Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Tell Bloomberg About Darknet Arms Trafficking

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Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York went off after the Paris attacks stating once again an issue with people having the ability to get their hands on guns. Ah …Michael you trying to do gun control in Europe also? Sheesh. Get a clue Bloomberg, here is a memo on the Darknet.

There is also a State Department visa waiver program that allows foreigners to travel freely in countless countries globally much less, Europe is borderless due to the Schengen Agreement. Borders and documents MATTER! Oh and hey Michael, payment methods often include the bitcoins, track that sir.

The Middle East is full of weapons, all kinds of weapons and to resell them is nothing more than a yard sale. An AK-47 in good condition sells for $50.00 (U.S.) or less.

 

How Dark Net Arms Dealers Could Easily Smuggle Assault Weapons To Paris

Europe’s open-border policy has made it harder for government officials to track illegal weapons that come from as far away as the U.S.

Vocativ: When terrorists in Western Europe want guns, they usually tap into a 20-year-old market that took root and flourished at the end of the Balkan wars. Now with the rise of the dark net, that market has been digitized and deals on illegal guns are only a few minutes away.

Vocativ used our technology to scan several current and active dark net marketplaces and found several postings selling AK-47s, the types of guns eight ISIS terrorists were said to have used during the deadly attacks in Paris on November 13. Across a dozen sites, we found 281 listings of guns and ammunition, including 16 submachine and machine guns, 12 sniper rifles and 40 assault rifles. The majority of the vendors ship from the U.S., as well as Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.

Terrorists likely acquired weapons through the black market or dark net, as France has especially strict gun laws. The French government estimates there are about 7.5 million legally owned guns in the country. Some estimates claim there are as many as 10 to 20 million illegal weapons in France. A European Commission study estimates some 67 million unregistered firearms exist in the EU.

When the illegal firearm market initially grew from weapons originating in the Balkans, criminals and terrorists wanting weapons had to connect with the right crime organization. Now, they just have to connect to the Internet. If a terrorist (or anyone) wants to buy an illegal assault rifle today they just have to download the Tor browser, which allows them to search the web anonymously, then find eBay-like marketplaces, which can be found on the regular Internet.

In January, Philippe Capon, the head of UNSA police union told Bloomberg that AK-47s sell for about 1,000 euros ($1,181 USD) to 1,500 euros ($1,650 USD) on the French black market. Our Vocativ analysis shows that the current going rate for AK-47s on the dark net ranges from 547 eros ($590 USD) to 6,300 euros ($6,785 USD).

“The guns moved from the Balkans to Western Europe and other parts of Europe in small and medium shipments, so that makes it very difficult to monitor and investigate and protect against,” said Cédric Poitevin, head of the  Arms Transfers and Small Arms project at GRIP (Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security), which is based in Brussels. “They can move across criminal networks within Europe. First to Belgium and other parts and then to someone who is linked to criminal or terrorist networks.”

An open-border policy has likely made matters worse. The United Kingdom does not participate in Europe’s open-border program and the country has had very little gun crime, but other European nations have not been so fortunate. “We face the same challenge in all countries with the almost absence of border controls,” Poitevin told Vocativ. “The fact that we are close to the Balkans and, generally speaking, two countries in Eastern Europe with huge stockpiles of guns that have been made available.”

Poitevin say, most of what he and European government officials know about firearm trafficking and smuggling comes from assumptions, arrests and limited studies. “Only recently there has been political priority,” he said. “Until recently there was very little funds to study the issue and build stats and to gather quantitative information.”

One of the most recent efforts to study gun trafficking began in 2013, when Interpol created the Illicit Arms Records and Tracing Management System (iARMS), which allows member countries to report and track weapon trafficking. In 2014, Europol announced they would make gun smuggling a priority. That initiative focused largely on the rise in Internet trafficking. They had some success in October that year. French law enforcement agents raided several homes across the country and found hundreds of weapon stashes, which included assault rifles and machine guns.

*** Meanwhile, the Paris attackers communicated with each other using PlayStation 4 and they in turned communicated with Islamic State using an app called ‘WhatsApp’.

