Category Archives: Department of Defense

ISIS has Better Foreigners Control than the U.S.

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Confessions of an ISIS Spy

Michael Weiss  

DailyBeast: He joined the self-proclaimed Islamic State, trained jihadist infantry, and groomed foreign operatives—including a pair of Frenchmen. And now, Abu Khaled says he is ready to talk.
For all the attention paid to ISIS, relatively little is known about its inner workings. But a man claiming to be a member of the so-called Islamic State’s security services has stepped forward to provide that inside view. This series is based on days of interviews with this ISIS spy.

Part One: An Appointment in Istanbul

ISTANBUL — It took some convincing, but the man we’ll call Abu Khaled finally came to tell his story. Weeks of discussion over Skype and WhatsApp had established enough of his biography since last we’d encountered each other, in the early, more hopeful days of the Syrian revolution. He had since joined the ranks of the so-called Islamic State and served with its “state security” branch, the Amn al-Dawla, training jihadist infantry and foreign operatives. Now, he said, he had left ISIS as a defector—making him a marked man. But he did not want to leave Syria, and The Daily Beast was not about to send me there to the kidnap and decapitation capital of the world. I had met him often enough in Syria’s war zones in the past, before the rise of ISIS, to think I might trust him. But not that much. “Lucky for you, the Americans don’t pay ransoms,” he ventured, after the two of us began to grow more relaxed around each other and the question of ISIS hostage-taking inevitably came up. He said he was joking.

I knew from our digital parlays that, if he were telling the truth, he had extraordinary, granular information about the way ISIS operates: who is really in charge, how they come and go, what divisions there are in the ranks of the fighters and the population. Abu Khaled saw firsthand, he said, what amounted to the colonial arrogance of Iraqi and other foreign elites in the ISIS leadership occupying large swaths of his Syrian homeland. He was in a position to explain the banality of the bureaucracy in a would-be state, and the extraordinary savagery of the multiple security services ISIS has created to watch the people, and to watch each other. He could also tell me why so many remain beholden to a totalitarian cult which, far from shrinking from its atrocities and acts of ultra-violence, glories in them.

An injured man hugs an injured woman after an explosion during a peace march in Ankara, Turkey, October 10, 2015.

Abu Khaled had worked with hundreds of foreign recruits to the ISIS banner, some of whom had already traveled back to their home countries as part of the group’s effort to sow clandestine agents among its enemies.

But Abu Khaled didn’t want to leave his wife and an apartment he’d just acquired in the suburbs of embattled Aleppo. He didn’t want to risk the long journey to this Turkish port city. Since he’d bailed out of ISIS, he said, he’d been busy building his own 78-man katiba, or battalion, to fight his former jihadist comrades.

All very interesting, I answered, but still we would have to meet face to face, even if that meant both of us taking calculated risks.

The worst terrorist bombing in modern Turkish history had just been carried out by ISIS operatives in the streets of Ankara, killing over 100 people in a NATO country, reinforcing yet again one of the core ideological conceits of the putative caliphate: Borders are obsolete, and ISIS can get to you anywhere, as it wants everyone to know. There was at least a possibility Abu Khaled was still a spy for ISIS, and that he was part of an operation to collect new hostages.

A fighter seen in front of a burning vehicle in Raqqa.
Hamid Khatib/Reuters

For Abu Khaled, assuming he was telling me the truth, the risks were much greater. ISIS might track him all the way into the “Land of Unbelief” and deal with him there. Indeed, it did just that with two Syrian activists from Raqqa, who were beheaded in Sanliurfa at the end of October. And there were agents Abu Khaled had trained himself who had left Syria and Iraq for work “behind enemy lines.”

“When you’re in the secret service, everything is controlled,” he told me. “You can’t just leave Islamic State territory.” It would be especially hard for him because all the border was controlled by the state security apparatus he had served. “I trained these guys! Most of them knew me.”

“I can’t go, Mike,” he said more than once as we spoke for hours, long-distance. “I’m kafir now,” an infidel, a non-believer in the view of the caliphate. “I was Muslim and now I’m kafir. You can’t go back, from Muslim to kafir, back to Muslim again.” The price you pay is death.

