Category Archives: History

Dabiq, Syria: Cubs and Pearls

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Cubs and Pearls: A generational war, there is no end.

Dabiq is the sophisticated online magazine for Islamic State. What is Dabiq?

Dabiq

TheGuardian: Dabiq is a small, rather nondescript town in northern Syria, close by the border with Turkey. It’s more of a large village really, with just a few thousand inhabitants.

And it is of limited strategic interest. Not far south, in the sprawling city of Aleppo, where battle rages, Bashar al-Assad continues to drop his untargeted barrel bombs on its Sunni population, thus rallying more and more jihadis to the black flag. Yet it is Dabiq after which Islamic State (Isis) names its glossy recruiting magazine. For this is the place where the world will come to an end.

Like Judaism and Christianity – and strongly influenced by them – Islam has a powerful eschatological strain. It anticipates the end of the world and a final historical confrontation between good and evil, after which human life is set to be miraculously transformed. And according to one reading of Islamic tradition (hadith), the place where this final malahim (apocalypse) will happen is – of all places – Dabiq. This is where the Muslim and Christian armies will finally face each other and the Crusaders will be destroyed. And this is why Dabiq is the name on the lips of Isis recruiting sergeants.

It is worth noting that Isis is extremely selective in its use of hadith. For instance, other parts of the tradition have it that Jesus, dressed in yellow robes, will return east of Damascus and will join forces with the Islamic messiah, the Mahdi, in a battle against the false messiah, the Dajjal. After the death of the Mahdi, it is the Muslim Jesus who will rule the Earth. This hadith is less useful to Isis, though its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, looks to many observers to be trying to style himself as the Mahdi.

The Battle of Marj Dābiq (Arabic: مرج دابق‎, meaning “the meadow of Dābiq”; Turkish: Mercidabık Muharebesi) was a decisive military clash in Middle Eastern history, fought on 24 August 1516, near the town of Dabiq, 44 km north of Aleppo, Syria.[1] The battle was part of the Ottoman–Mamluk War (1516–17) between the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate, which ended ultimately in an Ottoman victory, the conquest of most of the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire, and the end of the Mamluk Sultanate. The Ottoman Empire’s victory in this battle gave it control of the entire region of Syria.

Abraham Ortelius - Tvrcici imperii descriptio.jpg

 

The Ottoman–Mamluk War of 1516–1517 was the second major conflict between the Egypt-based Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, which led to the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate and the incorporation of the Levant, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula as provinces of the Ottoman Empire.[1] The war transformed the Ottoman Empire from a realm at the margins of the Islamic world, mainly located in Anatolia and the Balkans, to a huge empire encompassing the traditional lands of Islam, including the cities of Mecca, Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo. It continued to be ruled however from Constantinople

Meet the Bravery in Syria

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The Pentagon and Joint Chiefs Chairman is in full opposition with the White House that Islamic State is contained.

WashingtonTimes: The nation’s top military officer on Tuesday said the U.S. has “not contained” the Islamic State, contradicting President Obama’s reassuring remarks last month just before the terrorist attacks in Paris.

“We have not contained ISIS,” Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, referring to the terror group by its acronym, The Hill reported.

Gen. Dunford said the Islamic State has been “tactically” contained in areas in Iraq and Syria since 2010, but said “strategically they have spread since 2010.”

He said the terror group poses a threat beyond Iraq and Syria, to countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan, The Hill reported.

Gen. Dunford gave his testimony alongside Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who announced Tuesday that the U.S. will expand its special operations force in Iraq and Syria to help fight militants.

In part from HuffPo: “We crossed the border at 3 a.m.,” Saleh said in an interview with The Huffington Post last week. He remembers the time for a reason: It was the moment he attained relative safety for himself and his family. Crossing into Turkey meant they had successfully outrun the Syrian army’s airstrikes. Saleh never imagined it would one day be his job to run back toward the bombing.

But three years after he escaped from Syria, that’s exactly what this former electronics merchant is doing. Saleh left his family in Turkey and returned to Syria to become a member of the White Helmets, a group of local volunteers who carry out search-and-rescue operations amid the country’s increasing violence and mounting destruction.

The White Helmets, also known as the Syrian Civil Defence, are apolitical, refusing to align themselves with any one group or military faction. Founding members of the White Helmets were trained by the Red Cross, and the Syria Campaign, a nonprofit registered in the U.K., helps coordinate fundraising efforts for the group.

“We work with everybody to help everybody,” Saleh said. Not concerned with the allegiances of the bombers or of those bombed, their focus is saving lives — and they routinely put their own lives on the line to do it.

“When we hear the sound of an airplane, we respond quickly. We ask civilians where the bombing took place. We ask the neighbors if they know if there is still anybody under the destruction,” Saleh explained. “Sometimes we’re able to rescue lives, when we have the proper equipment. And sometimes we can’t.”

In the three years since the start of the Syrian civil war, an estimated 191,000 lives have been lost, according to a United Nations report released in August — although the report noted that the real number is likely higher.

Holocaust Documents Found in Apartment, Budapest

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Holocaust Documents Trove Unearthed In Budapest Apartment

A vast and historically valuable trove of Holocaust-era documents, long thought destroyed during World War II, has been found hidden in a wall cavity by a couple renovating their Budapest apartment.

BreitbartLondon: The haul of 6,300 documents are from a 1944 census that was a precursor to the intended liquidation of the Hungarian capital’s 200,000 Jews in Nazi death camps.

Brigitte Berdefy, co-owner of the apartment overlooking Hungary’s parliament, said that in August a worker detected paper after jamming a screwdriver through a crack in the wall.

“We thought we’d ruined the neighbour’s wallpaper,” Berdefy told AFP.