Belgium’s home affairs minister says ISIL communicates using Playstation 4

Quartz: The day after terror attacks in Paris left at least 127 dead and some 300 wounded, attention has turned to Belgium. Several arrests were made in Belgium today (Nov. 14), and a black Volkswagen Polo with a Belgian license plate had been spotted on the night of the attacks near the Bataclan theater. Police have raided a Brussels neighborhood where three of the eight attackers are believed to have lived.

More fighters have joined ISIL from Belgium, per capita, than any Western nation.

Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has previously described Brussels as a weak link in the fight against terror. Speaking at a debate last week, he said: “The thing that keeps me awake at night is the guy behind his computer, looking for messages from IS and other hate preachers.”

Jambon also reportedly warned of the growing use by terror networks of the PlayStation 4 gaming console, which allows terrorists to communicate with each other and is difficult for the authorities to monitor. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,” he said.

The gaming console also was implicated in ISIL’s plans back in June, when an Austrian teen was arrested for downloading bomb plans to his PS4.

Amid Paris Attacks, 5 More Released from Gitmo

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Barack left the country too, headed for Turkey.

The nefarious outside legal council group CCR, which was assigned by former Attorney General Eric Holder is the group of lawyers of record for many of the detainees.

Pentagon Transfers 5 Guantanamo Detainees to the UAE as Battle Over Closure Heats Up

Days ahead of signing a legislative freeze on Guantanamo into law, the president defiantly moves five

Files: al Rahzihi    al Qadasi 

al Asani     al Busays     al Nahdi

Hours after President Barack Obama took off for the G20 conference in Turkey, another plane was wheels up, carrying five detainees from the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United Arab Emirates.

The move of Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Razihi, Khalid Abd-al-Jabbar Muhammad Uthman al-Qadasi, Adil Said al-Hajj Ubayd al-Busays, Sulayman Awad Bin Uqayl al-Nahdi, and Fahmi Salem Said al-Asani brings the total population to 107, with 48 more cleared to go.

The transfer comes just days ahead of Obama signing the annual defense authorization bill, in which lawmakers extended and added restrictions intended to freeze such moves into 2017, potentially dooming Obama’s campaign pledge and 2009 order to close Guantanamo.

The administration insists it will continue to use the transfers to chip away at the population. Sunday’s transfer also follows a string of single moves in recent weeks, a sign that a bureaucratic logjam at the Pentagon has loosened under presidential pressure.

But officials have acknowledged they won’t be able to achieve their goal of emptying the prison — or at least getting the population so low the cost of keeping them in Cuba becomes indefensibly high — unless they are able to move larger groups of detainees, such as they did Sunday, rather than one-by-one.

 

 

The move also takes on a defiant tone amid preemptive political outcry over the Obama administration’s ever-imminent plan to close Guantanamo, which officials say will include a series of options for alternative sites in the U.S., and its refusal to rule out executive action to ultimately shutter the facility in Cuba.

Threat: Immigration/Visa Waiver to U.S. From Europe

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This is the second major attack in Paris in less than a year, but not the only 2 by any means. The Charlie Hebdo attack gave us wider connections to jihadis from Belgium and Germany as well as a spotlight on functional cells in France. This recent attack in France is no different, where the same countries are the same once again.

The FBI has declared they cannot keep up with the flow of refugees and immigrants into the United States, not enough resources and there are more than 900 actives ISIS domestic cases currently being worked by the FBI.

Many in Washington DC and even some Republican candidates are calling for closing the borders and full suspension of visa programs, which this blogger has been calling for at least 2 years long.

Now, more chilling, The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) allows citizens of participating countries* to travel to the United States without a visa for stays of 90 days or less.

A partial list of the countries as declared and managed by the U.S. State Department includes in the visa waiver program:

BFlag of Belgium BelgiumFlag of Brunei Brunei

CFlag of Chile ChileFlag of Czech Republic Czech Republic

DFlag of Denmark Denmark

EFlag of Estonia Estonia

FFlag of Finland FinlandFlag of France France

GFlag of Germany GermanyFlag of Greece Greece

It is worse as reported by the CTC, counter-terrorism center.