Given the circumstances, it seemed possible, even preferable, that he leave Syria for good, and bring his wife to Istanbul, so they could make their way eventually to Europe. But he refused even to consider such a thing. Abu Khaled told me he was prepared to die in Syria. “You have to die somewhere,” he said. “People die in bed more than people who die in wars. What if something like this happened to your country? Are you willing to die for your country, the next generation, or do you run away?”

All this sounded persuasive, but to get at what Abu Khaled knew with any confidence, I had to have the chance to question him again and again. He had to be asked about any contradictions in his account. I had to see his body language, his twitches, his tells. And that could only be done in person.

Militant Islamist fighters ride horses as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Raqqa.
Reuters

***

I asked Abu Khaled: Did you warn anyone about these two Frenchmen? “Yes,” he responded.

Abu Khaled eventually relented. He borrowed about $1,000 to make the long, 750-mile journey by car and bus from Aleppo to Istanbul, and then back again. We met at the end of October. And so for three long days, in the cafés, restaurants, and boulevards of a cosmopolis, on the fault line between Europe and the Middle East, I watched him through the haze of smoke as he lit one cigarette after another, and sipped his bitter Turkish coffee, and looked me in the eye. And Abu Khaled sang.

“All my life, OK, I’m Muslim, but I’m not into Sharia or very religious,” he said early in our conversation. “One day, I looked in the mirror at my face. I had a long beard. I didn’t recognize myself. It was like Pink Floyd. ‘There’s somebody in my head but it’s not me.’”

Not many recovering jihadists have a word-perfect recall for “Brain Damage.” But Abu Khaled is not a fresh young fanatic anxious for martyrdom, he is a well-educated multilingual Syrian national of middle age whose talents, including his past military training, the ISIS leadership had found useful.

In his novel Money, Martin Amis describes a character’s face as having “areas of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and boneshadow you’re bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century.” Abu Khaled’s face, now shorn of the long beard he’d been made to grow, bore all the signs of someone who’d already hung out too long in the 21st. He looked haggard and beaten.

Like many of his compatriots, he’d spent a large part of a war that has gone on for half a decade based in southern Turkey. He joined ISIS on Oct. 19, 2014, he said, about a month after the U.S.-led coalition’s Operation Inherent Resolve expanded its aerial bombardment campaign to Raqqa, the eastern province where ISIS keeps its “capital.”

Reuters

Abu Khaled felt compelled to sign up because he believed America was an accomplice to global conspiracy, led by Iran and Russia, to keep the tyrant Bashar al-Assad in power. How else could it be explained that the U.S. was waging war only against Sunnis, and leaving an Alawite-run regime guilty of mass murder by almost every means and its Iranian Shia armies untouched?

“The most important thing,” Abu Khaled said, “is that they are trying to make sleeper cells all over the world.”

Also, Abu Khaled was curious. “I went there practically as an adventure,” he said. “I wanted to see what kind of people were there. Honestly, I don’t regret it. I wanted to know them. Now they are my enemy—and I know them very well.”

The procedure that took him into ISIS ranks was thoroughly organized. He approached a checkpoint at the Turkish-Syrian border town of Tal Abyad when it was in ISIS’s hands. “They asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘Raqqa.’ They asked me why. I told them I wanted to join ISIS. They checked my luggage.”

Once in Raqqa he had to go to the “Homs embassy,” the name for the ISIS administrative building where all Syrians had to apply. He spent two days there, after which he was transferred to what was called the “Border Administration Department.” All this in his own country, which ISIS informed him no longer existed.

“They considered me an immigrant because I had been living outside the caliphate.” So Abu Khaled had to be “naturalized” first, and had to pass a citizenship interview conducted by an Iraqi named Abu Jaber.

“Why do you want to become a holy warrior?” he was asked. He said something perfunctory about fighting the crusader-infidels, he recalls. Apparently it passed Abu Jaber’s smell test.

A man holds up a knife as he rides on the back of a motorcycle touring the streets of Tabqa city with others in celebration after Islamic State militants took over Tabqa air base, in nearby Raqqa.
Reuters

The next stage was indoctrination: “I went to Sharia court for two weeks. You have to go take classes. They teach you how to hate people.” Abu Khaled laughed. He was taught the ISIS version of Islam—that non-Muslims have to be killed because they are the enemy of the Islamic community. “It’s brainwashing,” he said.

