PIRAEUS, Greece (AP) — Clutching an English phrase book, Mohammed Sawadi is preparing to head north.

The 23-year-old university student traveled from Damascus with his two cousins. They knew Greece's borders were closed before leaving home but say nothing will stop them getting to northern Europe.

"We made a vow: We will get to Europe, and we will stay together," said Sawadi, wearing a Batman T-shirt and holding a map of central Athens.

The three cousins crossed Turkey before reaching the Greek island of Chios and taking a ferry to Piraeus, the country's largest mainland port, near Athens. Sawadi wants to join his brother in Germany and eventually settle in The Netherlands.

European leaders are determined that they won't make it out of Greece any time soon.

The country's borders were sealed off to migrants and refugees a week ago and NATO expanded patrols in the eastern Aegean Sea — and waited for signs that the number of arrivals was beginning to slow.

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A child with chocolate stains on his face smiles in his mother's arm at the northern Greek borde …

It's not yet clear if that is happening: From an average of 2,000 arrivals per day at Greek islands facing Turkey so far this year, the numbers have become more uneven.

The daily number stayed below 1,000 most of the past week, but spiked to 3,340 on Wednesday, according to data from the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. About half of those arriving are from Syria, with the rest mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq.

"It's too soon to draw a conclusion from that data. We'll need to see what happens in the next few days," Public Order Minister Nikos Toskas told private Skai television Saturday. "I think the flow of migrants and refugees will eventually slow down, but it won't happen in a day."

Since the borders closed, the number of migrants and refugees stranded in Greece has climbed to above 42,000. And the European Union's commissioner for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, a conservative Greek politician, revealed this week that emergency plans are being made to help the country cope with 100,000.

About a third of those stranded in Greece are camped out in harsh conditions at the Macedonian border, where no one has crossed in the past week.

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A migrant boy pushes a baby stroller at the northern Greek border station of Idomeni, Saturday, Marc …

"Arrivals could remain high for as long as war and destitution affects refugees' lives. The EU's decision to encourage the closure of the Balkan migration route doesn't mean people will stop trying to reach northern Europe," said Apostolis Fotiadis, an Athens-based migration researcher and author of the book "Border Merchants: Europe's New Architecture of Surveillance."

"(Migrants) will just go underground, taking greater risks to their own life and boosting crime in Balkan economies," he said.

In Piraeus, Sawadi and his cousins studied a map of Athens to locate the central bus station for their trip north. About 2,000 people camped out at the port are also mulling their options. Young men play football on the quay and small groups sit on the ground to play cards; others huddle around European Union migration officers in navy blue vests who inform them that the borders will remain closed and the best option is to head to an army-built shelter and follow Europe's relocation procedure.

But so far, European Union member states have offered only 3,412 places to settle asylum seekers, and fewer than a thousand have actually been relocated, according to Avramopoulos.

Salih Abbed, an accountant from Damascus and Sawadi's cousin, says Syrians must make their own luck.

"We're going to buy a tent and go to the border. I'm not afraid to go there. We won't go to a camp," he said.

"It's different now: It was easy last year when you just followed the others. Now you have to depend on yourself."

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Fully covered and wearing face veils, they shop, take a taxi and walk around neighborhoods, showing a deserted city with little traffic and some armed men walking about.

"Everyone's left," they say, because airstrikes on Raqqa have intensified. "Foreign ISIS fighters have set up checkpoints, taken the ID cards of Syrians and use them to flee to Turkey," the women say.

Five years after the start of the civil war in Syria, Raqqa -- the capital of ISIS' self-proclaimed caliphate -- has fundamentally changed. The war has claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people nationwide and displaced more than 10 million, according to the United Nations. ISIS captured Raqqa in 2013.

The truth about Syria: Undercover behind rebel lines

The video was taken in late winter, according to Expressen TV, and shows the rubble of what once was the Uwais al-Qarni shrine, important to both Sufis and Shia Muslims.

Passing by the Armenian Catholic Church of the Martyrs, distinctive by its geometric facade, one of the women notes ISIS has turned it into the Islamic police headquarters.

Is ISIS going broke?