CTC Perspectives – The French Foreign Fighter Threat in Context

November 14, 2015

Author(s): Daniel Milton

In the immediate aftermath of the multi-pronged terrorist assault in Paris, policymakers, practitioners, and the press began to focus on the possibility that returnees from Iraq and Syria had participated in carrying out the tragic attacks. This possibility of a connection was further strengthened by the discovery of a Syrian passport on one of the suicide bombers and a number of witnesses to the attacks who claimed that the attackers referenced Iraq and Syria, with one account claiming that one of the terrorists shouted, “This is for Syria.”[1]

While the exact role that foreign fighters may have played in these attacks will likely remain unclear for the near future, the threat posed by returning fighters has been a central focus of counterterrorism efforts for some time. By utilizing a unique source of open-source data on foreign fighters that the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point has been collecting over the past year, which has resulted in the collection of 182 detailed records of French foreign fighters (as part of a much larger set of Western foreign fighters), this CTC Perspectives endeavors to offer a bit of context regarding the French foreign fighter threat.

One of the claims made by a number of witnesses of the Paris attacks was the relatively youthful appearance of some of the attackers. Indeed, early indications about one of the individuals is that he was a 29-year-old French national.[2] This seems consistent with what we see among French fighters in the CTC dataset, in which the average age was approximately 25. In other words, young individuals seem to form a large portion of the French foreign fighter contingent. The appeal of organizations like the Islamic State among youth is not particularly surprising given their slick propaganda campaign and social media outreach, but the involvement of younger fighters in the Paris attack, if proven to be the case, may raise additional questions about the implications of such a youthful appeal.

French_AgeDistro

Another way in which foreign fighters could contribute to an attack similar to what occurred in Paris is if they carried knowledge of the streets and terrain above and beyond that which would be attained through weeks or months of pre-operation surveillance. The 29-year-old individual mentioned earlier is said to be from Courcouronnes, a location 20 miles south of Paris. In our data of French foreign fighters, we were able to ascertain the hometown of 145 of the fighters. Approximately 25 percent of the French fighters in our dataset came from the Paris-metro area. As would be expected given the large population of the city and its suburbs, this number represents one of the largest concentrations of foreign fighters. It is worth noting that the southern region of France accounts for 42 percent of fighters in our dataset, although they are spread throughout a number of smaller towns and locations across the southern part of the country.

One of the most difficult things for security services to assess is what kinds of skills and training foreign fighters receive while in Iraq and Syria. The fact that they could have acquired sufficient training to plan and execute the Paris attacks seems self-evident after the fact, but is also evident from examining the limited data we were able to collect in this project. We were only able to assess the operational role filled by foreign fighters for 84 of our French foreign fighters. Of that limited number, however, we found evidence that at least 50 of them served as foot soldiers, gaining valuable front-line experience in carrying out operations under pressure. Of course, as shown in the still shots from the Islamic State propaganda videos below, the Islamic State operates a number of training camps in Iraq and Syria where incoming fighters receive training tactics and weapons that could be applied in a number of settings, whether on the battlefield or when they return to their home countries.

Picture2

It also emerged that at least 7 of the 8 Paris attackers died by detonating suicide devices, bringing for the first time in France’s history the phenomenon of suicide bombing to its homeland.[3] Despite the newness of this tactic in the French homeland, our data also show that a number of French foreign fighters that traveled to Iraq and Syria set the precedent of dying for the cause. Indeed, at least 14 of the French fighters in our data either died in suicide bombings in Iraq and Syria or expressed a willingness to do so. Beyond suicide bombings alone, we were able to confirm that 23 percent of the French foreign fighters in our dataset died in Iraq and Syria. In other words, the expectation of being willing to die for the cause has been set for French fighters to emulate.

To be clear, the fact that such an expectation is perpetuated among fighters in Syria is not a supposition, but something that they themselves have confirmed in interviews. In the words of Abu Mariam, a 24-year old foreign fighter for France:

Martyrdom is probably the shortest way to paradise, which is not something I was told. I did witness my martyred friends, noticing contentment on their faces and the smell of musk coming out of their corpses, unlike those of the dead disbelievers, the enemies of Allah, whose faces only exhibit ugliness, and whose corpses smell worse than pigs.[4]

Although our data focuses mainly on Western foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, we also collected a number of records, 32 to be precise, of French individuals deemed to be facilitators of foreign fighter travel. While those who carry out violence tend to garner the most attention, it important to remember that the same networks that facilitate travel may very well also be used by the organization to help returnees carry out attacks, or to do so on their own. It is too soon to say whether such a facilitation network played a role in the Paris attacks, but the sheer size, scale, and complexity of the attacks would suggest the participation of a network larger than just a couple of returned foreign fighters. The possibility of a broader facilitation network reaches beyond France. Reports of arrests related to the Paris attacks have emerged from Germany and Belgium.