“They asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘Raqqa.’ They asked me why. I told them I wanted to join ISIS. They checked my luggage.”

The clerics responsible for this indoctrination were know-nothing striplings from foreign countries. “There was one guy I remember from Libya, maybe he was in his mid-twenties.” What kind of Islamic authority could someone so young have, Abu Khaled wondered. And where were all the Syrians?

***

In his first weeks with ISIS, Abu Khaled met Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Venezuelans, Trinidadians, Americans, and Russians—all freshly arrived to “remain and expand,” as the ISIS mantra goes, and to be custodians of the one true faith.

As might be expected, new additions to this jihadist internationale don’t have even conversational Arabic, so a polyglot volunteer, such as Abu Khaled, is particularly valued. He has fluent Arabic, English, and French, and was therefore seized upon right away as an interpreter. “I had two groups,” he said. “On the left I had the French and was translating from Arabic to French; on the right I had the Americans, translating from Arabic into English.”

As part of its agitprop, ISIS often shows its muhajireen, or foreign fighters, setting their passports ablaze in a ritual designed to demonstrate that there’s no going back. Whether from Bruges or Baton Rouge, they have all repudiated their nationality in Dar al-Harb, the land of war and depravity and godlessness, in order to become inhabitants of Dar al-Islam, the land of faith and peace (once it finishes fighting wars). But this is mostly for show. Previously, most new arrivals either kept their passports or “handed them over.” To whom? “Human Resources,” said Abu Khaled.

But that relatively relaxed personnel policy has changed in recent days. ISIS is increasingly restrictive and controlling as it has begun to lose battles, some of them at tremendous cost.

Smoke and flames rise following an explosion in the Syrian town of Kobani on October 20, 2014.
Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

Before the fight for the Kurdish town of Kobani last year, the caliphate had an aura of invincibility, and people from around the world were rushing to envelop themselves in the black flag of messianic victory. But in that battle, which lasted for months, Kurdish paramilitaries backed by U.S. airpower fought well, while ISIS—at least as far as Abu Khaled characterizes it—needlessly sent thousands to their slaughter, without any tactical, much less strategic, forethought. The jihadist army had lost between 4,000 and 5,000 fighters, most of them non-Syrians.

Confessions of an ISIS Spy

Part I: An Appointment in Istanbul
Part II: Spies Like ISIS
Part III: Coming Friday
Part IV: Coming Saturday

“Double this number are wounded and can’t fight anymore,” Abu Khaled told me. “They lost a leg or a hand.” Immigrants, then, are requisitioned as cannon fodder? He nodded. In September of last year, at the apogee of ISIS’s foreign recruitment surge, he says the influx of foreigners amazed even those welcoming them in. “We had like 3,000 foreign fighters who arrived every day to join ISIS. I mean, every day. And now we don’t have even like 50 or 60.”

This sudden shortfall has led to a careful rethinking by ISIS high command of how inhabitants outside of Syria and Iraq can best serve the cause. “The most important thing,” Abu Khaled said, “is that they are trying to make sleeper cells all over the world.” The ISIS leadership has “asked people to stay in their countries and fight there, kill citizens, blow up buildings, whatever they can do. You don’t have to come.”

Some of the jihadists under Abu Khaled’s tutelage have already left al-Dawla, the state, as he puts it, and gone back to their nations of origin. He mentioned two Frenchmen in their early 30s. What were their names? Abu Khaled claimed not to know. “We don’t ask these kinds of questions. We are all ‘Abu Something.’ Once you start asking about personal histories, this is the ultimate red flag.”

Following the Paris terrorist attacks on Nov. 13, which occurred almost a month after our meeting in Turkey, I contacted Abu Khaled. Now back in Aleppo, he told me that he was fairly certain that one or both of these French nationals were involved in some way in the coordinated assault, the worst atrocity to befall France since World War II, which has killed at least 132 and left almost as many critically wounded. He says he’s now waiting to see their photographs published in the international press.

