Saudi Led Coalition vs. Islamic States, Big Questions

Audio interviews of attitudes of the newly announced Saudi coalition against Islamic State and terrorism in the region.

BBC: Saudi Arabia is part of the US-led coalition against IS and is also leading a military intervention in Yemen against Shia Houthi rebels.
The list of 34 members: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Benin, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Palestinians, Qatar, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
A joint operations centre is to be established in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, state media reported.
Countries from Asia, Africa and the Arab world are involved in the alliance but Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival Iran is not.
It comes amid international pressure for Gulf Arab states to do more in the fight against so-called Islamic State.
Saudi Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman said the new alliance would co-ordinate efforts against extremists in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan.
Neither Iraq nor Syria, whose governments are close to Shia-ruled Iran, are in the coalition, nor is Afghanistan.


Two things stand out immediately about this new Saudi-based Islamic Coalition.
The Shia-majority nations of Iran and Iraq are noticeably absent, as is their ally Syria.
It is far from clear how, in practice, the coalition would conduct counter-terrorism operations in IS-plagued Iraq and Syria without the agreement of those governments.
Secondly, there is the question of the exact definition of terrorism. The Saudi authorities’ interpretation of it extends far beyond the violent actions of armed insurgents.
Recent legislation has branded peaceful opposition activists and reformers, whether online or in the street, as suspected “terrorists” and a security risk to the state.

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CBC: Saudi Arabia’s defence minister gave a rare press conference on Tuesday to announce a new military coalition of 34 Muslim countries, led by Saudi Arabia, to fight terrorism in the region. The coalition includes a broad range of countries including the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan.

The announcement was welcomed by some, and met with skepticism by others, given that Saudi Arabia has long been accused of turning a blind eye to support for terrorism coming from inside its own borders.

By Wednesday, several of the countries involved, including Pakistan and Malaysia, expressed confusion at having been named as members of a military coalition, and began distancing themselves from the commitment.

Aya Batrawy reports on the Arabian Peninsula for the Associated Press. She was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

David A. Weinberg is skeptical of Saudi Arabia’s new military coalition. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies in Washington.

For a sense of how the American government might be thinking, we were joined by James B. Smith. He was the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2009 to 2013. He’s now the president of the policy consulting firm C and M International in Washington.

We did make multiple requests for comment from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Canada, but we did not receive a response. The Saudi embassy to the United States declined our request for an interview.

Hagel: WH Worked to Destroy Me

Hagel: The White House Tried to ‘Destroy’ Me

21st Century Genocide, Syria

On regime change in Syria, the White House capitulates to Russia

WashingtonPost Editorial Board: RUSSIAN PLANES are still bombing Western-backed forces in Syria every day and targeting hospitals, bakeries and humanitarian corridors. Moscow is still insisting that blood-drenched dictator Bashar al-Assad remain in power indefinitely while trying to exclude opposition groups from proposed peace negotiations by claiming they are terrorists.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State John F. Kerry insisted Tuesday after meeting with Vladi­mir Putin that the Russian ruler and the Obama administration see Syria “in fundamentally the same way.” Unfortunately, that increasingly appears to be the case — and not because Mr. Putin has altered his position.

For four years, President Obama demanded the departure of Mr. Assad, who has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons, “barrel bombs,” torture and other hideous acts. Yet in its zeal to come to terms with Mr. Putin, the Obama administration has been slowly retreating from that position. On Tuesday in Moscow, Mr. Kerry took another big step backward: “The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change,” he said. He added that a demand by a broad opposition front that Mr. Assad step down immediately was a “non-starting position” — because the United States already agreed that Mr. Assad could stay at least for the first few months of a “transition process.”