Within the next month, the CTC will be publishing the first of a series of reports related to the broader issue of foreign fighters that examines the question of foreign fighter radicalization. It is our hope that this collection and analysis effort will contribute to understanding the enduring threat posed by foreign fighters.

Daniel Milton is an Assistant Professor at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or any of its subordinate commands.

[1] Rose Troup Buchanan, “Paris terror attacks: Syrian passport found on body of suicide bomber at Stade de France,” Independent, 14 November 2015; Andrew C. McCarthy, “This is for Syria…Allahu Akbar,” National Review, November 13, 2015.

[2] Adam Nossiter, Aurelien Breeden, and Katrin Bennhold, “Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS,” New York Times, November 14, 2015.

[3] Of course, the French people have dealt with this type of terrorism before, having been targeted alongside American military personnel on October 23, 1983 in a twin truck bombing in Beirut, Lebanon.

[4] Loubna Mrie, Vera Mironova, and Sam Whitt, “I am only looking up to paradise,” Foreign Policy, October 2, 2014.

 

 

 

What Jihad in Paris Looks Like

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The President of France, Hollande is a passive leader, precisely the same as Barack Obama. Hillary after the CBS debate held on Saturday night, is just as passive. All of them are by themselves a danger to the security of the homeland.

 

 

Fair warning for the last photo at the bottom, but it is important to absorb…it can and has happened here.  Exactly what is a ‘watch list’ in America, what is being watched by those on the list? Too little too late as noted by the Tsarnaev brothers. Time to ask hard questions and make new demands.

The FBI has already dispatched a team to Paris for forensic and investigation with French intelligence services. Meanwhile:

FNC:  French man believed to be directly involved in Friday’s Islamic terror attack in Paris that killed 129 and injured 352 was on the run Sunday afternoon and was being hunted by authorities, French security officials said.

The man, one of three brothers believed involved in the killings in central Paris, rented the black Volkswagen Polo used by a group of hostage-takers that left at least 89 people dead inside the Bataclan concert hall, one official said.

One other police official said the manhunt is believed to involve at least one suspect. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. One of the suspect’s brothers has been arrested in Belgium and another brother died in the attack, the first official said.

Three of the seven Islamist suicide bombers have already been identified as French citizens, as was at least one of seven other people arrested in neighboring Belgium in connection to the deadly attacks.

One suicide attacker, who was identified from a skin sample, had been living in a Paris suburb, French police said Sunday. A Belgian official said two of the seven suicide bombers were French men living in Brussels, and one of the attackers was living in the Molenbeek neighborhood, which is considered a focal point for religious extremism and fighters going to Syria. Among the seven people arrested  was another French citizen living in the Belgian capital.

The new information highlighted growing fears of possible homegrown terrorism in France, a country that has exported more jihadis than any other in Europe.

Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old French citizen who had been flagged for ties to Islamic radicalism, was identified Sunday as one of the assailants by a French judicial official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Mostefai’s ID comes as Balkan authorities work to track the travels of a man whose Syrian passport was found next to a dead suicide bomber at France’s national stadium on Friday night. It is still not clear if that Syrian passport is authentic, or if it belonged to the dead bomber. European officials say there is a brisk trade in fake Syrian passports to help people obtain refugee status in the European Union.

Serbian police said Sunday the owner of the passport, identified only as A.A., formally requested asylum in Serbia. Prosecutor Francois Molins told Sky News the passport was found at the Stade de France bombing site and belonged to a Syrian citizen born in 1990.

Officials said the passport holder entered Greece on Oct. 3 through Leros, one of the eastern Aegean islands that tens of thousand of people fleeing war and poverty have been using as a gateway into the 28-nation EU. Serbian police said the holder of the passport then registered at its border entry with Macedonia on Oct. 7. Croatian police said the passport holder was checked at a refugee center on Oct. 8, but the man was not flagged as suspicious and continued his journey toward Hungary and Austria, according to police spokeswoman Helena Biocic.