In the meantime, he volunteered their physical descriptions. The first was a North African, possibly from Algeria or Morocco, bald, of average height and weight. The other was a short, blond-haired, blue-eyed Frenchman, very likely a convert to Islam, who had a wife and a 7-year-old son.

It seemed like the kind of information that those looking to counter ISIS would find useful. So I asked Abu Khaled: Did you warn anyone about these two? “Yes,” he responded, and left it at that.

Govt Tools to Deter Terrorist Travel

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Legal Tools to Deter Travel by Suspected Terrorists: A

Brief Primer

11/16/2015

FAS: The terrorist attacks in Paris last week, for which the Islamic State (sometimes referred to as ISIS, ISIL, or IS) has claimed responsibility, have renewed concerns about terrorist travel. Following reports that at least one of the perpetrators of the attacks was carrying a Syrian passport, there has been heightened scrutiny and debate concerning the resettlement of refugees from war-torn Syria to Europe and the United States. This Sidebar provides a brief overview of some (but by no means all) of the tools the federal government employs to prevent individuals from traveling to, from, or within the United States to commit acts of terrorism. In some cases, the application of these tools may depend on different factors, including whether the suspected terrorist is a U.S. or foreign national.

Terrorist Databases and Screening

Decisions by the federal government as to whether to use a particular tool to deter an individual’s travel are often informed by information collected by various agencies that link that individual to terrorism. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC)—administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—maintains the federal government’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the government’s single source repository watch list record of known and suspected terrorists. TSC provides various federal agencies with subsets of the TSDB for use in combating and deterring terrorism. Some of the many screening systems supported by the TSDB include the Department of State’s Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS) for screening of passports and visas; the TECS system (not an acronym) administered by Custom and Border Protection within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to screen and make eligibility determinations of arriving persons at U.S. ports of entry; the DHS’s Secure Flight system for air passenger prescreening; and the FBI’s National Crime and Information Center’s Known or Suspected Terrorist File. Of course, while the TSDB supplies these systems with information on the identity of suspected terrorists, these systems may also include information on individuals obtained independently from the TSDB consistent with the agency’s particular responsibilities.

No-Fly List and Selectee List

Information compiled by the TSDB may be used to deter suspected terrorists from using civil aircraft and other modes of transportation to travel to, from, or within the United States. The safety of air travel, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is an important priority for the U.S. government. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and charged it with ensuring the security of all modes of transportation, including civil aviation. Two of the most prominent means by which TSA attempts to deter terrorist travel is via two watch lists comprised of information from the TSDB – the No-Fly List and the Selectee List. Persons on the No-Fly list are prohibited from boarding an American airline or any flight that comes in contact with U.S. territory or airspace. Those on the Selectee List are subject to enhanced screening procedures.

Criminal Sanctions

Perhaps the most severe means by which to prevent persons from traveling to, from, or within the United States for terrorist purposes is through the use of criminal sanctions. A wide range of terrorism-related conduct is subject to criminal penalty under U.S. law. Many of the most relevant criminal statutes are extraterritorial in reach, covering conduct which may occur partially or (in more limited cases) entirely outside the United States. Persons who aid and abet a criminal violation may typically be held criminally liable for the underlying offense to the same degree as the person who directly committed the violation. Attempts or conspiracies to commit proscribed conduct are also typically subject to criminal punishment. Several U.S. persons accused of attempting or conspiring to assist the Islamic State, including through either encouraging others to travel abroad to join the group or planning to join the group themselves, have been charged with terrorism offenses.

Probable cause is required to arrest a person for a criminal violation, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt is necessary to sustain a conviction. Law enforcement’s suspicion that a traveler may be involved in terrorist conduct (or associated with others who have terrorist ties) may not be sufficient to warrant the traveler’s arrest. As a result, government officials may sometimes deploy tools other than criminal sanctions to deter travel by persons suspected of terrorist activity.

Passport Restrictions on Travel to Specific Countries

Through the revocation or denial of passports, U.S. authorities could potentially impede the international travel of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorist involvement or association with an enemy belligerency. Federal law provides that, except as authorized by the President, a U.S. citizen may not depart from the United States and travel to another country unless he bears a valid passport. The revocation of the passport of a U.S. citizen located abroad may also have implications for his ability to remain in a particular foreign country, or travel from there to a third country. While federal statute provides that U.S. citizens also may not reenter the country unless they bear a valid passport, U.S. citizens who travel abroad appear to enjoy a constitutional right to be readmitted back into the United States.