Mr. Kerry’s rhetorical capitulation was coupled with the observation that the administration doesn’t “believe that Assad himself has the ability to be able to lead the future Syria.” But he now agrees with Mr. Putin that the country’s future leadership must be left to Syrians to work out. That’s a likely recipe for an impasse — especially as Mr. Assad is still saying he won’t even negotiate with any opponents who are armed or backed by foreign governments. At the same time, the administration’s forswearing of “regime change” sends a message to Mr. Putin and his Iranian allies: The power structure in Damascus that has granted Russia a naval base and served as a conduit for Iranian weapons to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon can remain. (complete editorial here)

“If the Dead Could Speak” reveals some of the human stories behind the more than 28,000 photos of deaths in government custody that were smuggled out of Syria and first came to public attention in January 2014.

The report lays out new evidence regarding the authenticity of what are known as the Caesar photographs, identifies a number of the victims, and highlights some of the key causes of death. Human Rights Watch located and interviewed 33 relatives and friends of 27 victims whose cases researchers verified; 37 former detainees who saw people die in detention; and four defectors who worked in Syrian government detention centers or the military hospitals where most of the photographs were taken. Using satellite imagery and geolocation techniques, Human Rights Watch confirmed that some of the photographs of the dead were taken in the courtyard of the 601 Military Hospital in Mezze.

If you can stomach more truth, torture and genocide click here.

Why is this an important story? It is a holocaust at the hands of the Syrian leader, Bashir al Assad, a deadly tyrannical leader who is fully supported by Vladimir Putin of Russia and the rogue regime of Iran. Further questions are required, where is the United Nations? Where is the International Criminal Court, why no modern day Nuremberg trial? Why have Western leaders including John Kerry, Barack Obama, David Cameron even the Middle East Gulf States come to accept this?

Many across America say that Syria is not our problem. While there is some truth to that, when the United States is taking in hundreds of thousands refugees without vetting and Europe is being crushed by migrants, it does become a problem for at least America.

The full Human Rights Watch report is here. In full disclosure, multi-billionaire George Soros gave $100 million to HRW in 2010, but it seems there is selective attention, attitudes and investigations by Human Rights Watch as noted with regard to Iran.

Full Story on San Bernardino Accomplice, Marquez

Marquez-Complaint-Charging-Document-12-17En­rique Mar­quez, the friend of ter­ror­ist Syed Rizwan Farook, was ar­res­ted Dec. 17 and charged with con­spir­ing to give ma­ter­i­al sup­port to a ter­ror­ist plot, ac­cord­ing to a char­ging state­ment re­leased by fed­er­al of­fi­cials.

Marquez-Complaint-Charging-Document-12-17 https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2648603/Marquez-Complaint-Charging-Document-12-17.pdf

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Enrique Marquez, who bought the assault rifles used in a deadly attack here, was charged Thursday with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, federal officials said.

Marquez, 24, was also charged in federal court with making a false statement in connection with the acquisition of firearms used in the attack, the Justice Department announced.

These charges are the first to stem from what became a sprawling global investigation into the Dec. 2 massacre at an office holiday gathering, a probe that has remained focused on the man who once lived next door to one of the attackers.

Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple with a young baby, killed 14 people and wounded 21 others in what authorities said was a terrorist attack. The couple died in a shootout with police hours later.

Officials say that Marquez and Farook, former neighbors, had discussed mounting a attack in 2012, a year before the FBI says Farook and his future wife began corresponding online about waging violent jihad.

The FBI arrested Marquez on Thursday and he is expected to make his first court appearance in Riverside, Calif., later in the day.

“While there currently is no evidence that Mr. Marquez participated in the Dec. 2, 2015 attack or had advance knowledge of it, his prior purchase of the firearms and ongoing failure to warn authorities about Farook’s intent to commit mass murder had fatal consequences,” U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker of the Central District of California said in a statement.

Authorities also said Thursday that in addition to buying the guns used by the husband-and-wife attackers, Marquez had bought explosive material used to construct the pipe bomb authorities found at the Inland Regional Center after the shooting attack.

Marquez and Farook were friends who fixed up cars together and were also connected through marriage. Last year, Marquez married Mariya Chernykh, and her sister Tatiana is married to Farook’s brother, a Navy veteran named Syed Raheel Farook. A co-worker of Marquez said the marriage to Chernykh was arranged and described it as strained.

