa hijacked the Facebook account of a female activist it murdered in order to trap other anti-IS activists, The Independent writes.

IS is thought to have killed Ruqia Hassan Mohammed in September after abducting her in Raqqa in July.

But a citizen journalist from the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group claims IS kept her Facebook account open "in order to entrap friends who communicated with her."

10:37 6.1.2016

The UK government is facing accusations of a major security lapse after it emerged that a British man suspected of appearing in the IS group's latest propaganda video managed to slip out of the country despite being on police bail.

The Independent reports that police had sent Siddhartha Dhar a letter to his home address six weeks after he had already left for Syria, asking him to "surrender all travel documents" to a London police station.

10:33 6.1.2016

There are also unconfirmed reports, citing oil terminal sources in Sidra, that the fighting in Sidra has damaged three crude storage tanks belonging to a subsidiary of the Waha Oil Company of total capacity 1.5M barrels.

10:19 6.1.2016

Sources in Libya's oil terminal Sidra are reportedly saying that the IS group is planning another attack in the oil crescent and that reinforcements are arriving in the town of Bin Jawad to the west of Sidra.

The reports have not been confirmed.

IS attacked Sidra and the nearby Ras Lanuf for two days in a row.

10:15 6.1.2016

A documentary about American freelance journalist James Foley, who was beheaded by the IS group in 2014 after being held hostage since 2012, will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on February 6, the cable network HBO has said.

10:13 6.1.2016

AP has obtained a document suggesting that the Obama administration's best-case scenario for political change in Syria does not see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stepping down before March 2017.

The document contains an internal timeline prepared for U.S. officials, based on a plan endorsed by the United Nations and laid out at an international conference in Vienna in November. According to the plan, Syria would hold presidential and parliamentary elections in August 2017.

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