State Department regulations identify various grounds for which passport applications may be denied or a previously issued passport may be revoked. Several such grounds may be relevant to efforts to deter international travel by U.S. citizens suspected of involvement with terrorist groups, including those permitting the denial or revocation of passports to U.S. citizens who are the subject of outstanding felony arrest warrants or requests for extradition. The regulations also provide that a U.S. citizen’s passport application may be denied or revoked when the Secretary of State “determines that the applicant’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” However, the authority to deny or revoke passports on account of national security or foreign policy concerns is not absolute. The Supreme Court has recognized that the State Department lacks statutory authority to deny a passport solely on the basis of the applicant’s political beliefs; the denial must be based in part upon actual conduct that causes serious damage to the national security or foreign policy of the United States.

In addition to regulatory authority to deny or revoke passports, State Department regulations also permit the Secretary of State to restrict the usage of U.S. passports to travel to a country or area in certain cases – including when the Secretary has determined the country or area is a place where “armed hostilities are in progress” or there exists “an imminent danger to the public health or physical safety of United States travelers.” Such restrictions have been imposed on a number of occasions, including restricting the use of a U.S. passport to travel to Iraq from 1991 until late 2003, on account of hostilities occurring in that country and the potential dangers posed to U.S. travelers.

Immigration

Perhaps the most effective and commonly employed means to deter non-U.S. nationals (aliens) suspected of terrorist activity from traveling to the United States derive from federal immigration law. Rules governing whether and when aliens may be admitted into the United States, along with the conditions for their continued presence in the country, are primarily found in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA establishes several grounds for which an alien suspected of terrorist activity may be barred from admission into the United States, including persons seeking to come to the United States as refugees. Under INA §212(f), the President is also conferred with broad authority to act, by means of proclamation, to bar the entry of an alien or class of aliens into the United States if he deems their entry detrimental to U.S. interests, though usage of this authority has been relatively rare. While programs like the No-Fly List may prevent suspected foreign terrorists from coming to the United States via a particular mode of transportation, federal immigration rules and requirements may prevent such persons from traveling to the United States using any mode of transport.

The INA generally provides that aliens who are seeking initial admission into the country bear the burden of proving they are admissible. Moreover, judicial review of a decision by a consular officer abroad to deny an alien a visa to come to the United States, or a determination made by customs and border officials at a U.S. port of entry that an arriving alien is inadmissible on terrorism-related grounds, may be quite circumscribed or virtually non-existent. Aliens who have been lawfully admitted into the country might also be removed from the United States for the same terrorism-related reasons as aliens seeking initial admission into the country. In the case of lawfully admitted aliens, however, federal immigration authorities bear the evidentiary burden of demonstrating that the alien’s activities render him deportable before the alien may be ordered removed. There may also be greater availability of judicial review than in cases where an alien has not yet been lawfully admitted. Moreover, if a lawful permanent resident alien (sometimes described as an “immigrant”) travels briefly abroad and seeks to return to the United States, he may be afforded greater procedural and substantive protections than other aliens who attempt to travel to the United States.

Immigration rules and requirements do not apply to U.S. citizens. Whereas an alien suspected of terrorism-related travel to the United States may be barred from admission into the country, other methods would need to be employed (e.g., placement on the No-Fly List, criminal prosecution, passport restrictions) to deter U.S. citizens from traveling to, from, or within the United States for terrorist purposes.

 

 

ISIS Has 24 Hour Tech Savvy Jihad Help Desk

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Using the Darkweb is not a new weapon for jihad cells, DARPA has been working the ISIS hidden internet world for quite some time, to what success is undetermined.

ISIS Has Help Desk for Terrorists Staffed Around the Clock

NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint — a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development — which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year — is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.

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Authorities are now homing in on the terror group’s growing cyber capabilities after attacks in Paris, Egypt and elsewhere for which ISIS has claimed credit.

“They’ve developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning,” said Aaron F. Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research organization at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Brantly was the lead author of a CTC report on the Islamic State’s use of secure communications, based on hundreds of hours of observation of how the Jihadi Help Desk operates.

