Deir ez-Zor

Coordinates: 35°20′N 40°9′E / 35.333°N 40.150°E / 35.333; 40.150

Deir ez-Zor, also spelled Deir Ezzor, Deir Al-Zor, Deir-al-Zour,Dayr al-Zawr,Der Ezzor and other variants (Arabic: دير الزور‎; Syriac: ܕܝܪܐ ܙܥܘܪܬܐ, Armenian: Տէր Զօր, Դեր Զոր, Der Zor), is the seventh largest city in Syria and the largest in the eastern part of Syria. Located 450 km (280 mi) to the northeast from the capital Damascus on the shores of Euphrates River, Deir ez-Zor is the capital of the Deir ez-Zor Governorate. According to the 2004 official census, 211,857 people were residing in the city that year.

Names

Among Syrians and neighbouring regions, Ad-Deir is used for short to indicate Deir ez Zor. The current name, which has been extended to the surrounding region, indicates an ancient site for one of the Early Christian secluded monasteries spread since the persecution times and Apostolic Age throughout Mesopotamia. Although Deir, which is Arabic for "monastery", thought to be kept throughout Medieval and Modern Age renaming, Zor, which indicates the riverbank bush, appeared only in some late Ottoman records.

War diary

A war diary is a regularly updated official record kept by military units of their activities during wartime. The purpose of these diaries is to both record information which can later be used by the military to improve its training and tactics as well as to generate a detailed record of units' activities for future use by historians. War diaries are focused on the administration and operations of the unit they cover, and generally do not contain information about individual personnel.

War diaries were invented by the Prussian Army. On 22 April 1850, the Prussian Minister of War, August von Stockhausen, ordered that all commanders of major units should keep war diaries. All significant military actions, relocations, important messages and orders, casualties, material losses, reinforcements etc. were to be recorded. Subsequent regulations of 1870, 1895, 1916 and 1940 were largely identical to the 1850 regulations.

The British Army first required that its units keep war diaries in 1907 as a means of preventing its mistakes of the Second Boer War from being repeated, and units currently operating in Afghanistan continue to maintain such diaries. The war diaries kept by Australian military units are normally maintained by the unit's adjutant or intelligence officer and contain a regularly updated narrative of its activities as well as copies of reports, messages received and maps.

RT (TV network)

RT, originally Russia Today, is a Russian government-funded television network which runs cable and satellite television channels directed to audiences outside the Russian Federation, as well as Internet content in various languages including Russian. RT International, which is based in Moscow, presents around-the-clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows, and debates, as well as sports news and cultural programmes about Russia. RT operates as a multilingual service with conventional channels in three languages: the original English language channel was launched in 2005, followed by the Arabic language channel in 2007 and the Spanish language channel in 2009. RT America (since 2010), and RT UK (since 2014) offer some locally based content for those countries.

RT is a brand of "TV-Novosti", an "autonomous non-profit organization", founded by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti on April 6, 2005. During the economic crisis in December 2008, the Russian Government headed by Vladimir Putin included ANO "TV-Novosti" in the list of core organisations of strategic importance of Russia.

Islamic state (disambiguation)

Islamic state is a type of government based on Islamic religious law (sharia).

Islamic state may also refer to:

Syrian Army

The Syrian Army, officially the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) (Arabic: الجيش العربي السوري‎ al-Jaysh al-’Arabī as-Sūrī), is the land force branch of the Syrian Armed Forces. It is the dominant military service of the four uniformed services, controlling the most senior posts in the armed forces, and has the greatest manpower, approximately 80 percent of the combined services. The Syrian Army originated in local military forces formed by the French after World War I, after France obtained a mandate over the region. It officially came into being in 1945, before Syria obtained full independence the following year.

Since 1946, it has played a major role in Syria's governance, mounting five military coups (two in 1949, including the March 1949 Syrian coup d'état and the August 1949 coup by Colonel Sami al-Hinnawi, 1954, 1963, 1966, and in 1970. It has fought four wars with Israel (1948, the Six Day War in 1967, 1973, and 1982 in Lebanon) and one with Jordan (Black September in Jordan, 1970). An armored division was also deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1990–91 during the Persian Gulf War, but saw little action. From 1976 to 2005 it was the major pillar of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Internally, it played a major part in suppressing the 1979–82 Islamist uprising in Syria, and since early 2011 has been heavily engaged in fighting the Syrian Civil War, the most violent and prolonged war the Syrian Army has taken part in since its establishment in the 1940s.