The FBI is sending to Paris a team of agents that specialize in recovering information from electronic devices, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The FBI is reportedly anticipating a bevy of information coming from French officials in the days ahead and wants to have sufficient manpower to handle and interpret it.

While investigators work to figure out how the attack was planned and if anyone connected with it is still at large, the so-called “City of Light” has gone dark as top Paris tourist attractions such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre art museum remain closed in the wake of the attacks perpetrated by Mostefai and seven other terrorists. The Islamist attackers wielded AK-47s and wore suicide belts while carrying out a series of coordinated attacks at six sites around Paris on Friday night.

Mostefai, identified by his fingerprints, was one of the terrorists inside the Bataclan concert hall, where at least 89 people were murdered during a concert by the American band Eagles of Death Metal, Sky News reported. He was known to the French Secret Service for his radicalism, Fox News has confirmed.

Little is known about Mostefai’s background, but French investigators have learned he grew up in a tough French housing project and turned to radicalism five years ago.

The mayor of the French city of Chartres, Jean-Pierre Gorges, identified Mostefai as a resident in a Facebook post, and Molins told Sky News that Mostefai had a criminal record, but didn’t spend time in jail.

“In 2010, he was blacklisted by the police due to extreme behaviors, but never been classified into any illegal extremist groups,” Molins said.

An unidentified prosecutor told AP Mostefai was identified from fingerprints on a finger found in the carnage of the Paris attacks Friday night.

“In 2010, he was blacklisted by the police due to extreme behaviors . . .”

– Prosecutor Francois Molins

The official said Mostefai’s father, a brother and other family members have been detained and are being questioned, according to the AP.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the apparent meticulously planned attacks and has warned that France would remain at the “top of the list of targets” over its airstrike on the militant group in Syria and Iraq.

A Seat car containing Kalashnikov rifles was found abandoned by police in Montreuil, approximately 4 miles east of Paris. Molins said Saturday that gunmen armed with automatic rifles pulled up in that model car before opening fire, killing 15 people and injuring 10, but a French official told the AP that authorities couldn’t immediately confirm if it was the same black Seat car linked to the AK-47 attacks on the Le Carillon bar and the Le Petit Cambodge restaurant on Rue Alibert in the city’s 10th district.

Belgian police arrested three in connection with the terror assaults Saturday. Belgium Justice Minister Koen Geens told the VRT network that the arrests came after a car with Belgian license plates was seen Friday night close to the Bataclan concert hall, scene of the deadliest assault, where at least 89 people were massacred by attackers armed with AK-47s and explosives.

Geens said the car was a rental and the arrests stemmed from police raids conducted in the St. Jans Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels.

French President Francois Hollande called the attacks an “act of war” in a nationally televised address Saturday. Hollande vowed France “will be merciless toward the barbarians of Islamic State group.”

ISIS, in an online statement, described Paris as “the carrier of the banner of the Cross in Europe” and described the attackers as “eight brothers wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine rifles.”

French police said Saturday they believed all of the attackers were dead, but were still searching for possible accomplices. The French prosecutor’s office said seven of the eight assailants died in suicide bombings.

 

 

 

 

Paris Attacks Details Emerge

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  1. day after the attacks in Paris, raids were conducted in Belgium.  

Belgium’s justice minister the VRT network that several arrests were made in Brussels after a car with Belgian license plates was seen close to the Bataclan theater in Paris on Friday night, one of the places where victims were killed.

He said it was a rental vehicle and police organized several raids in the St. Jans Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels on Saturday.

2. Countless migrants have found their way to Greece and continues their way into Europe including one of the Paris attackers.

The holder of a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the gunmen who died in Friday night’s attacks in Paris passed though Greece in October, a Greek minister said.  He traveled through the Greek island of Leros.

“The holder of the passport passed through the island of Leros on Oct. 3, 2015, where he was identified according to EU rules,” said Greece’s deputy minister in charge of police, Nikos Toskas, in a statement.

A Greek police source said the passport’s owner was a young man who had arrived in Leros with a group of 69 refugees and had his fingerprints taken by authorities there. Police declined to give his name.

Toskas did not know if the passport was checked by other countries through which the holder possibly passed on his way to France. The police source said French authorities had asked other countries in Europe, including Greece, to check on the passport.