Gruesome public executions

The one-way bus ride into ISIS headquarters 02:19

Throughout the video, the women, whose voices are disguised, recall the violence they have witnessed, including the beheading of a young man.

"I could see there was a man sitting on the ground," says Oum Mohammad, the name used by one of the women. "The executioners were lined up, they were dressed in black."

She said she tried, but couldn't watch the execution.

"They execute with bullets, desecrate the body, decapitate it, stick the head on a spike and put it on display at the roundabout," she says. "Or they will put the body on the road and force cars to run it over until nothing is left."

Strict Islamic law

ISIS videos show children training to kill 03:16

The women say ISIS has imposed hardline Islamic law in a city once considered Syria's most liberal.

Alleged homosexuals now are subject to being killed; women have lost many of their rights and have to cover their bodies and faces.

"All women like to show their faces. We've lost that option. We've lost our femininity," Oum Mohammad says.

To show the length to which ISIS has gone in enforcing its laws, the women go shopping for hair coloring only to find that all the faces of the models on the packaging have been covered with black marker.

The women's hidden video also shows parts of Raqqa where the wealthy lived before ISIS drove them out. Now, mostly foreign fighters and their families occupy the nicer homes and apartments, the women explain.

"They are from Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Saudis, Europeans, from places in France," Oum Mohammad says, "but the majority is from Saudi Arabia."

The women want the world to understand in hopes that one day they will be free.

"I long to take off the niqab and the darkness that cloaks us," one woman says. "Nothing matters more than freedom."

Syria's war: Everything you need to know about how we got here

CNN's Pierre Meilhan, Samira Said, Michael Holmes and Alba Prifti contributed to this story

An Indian student from the lowest Dalit caste was hacked to death and his wife critically injured in southern India in a suspected "honour killing" by relatives angered by their marriage, police said Monday.

Three men armed with sickles and sharp weapons attacked the 22-year-old student and his wife, who is from a higher caste, on a crowded street in Tamil Nadu state on Sunday.

Local police commissioner N Manjunatha said the 19-year-old woman's relatives were angered by the couple's marriage.

"They married some eight months ago and the woman's family was unhappy. She is an upper Thevar Hindu caste and the man was a Dalit," Manjunatha told AFP.

The woman is recovering at a local hospital and police are searching for her uncle in connection with the attack, he said.

CCTV footage of the incident broadcast on Indian television showed the couple walking along the street when three men on a motorbike stop and attack them.

Thevars are a dominant community in Tamil Nadu while Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, are a historically marginalised community.

India has long witnessed so-called honour killings, where couples are targeted because their families or communities disapprove of their relationships over caste or religion. Most occur in rural pockets of the north.

They are carried out by relatives or caste groups to protect what is seen as the family's reputation and pride.

There are no India-specific figures available, but United Nations statistics say 1,000 out of the 5,000 such killings every year are in India.

India's Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that those involved in honour killings should face the death penalty.

Published — Sunday 13 March 2016

Last update 14 March 2016 2:38 am

BEIRUT: US-backed Syrian rebels say Al-Qaeda militants have seized their bases and stolen weapons in a series of raids in the northern Idlib province.

Division 13 of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is led by the prominent rebel commander Ahmed Al-Seoud, said on Twitter Sunday that the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front occupied and looted its posts late the night before.

It gave no further details, bu the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, says Nusra seized anti-tank missiles, armored vehicles, a tank, and other arms from the division, which has received weapons, training, and money from the US government.

Both the FSA and the Nusra Front are fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Rami Abdulrahman, director of the Observatory, said the Nusra Front had also detained dozens of members of the 13th Division rebel group.

Nusra Front accused the rebel fighters of launching surprise attacks on its own bases in the town of Maarat Al-Numan in Idlib province in northwest Syria. It said some Nusra fighters had been captured.

The clashes came two weeks into a cessation of hostilities in Syria and on the eve of peace talks in Geneva between President Bashar Assad’s government and the opposition.

The halt in fighting, agreed by government forces, rebel groups and their international backers, excludes Nusra Front and Daesh militants.

Nusra Front fighters have often taken part in offensives alongside other rebel groups. But they have also fought them for territory, defeating groups such as the Western-backed Syria Revolutionaries Front and the Hazzm group last year.


(arabnews.com)