Marquez has also told the FBI that he and Farook talked about mounting some kind of attack in 2012, according to senior U.S. law enforcement officials. But he said said they were scared off after a terrorism investigation in Riverside, Calif., that year ended with four local men arrested for plotting to kill Americans in Afghanistan. The men were convicted and sentenced to prison.

Authorities say Marquez legally purchased two assault rifles in 2011 and 2012 that were eventually used in the massacre this month at the Inland Regional Center. California law states that transferring gun ownership from one person to another must be done by a registered dealer. Exemptions include transfers from a parent to an adult child or transfers between spouses.

Some Democratic lawmakers responded immediately with vows to push legislation to tighten gun trafficking laws.

“We must do everything we can to ensure that deadly weapons – like the rifles used in the San Bernardino shootings – do not fall into the hands of terrorists, violent criminals, and drug traffickers,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Law enforcement officials have complained for years that they lack effective tools necessary to investigate and deter straw purchasers and gun traffickers.  Today’s arrest of the individual who provided the rifles for the San Bernardino shooters is a reminder that we need to strengthen our laws to give law enforcement agents and prosecutors the tools they need to fight terrorism and violent crime.”

Leahy said he would reintroduce legislation to make straw purchasing a federal crime and establish tough penalties for those who traffic guns to terrorists and criminals.

Law enforcement authorities searched Marquez’s home three days after the shooting. At the time, Marquez was not charged with a crime, and officials said he was cooperating with the investigation. He had checked himself into a mental-health facility in the aftermath of the shooting, but has cooperated with the FBI after he was tracked down.

Two days before his Riverside home was raided, Marquez had posted a garbled message on Facebook: “I’m. Very sorry sguys. It was a pleasure.” When he didn’t show up for work the next day as a doorman at a pirate-themed neighborhood bar, his co-workers began to worry that he may have become suicidal. Much more detail here.

 

FBI Prevented from Using Open Source?

‘ISIS Supporters’ Twitter Accounts Traced To UK Government Department’: Report

NDTV: London:  Hackers in Britain have claimed that a number of ISIS supporters’ social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the UK government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

A group of four young computer experts, who call themselves VandaSec, have unearthed evidence indicating that at least three ISIS-supporting accounts can be traced back to the DWP’s London offices, the ‘Daily Mirror’ reported.

Every computer and mobile phone logs onto the internet using an IP address, which is a type of identification number. The hacking collective showed the newspaper details of the IP addresses used by three separate so-called “digital jihadis” to access Twitter accounts, which were then used to carry out online recruitment and propaganda campaigns.

At first glance, the IP addresses seem to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection using specialist tools they appeared to link back to the DWP.

The newspaper learned that the British government had sold on a large number of IP addresses to two Saudi Arabian firms.

After the sale completed in October of this year, they were used by extremists to spread their message of hate.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The government owns millions of unused IP addresses which we are selling to get a good return for hardworking taxpayers.

“We have sold a number of these addresses to telecoms companies both in the UK and internationally to allow their customers to connect to the internet. We think carefully about which companies we sell addresses to, but how their customers use this internet connection is beyond our control.”

The UK government has not revealed how much money it has made from the sale of IP addresses.

Now we have learned that DHS has an edit to not use social media or open source for reasons of profiling, which likely has handicapped the FBI from sourcing and connecting intelligence when it comes to cultivating data on would-be jihadists.

Jihadists are making their plans public. Why hasn’t the FBI caught on?

Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week we’re talking about Internet encryption. Need a primer? Catch up here.

WaPo: Rita Katz is the director of the SITE Intelligence Group and has spent nearly two decades tracking, studying and reporting on jihadists. She has testified before Congress and in terrorism trials, briefed the White House, and is the author of the book “Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America.”