3. While the shock of the Paris attacks continues, the United States conducted another airstrike in Libya against Islamic State. The target was Abu Nabil known as Wissma Najm Abd Zayd al Zubaydi, a senior Islamic State leader in Libya. He is dead and was responsible for the murder of dozens of Egyptian Coptic Christians on the shores of Tripoli last February. Libya matters because ‘Libya is a double-barreled existential crisis for the European Union. First there’s the humanitarian aspect of how to handle the torrent of migrants heading north. In this Brussels seems to have opted for a good cop/bad cop strategy of taking in a greater number of refugees and blowing up the smugglers’ boats respectively. Yet the bad cop doesn’t have a clue (it’s impossible to identify a smuggler’s boat since they’re often purchased from fisherman hours before a crossing) and the audience of EU member states has learned how to shut out the good cop’s lectures.

Brussels has proposed a quota system whereby member states would be asked to take in 40,000 refugees. In theory this would distribute refugees more evenly among the bloc, away from the countries at the frontlines of the influx and towards those with less of a problem. But the plan has already run into a wall of opposition from an immigration-wary membership. France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and various central and eastern European countries have come out against the proposal, setting the stage for another nationalist revolt against Brussels. In this we see how refugees can put added strain on a bloc that is bitterly divided on issues of immigration.’

And then there’s the elephant in the room, or the biggest political crisis of all: How can this be happening in a country just 450 miles from Europe’s southern shores? If there was ever an opportunity for the European Union to demonstrate the will and means to assert itself on the world stage, it’s in Libya – a country that certain EU member states are directly culpable in bringing to its present state. Though he was a monster through and through, Gaddafi presided over a stable Libya that exported 1.6 million barrels of oil per day, much of it to Europe. That the union is incapable of even attempting a serious, coordinated strategy to redress the current situation is the most damning fact of all. It suggests that no matter how proximate or severe, there’s no crisis that can break the ‘sleeping beauty’ of the European Union out of its geopolitical slumber.’

4. There are implications for other countries in Europe. Gatwick airport in the UK  was closed earlier due to a man with a weapon. A French passenger plane was grounded due to a threatening Tweet and Poland is refusing to adhere to refugee migrants in the wake of the Paris attacks.

5. Finally and most terrifying yet is the fact of Syrian refugees that arrived in New Orleans. NEW ORLEANS, LA (WVUE) –

The flood of refugees migrating from the terror in Syria and Afghanistan has begun to have a trickle effect in the New Orleans area.

 

“We had served two families, we’re expecting one more soon, and we do not know how many more, but we expect more,” said Martin Gutierrez of Catholic Charities, which is part of the Archidiocese of New Orleans.

Catholic Charities has targeted services for helping refugees.

“So it’s a matter of uniting the families, which is something that the church really promotes, obviously. Some of them don’t have relatives and we try to help them become integral parts of our communities,” Gutierrez said.

But some have argued against the U.S. accepting Syrian refugees, fearing terrorists might slip through the cracks. We turned to former New Orleans FBI chief and anti-terrorism expert Jim Bernazzani for insight on whether that’s a legitimate concern. Before coming to New Orleans, Bernazzani worked to ramp up the nation’s anti-terror strategies after 911.

“If I was in charge of ISIL, logistically I’d take advantage of this situation and put my people in, into the United States,” Bernazzani said. “Now with that said, the FBI is on top of this big time with our Joint Terrorism Task Force and we have what’s called a Terrorist Screening Center that these individuals will be run through.”

But make no mistake, not every refugee seeking admission to the U.S. would face such scrutiny.

“It’s going to be the 18- to 45-year-old male for the most part,” he said. “It’s a percentage game. It’s not fail-safe, but it’s a percentage game.”

Still, as more of the refugees take up residency in the New Orleans area, Bernazzani discourages fear.

“These are just people from another country trying to escape misery by virtue of a civil war,” he said. “We had our own civil war, and so I wouldn’t be worried, but I would be vigilant,” he said.

As local humanitarian agencies continue to serve refugees from Syria who find their way here, “there are multiple background checks that are done on these families and it is part of our  Christian faith to welcome the stranger,” said Gutierrez.

*** Reuters: A man arrested in Germany’s southern state of Bavaria in early November after guns and explosives were found in his car may be linked to Friday’s deadly assault in Paris, Bavaria’s state premier said on Saturday.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks in which gunmen wearing suicide bombing belts killed 127 people in several locations in Paris on Friday.