“They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror,” Brantly said in an interview Monday. “Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner. They are now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications.”

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The existence of the Jihadi Help Desk has raised alarm bells in Washington and within the global counterterrorism community because it appears to be allowing a far wider web of militants to network with each other and plot attacks. A senior European counterterrorism official said that concerns about the recent development are especially serious in Europe, where ISIS operatives are believed to be plotting major attacks, some of them with direct assistance from ISIS headquarters in Syria.

At a congressional hearing in October, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI is extremely concerned about ISIS’ increasing ability to “go dark.” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee that the U.S. is ” confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet.”

“While some of the contacts between groups like ISIL and potential recruits occur in publicly accessible social networking sites,” said Comey, “others take place via encrypted private messaging platforms. As a result, the FBI and all law enforcement organizations must understand the latest communication tools and position ourselves to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland.”

Nick Rasmussen, director of the U.S. government’s multiagency National Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview with the Combating Terrorism Center’s in-house publication that the “agile use of new means of communicating, including ways which they understand are beyond our ability to collect,” is one of his greatest concerns when it comes to ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Brantly described the Jihadi Help Desk as “a fairly large, robust community” that is anchored by at least five or six core members who are technical experts with at least collegiate or masters level training in information technology. There are layers of other associates, living all around the world, who allow the service to operate — and respond to questions — at any time of the day or night. CTC researchers have spent a year or so monitoring the help desk — and its senior operatives — via online forums, social media and other means.

“You can kind of get a sense of where they are by when they say they are signing off to participate in the [Muslim] call to prayer,” which traditionally occurs at five specific times a day, Brantly said. “They are very decentralized. They are operating in virtually every region of the world.”

The help desk workers closely track all of the many new kinds of security software and encryption as they come online, and produce materials to train others in how to use them. The CTC has obtained more than 300 pages of documents showing the help desk is training everyone from novice militants to the most experienced jihadists in digital operational security.

ISIS also distributes the tutorials through Twitter and other social media, taking pains to link to versions of it that can be downloaded even after their social media sites are shut down.

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And once the help desk operatives develop personal connections with people, ISIS then contacts them to engage them in actual operational planning — including recruiting, fundraising and potentially attacks.

“They will engage in encrypted person-to-person communications, and these are extremely hard to break into from a cryptographic perspective,” Brantly said.

“They also post YouTube Videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies,” Brantly said. “Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube; they have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism].”

 

 

Revenue Source for ISIS, a New Target Oil

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MarketPlace: France bombed ISIS targets in Syria on Sunday —in retaliation for Friday’s terror attacks in Paris —including a training camp and an ammunition depot, according to the French Defense Ministry. The next day, the United States targeted 116 trucks ISIS had been using to transport oil. The latter strike, reportedly planned before the Paris attacks, is an attempt to stymie a source of funding for the extremist group.

ISIS derives most of its funds from activities inside the territories it now controls, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. That’s different from, say, Al Qaeda, which has historically relied on donations from outside sources.

“When they control a territory that’s approximately the size of Great Britain, that creates a great deal of ability to get internal sources of revenue, ranging from natural resources, to antiquities they control, to taxation on their population,” he said.

It’s hard to say just how much funding ISIS gets from each source. Gartenstein-Ross estimates that the largest piece of the pie comes from taxing the people in its territories.

The group also benefits from the sale of antiquities from sites it loots.

“We’re really talking about small items, so tablets or seals,” said Howard Shatz, a senior economist at the Rand Corporation. “You can put those in your pocket, you can put them in a suitcase.”

Shatz said middlemen can get the goods to private buyers or lower-tier auction houses.

Meanwhile, oil is often transported across long-standing smuggling routes and mixed with oil from other sources so it can’t be traced, said Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism & Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The group makes use of hidden compartments in trucks as well as hoses to transport oil across borders, often into southern Turkey.

Still, other funding comes from ransoms demanded for kidnap victims.

“The vast majority of this money is going to run their state, because that’s their biggest expense by far,” said Levitt. “But they have a lot of money. If they want to be able to peel off a little bit for terrorism, they can do a tremendous amount of damage.”