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., FBI Director James Comey revealed to the Senate Judiciary Committee that one of the two Islamic State-inspired shooters in the May 3 attack in Garland, Tex., “exchanged 109 messages with an overseas terrorist” the morning of the attack. He followed up by saying that the FBI was unable to read those messages. His implication? Better regulation of message-disguising encryption technology could have revealed the shooters’ plans earlier and could help prevent attacks.

However, regulation of encryption is unlikely to provide the government with the counterterrorism benefit it says it will.  Jihadists’ main tool for planning and executing attacks in recent years has been social media — to which the government has full access — not encrypted messaging. In addition, regulation of one messaging technology will lead to immediate adaptation and the creation of ways to circumvent it.

In recent years, smartphones and social media have enabled users from around the world to communicate easily, safely and free of charge. Programs facilitating such communications sprouted, and jihadists — the Islamic State in particular — quickly adopted them as their main means of communication. For over three years, Twitter has been the Islamic State’s most important platform. High-level operatives within the group have used Twitter’s unencrypted direct messaging to recruit, give instructions for donating and plan attacks. Jihadists even rely on Twitter to promote their channels on other platforms, such as Telegram, which supporters would otherwise have difficulty finding.

Jihadists’ presence on social media has also spread the Islamic State around the world, with people of all ages, sexes and ethnicities leaving their families and friends to join the group. Social media use has been linked to executed and attempted lone-wolf attacks in the United StatesCanadaAustraliaFranceDenmark and other Western nations.

The Garland, Tex., shooting — the only example Comey used  as an impetus to regulate encrypted technology — in fact makes the opposite point. Attacker Elton Simpson, who was under previous FBI terror-related investigations, used Twitter to openly follow and communicate with high-profile terrorists. His account was followed by prominent English-speaking Islamic State fighters and recruiters Abu Rahin Aziz and Junaid Hussain — both of whom for a long time were known to provide manuals on how to carry out lone-wolf attacks from Raqqa, Syria, before they were killed. Simpson also followed and communicated with Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, a known American jihadist in Somalia who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

Relatedly, the incitement for the Texas shooting came from Hassan’s 31st Twitter account. Simpson, a friend and follower of Hassan, retweeted the call and later requested that Hassan send him a direct message. We at SITE, using only open-source information, reported on the call before the attack took place, and the FBI had a week to investigate the matter before the shooting. Though only nine Twitter users retweeted the call for attack, the FBI failed to prevent it.

The encrypted messages Comey mentioned before the Judiciary Committee were discovered by the FBI only after the attack took place, but Simpson’s open-source communication was available far in advance. There is in fact no evidence that this or any of these other lone-wolf attacks could have been prevented by regulation of encryption technology.

In stark contrast, a proper, targeted open-source investigation could have. Yet the FBI is reluctant to recognize open-source as an important — arguably the most important — tool to track jihadists online.

It’s also important to note that jihadists are very quick to adapt online. In the past year alone, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda fighters have moved quickly from WhatsApp to Kik, Wickr, Surespot, then to Telegram – all different encryption programs created to give smartphone users safe and free text messaging available across multiple devices.  Jihadists are constantly ranking, debating and explaining which of the services is the safest and most effective. Regulation of these programs will take jihadists next to no time to circumvent; the U.S. government would be the one taking years to catch up. And even if successful, they may be able to regulate companies based in the United States, but such programs would appear everywhere else, from Russia to India to China

SITE’s leadership and continued success do not stem from access to secret databases. Our research, investigations and reporting are based on open-source information — social media, forums, websites, blogs, IP addresses — which can be immensely powerful if used wisely. Government agencies, however, seem blind to this bountiful intelligence resource, and too often rely solely on classified documents and back-end access to websites.

Rather than try to create backdoors to encrypted communication services, or use the lack thereof as an excuse to intelligence failures, the U.S. government must first know how to utilize the mass amount of data it has been collecting and to improve its monitoring of jihadist activity online. A focused approach of this sort is much more likely to lead to success in the war on terrorism.