“We have an arrest through the dragnet, where there are reasonable grounds for presuming that it might be related to the matter,” Horst Seehofer said in a speech at a local party congress of the Christian Democrats.

A spokesman for the Bavarian police said they arrested the 51-year-old on Nov. 5 on a motorway near the town of Rosenheim after investigators found eight machine guns, several handguns and explosives in his VW Golf.

Bayerischer Rundfunk, which was first to break news of the arrest on Saturday, said that the man was a possible accomplice of the Paris killers, but the police spokesman dismissed this as “pure media speculation”.

***

Heavy: The Islamic State has officially claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris. It is the first time that ISIS has officially claimed an attack in Europe. The statement was released by ISIS in French:

isis, isil, is, islamic state, daesh, syria, iraq, terrorism

An English translation provided by SITE reads:

In the name of Allah, the All Merciful, the Very Merciful.

The Very High All Said: “It is He who expelled the ones who disbelieved among the People of the Scripture from their homes at the first gathering. You did not think they would leave, and they thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah ; but [the decree of] Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts [so] they destroyed their houses by their [own] hands and the hands of the believers. So take warning, O people of vision.” Surah 59 verse 2.

In a blessed attack for which Allah facilitated the causes for success, a faithful group of the soldiers of the Caliphate, may Allah dignify it and make it victorious, launched out, targeting the capital of prostitution and obscenity, the carrier of the banner of the Cross in Europe, Paris… Youths who divorced the world and went to their enemy seeking to be killed in the cause of Allah, in support of His religion and His Prophet, Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him, and his charges, and to put the nose of His enemies in the ground. So they were honest with Allah, we consider them thusly, and Allah conquered through their hands and cast in the hearts of the Crusaders horror in the middle of their land, where eight brothers wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine rifles, targeted sites that were accurately chosen in the heart of the capital of France, including the Stade de France during the match between the Crusader German and French teams, where the fool of France, Francois Hollande, was present.

[They also targeted] the Bataclan Conference Center, where hundreds of apostates had gathered in a profligate prostitution party, and other areas in the 10th and 11th and 18th [arrondissements] and in a coordinated fashion. So Paris shook under their feet, and its streets were tight upon them, and the result of the attacks was the death of no less than 100 Crusaders and the wounding of more than those, and unto Allah is all praise and gratitude.

Allah had granted our brothers their wish and gave them what they loved, for they detonated their belts in the gatherings of the disbelievers after running out of ammunition, we ask Allah to accept them among the martyrs and make us follow them.

Let France and those who walk in its path know that they will remain on the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State, and that the smell of death will never leave their noses as long as they lead the convoy of the Crusader campaign, and dare to curse our Prophet, Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him, and are proud of fighting Islam in France and striking the Muslims in the land of the Caliphate with their planes, which did not help them at all in the streets of Paris and its rotten alleys. This attack is the first of the storm and a warning to those who wish to learn.

Allah is the greatest.

“And to Allah belongs [all] honor, and to His Messenger, and to the believers, but the hypocrites do not know.” Surah 63 verse 8

Before the official announcement, ISIS affiliated accounts on Twitter reportedly claimed the attacks for the Islamic State. They used the hashtag “Paris on Fire” in Arabic to celebrate the attacks, the same hashtag ISIS used to celebrate the Charlie Hebdo terror attack.

A suspended Twitter account affiliated with the Islamic State allegedly tweeted about the Paris terrorist attacks before they began and said that Rome, London, and possibly Washington, D.C. are next.

An alleged screenshot by Anonymous affiliated @AnonRevolt_ of the suspended user @isis_9966 appears to be a warning to Parisians at 10:34 p.m. Paris time on November 13.

The alleged tweet by ISIS also threatened that there would be attacks in London and Rome on November 14 or 15. This was noticed by @VestraPvP.

ISIS affiliated accounts on Twitter claiming the Paris attacks for the Islamic State are using the hashtag “Paris on Fire” in Arabic, the same hashtag ISIS used to celebrate the Charlie Hebdo terror attack.

Tim Ramadan, reporter for Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, states that further hashtags under “Paris on Fire” also include “London on Fire”, “Rome on Fire”, and “Washington on Fire.”