While funding sources for the Paris attack are not yet clear, Levitt said similar attacks typically cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and are often funded by criminal activity near the target.

Targeting revenue sources is but one method to ‘contain’ Islamic State.

MilitaryTimes: In the first wave of U.S. airstrikes since the Paris attacks, A-10 Thunderbolt ground attack aircraft and AC-130 gunships raked a convoy of more than 100 ISIS oil tanker trucks in Syria in a stepped-up effort to cut off a main source of terror funding, the Pentagon said Monday.

The Navy also announced that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its battle group had departed Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia on a seven-month deployment to the Mideast to plug a gap in the U.S. air arm that has existed since the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt left the region in September.

Pentagon officials also said that the French carrier Charles de Gaulle was also expected to leave port soon and head to the region to bolster coalition air assets with the 11 Rafale and 9 Super Étendard fighters aboard.

The oil convoy attack and the carrier deployment signaled the U.S. intent to intensify airstrikes while increasing efforts to share intelligence with allies in the aftermath of the Paris carnage last Friday that killed at least 129, but President Obama insisted that there would be no fundamental changes in strategy.

“We have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through,” Obama said at a news conference at an economic summit in Turkey before heading to the Philippines and Malaysia for summit meetings there.

The president announced an agreement between the United States and France to share more intelligence information to prevent future terror attacks and refine airstrike targeting in Iraq and Syria.

The agreement would “allow our personnel to pass threat information, including on ISIL, to our French partners even more quickly and more often,” Obama said.

The U.S. will increase airstrikes and boost support for local forces fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria but would continue to avoid “boots on the ground” combat, he said.

“What I do not do is take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America look tough or make me look tough,” Obama said.

Sending U.S. ground troop into Syria and Iraq “would be a mistake, not because our military could not march into Mosul or Raqqa or Ramadi and temporarily clear out ISIL, but because we would see a repetition of what we’ve seen before” in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, referring to another term for ISIS.

Lasting victory over terrorists and insurgents requires local forces and populations to take control with U.S. support, Obama said — “unless we’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries,” he said.

Obama was adamant in rejecting the calls by Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders to scrap plans to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. for fear that terrorists would slip in among them.

“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism — they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” he said. “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”

In response, Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Obama’s remarks at a news conference were defeatist.  “Never before have I seen an American president project such weakness on the global stage,” Preibus said.

With the exceptions of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, the Republican presidential candidates have also stopped short of recommending U.S. “boots on the ground” to counter the Islamic State.

At a Pentagon briefing, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said the force posture of the U.S. had not altered since the Paris attacks but “clearly, we are very interested in doing everything we can” to stop ISIS.

Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had approved plans to “bolster our intelligence sharing” with France to include specifics on “operational planning.”

Carter and Clapper “provided new instructions that will enable the U.S. military to more easily share operational planning information and intelligence with our French counterparts on a range of shared challenges.”

The first fruits of the intelligence sharing were seen Saturday when French warplanes, using airbases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, conducted airstrikes on the self-proclaimed ISIS capital of Raqqa in northwestern Syria.

Davis said that the French “nominated” the targets from intelligence supplied by the U.S. “This was something they were very interested in doing” following what happened in Parks, he said.

The attack on the tanker truck convoy at Abu Kamal was part of a “broader operation specifically to target ISIL oil revenues,” Davis said.

“ISIL is stealing oil from the people of Iraq and Syria” at a rate estimated by the Treasury Department at $1 million daily, Davis said. By hitting ISIS-controlled oil facilities and distribution networks, “We’re disrupting a significant source of funding” for terror activities, he said.

Davis said the warplanes dropped leaflets warning of the convoy attack before the strike commenced to allow truck drivers who may not have been allied with ISIS to escape.

“It is a balancing act,” he said of the strikes on oil facilities. The U.S. wanted to cut off the funding the al-Qaeda-inspired group gets from oil sales while leaving behind the basic infrastructure for a future democratic Syria.

Davis echoed the remarks last week at a Pentagon briefing from Baghdad by Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve.

Warren said that two-thirds of the ISIS oil revenues come from the eastern Syrian region near the city of Deir ez-Zor, which has been a main focus of U.S. airstrikes.

“Our intent is to shut those oil facilities down completely,” he said. “We’ve done a very comprehensive analysis of these facilities to determine which pieces of the facility we can strike that will shut that facility down for a fairly extended period of time.

“Again, we have to be cognizant that there will be a time after the war — the war will end,” he added. “So we don’t want to completely and utterly destroy these facilities to where they’re irreparable.”

The campaign against ISIS oil facilities has been named “Operation Tidal Wave II.” The original Operation Tidal Wave was the disastrous raid in August of 1943 by B-24 Liberator bombers on the Ploiești, Romania, oil facilities that were supplying Nazi Germany.

Fifty-three aircraft and 660 crew members were lost, and the U.S. military later concluded that the raid had little or no effect on oil production.

Lisbon Treaty and Confirmed Bomb on Russian Plane

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BBC: France has mobilised 115,000 security personnel in the wake of Friday’s Paris attacks by Islamist militants, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.

Mr Cazeneuve said 128 more raids on suspected militants were carried out. French air strikes also hit Islamic State in Syria overnight.

IS has said it carried out the attacks on bars, restaurants, a concert hall and a stadium in which 129 people died.

A huge manhunt is under way for one of the suspects, Salah Abdeslam.

He is believed to have fled across the border to his native Belgium. Belgian police have released more pictures of the wanted man. More here including recent facts, timeline and target locations.

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John Kerry is in Europe working as a mediator and is guiding discussions on Europe’s offensive measures. Belgium is on high alert as is the UK but Germany appears to be passive. France has deployed a carrier group and has launched a second night of sorties, striking 19 targets and provided by U.S. intel sources. Meanwhile, officials have confirmed there was a bomb on board the Russian commercial aircraft that was brought down over the Sinai by the Islamic State faction in that province. The bomb was 1.5 kilos of TNT, which is more than what brought down PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie. Russia has offered a $50 million dollar reward and the Egyptian security services have detained 2 airport suspects.

Meanwhile, what is on tap with Europe is a new security discussion not under NATO but rather the European Union Lisbon Treaty which John Kerry is participating.

BRUSSELS—Defense ministers gathered in Brussels Tuesday to discuss a French decision to invoke the mutual defense clause of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

The clause of the Lisbon Treaty has never been invoked, pushing the European Union into new territory.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian declined to speak as he entered the European Union Council building Tuesday.

Two French officials said that the EU treaty provision, 42-7, was being invoked to try to prod the union to move forward on border control issues and increased intelligence sharing.

French officials said there needs to be agreement on stronger background and passenger name record checks on the European Union’s external borders — something that EU member states have been pressing for well over a year. The French also want more cooperation on illegal arms sales within Europe.

“Cooperation has not moved forward for years,” said a French official. “We are asking the EU to move forward on a number of issues that have been stuck for years,” said a French official..

Another French official said the use of the EU treaty could also help prompt better, and faster, intelligence sharing within the union.

French officials don’t want to invoke the NATO treaty, arguing the current coalition is a more nimble organization with which to strike at Islamic State targets.

While French requests carry great weight within the European Union, it isn’t clear whether the move will be able to resolve the disagreements over border control or other issues.

Measures to increase passenger name record screening have so far been blocked because of resistance to the measures in the European Parliament, forcing rounds of negotiations between capitals, lawmakers and the EU’s executive, the European Commission.

There have also been frequent calls since the migrant crisis began to tighten external border controls but apart from Hungary’s move to build fences on its border and a greater effort to register people entering the bloc in Italy and Greece there has been limited progress.

In a news conference late afternoon Monday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said it was too early to react to the French request, which she said she would discuss Tuesday morning with Mr. Le Drian.

“Obviously we will take a careful look at that politically with the French authorities first of all, with the rest of the European institutions including the legal services and obviously we’ll come up with a follow up to that,” Ms. Mogherini said. “Obviously we have started to work on this.”

On Tuesday, most defense ministers declined to comment on the proposal in advance of the French presentation, but expressed support for France in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

“We will defend our security, our freedom, our way of living and we will not be intimidated,” said Jeanine Hennis- Plasschaert, the minister of defense for the Netherlands.