But then her husband Gabor peered through the crack and saw what looked like handwriting.

Carefully removing each brick, the couple eased out some 61 kilogrammes (135 pounds) of dusty papers, many with bits of plaster caked on, but all more or less intact.

With the ink still readable — thanks to a lack of air in the cavity and nicotine from the heavy-smoking former owner — the yellowed papers were given to the Budapest City Archives.

Istvan Kenyeres, head of the archives, was amazed.

“Most wartime papers are more faded or rotten than medieval documents, on bad quality paper due to the rationing,” he told AFP.

“The content and scale of the finding is unprecedented,” he said. “It helps to fill a huge gap in the history of the Holocaust in Budapest.”

– Ironing history –

Since September, restorers at the archives have been literally ironing the papers to study them, pausing occasionally when they spot someone famous among the scrawled names.

The May 1944 Budapest census was to identify houses to serve as holding locations for Jews before moving them to a planned walled ghetto in the city’s seventh district.

Two months earlier Nazi Germany had occupied Hungary and deportations in the countryside to the gas chambers of Auschwitz began almost immediately.

The forms found in the Budapest apartment contain names of each building’s inhabitants, and whether they are Jewish or not, with total numbers of Christians and Jews marked in the corners.

“Jewish people filled in the forms honestly, they refused to believe where this might end up,” said Kenyeres.

Shortly after the census, around 200,000 Jews were moved into some 2,000 selected buildings, “Yellow Star Houses” with the Star-of-David Jewish symbol painted on the doors.

“Thanks to the Berdefys, we know that if a lot of Jews lived in a building then it likely became a Yellow Star House,” Kenyeres said.

In late 1944, they were crammed into the ghetto, where some died of starvation or were shot next to the river — a poignant memorial of abandoned iron shoes today marks the spot.

The arrival of the Russian army in January 1945 saved the rest though, and unlike the Jews from outside the city, most of Budapest’s Jewish population survived.

An estimated total of 600,000 Hungarian Jews perished in the Holocaust, most in Auschwitz.

Kenyeres said that an estimated 23,000 more documents may still be out there which would give further valuable insight into what happened in 1944 and would also be digitalised and made available to the public if they turned up.

“People should look behind their walls, you never know in Budapest what could be there.”

2011, POTUS Stopped Syrian Refugees, Security Concerns

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The real humanitarian thing to do at this point is fight this war against all enemies and fight to win it. Syrians and the rest of the refugees can go home, where most do have loyalties.

The Obama Administration Stopped Processing Iraq Refugee Requests For 6 Months In 2011

November 18, 2015 By

Although the Obama administration currently refuses to temporarily pause its Syrian refugee resettlement program in the United States, the State Department in 2011 stopped processing Iraq refugee requests for six months after the Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered evidence that several dozen terrorists from Iraq had infiltrated the United States via the refugee program.

After two terrorists were discovered in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 2009, the FBI began reviewing reams of evidence taken from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that had been used against American troops in Iraq. Federal investigators then tried to match fingerprints from those bombs to the fingerprints of individuals who had recently entered the United States as refugees:

An intelligence tip initially led the FBI to Waad Ramadan Alwan, 32, in 2009. The Iraqi had claimed to be a refugee who faced persecution back home — a story that shattered when the FBI found his fingerprints on a cordless phone base that U.S. soldiers dug up in a gravel pile south of Bayji, Iraq on Sept. 1, 2005. The phone base had been wired to unexploded bombs buried in a nearby road.

An ABC News investigation of the flawed U.S. refugee screening system, which was overhauled two years ago, showed that Alwan was mistakenly allowed into the U.S. and resettled in the leafy southern town of Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city of 60,000 which is home to Western Kentucky University and near the Army’s Fort Knox and Fort Campbell. Alwan and another Iraqi refugee, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 26, were resettled in Bowling Green even though both had been detained during the war by Iraqi authorities, according to federal prosecutors.

The terrorists were not taken into custody until 2011. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. State Department stopped processing refugee requests from Iraqis for six months in order to review and revamp security screening procedures:

As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News – even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets. One Iraqi who had aided American troops was assassinated before his refugee application could be processed, because of the immigration delays, two U.S. officials said. In 2011, fewer than 10,000 Iraqis were resettled as refugees in the U.S., half the number from the year before, State Department statistics show.

According to a 2013 report from ABC News, at least one of the Kentucky terrorists passed background and fingerprint checks conducted by the Department of Homeland Security prior to being allowed to enter the United States. Without the fingerprint evidence taken from roadside bombs, which one federal forensic scientist referred to as “a needle in the haystack,” it is unlikely that the two terrorists would ever have been identified and apprehended.

“How did a person who we detained in Iraq — linked to an IED attack, we had his fingerprints in our government system — how did he walk into America in 2009?” asked one former Army general who previously oversaw the U.S. military’s anti-IED efforts.

President Barack Obama has thus far refused bipartisan calls to pause his administration’s Syrian refugee program, which many believe is likely to be exploited by terrorists seeking entry into the United States. The president has not explained how his administration can guarantee that no terrorists will be able to slip into the country by pretending to be refugees, as the Iraqi terrorists captured in Kentucky did in 2009. One of those terrorists, Waad Ramadan Alwan, even came into the United States by way of Syria, where his fingerprints were taken and given to U.S. military intelligence officials.

Obama has also refused to explain how his administration’s security-related pause on processing Iraq refugee requests in 2011 did not “betray our deepest values.”

*** Were we even paying attention last February when POTUS made his declaration on accepting Syrian refugees? What changed between 2011 and earlier this year? The UN? Money? Iran?

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s commitment to take in potentially thousands of Syrian refugees is raising national security concerns among law enforcement officials and some congressional Republicans who fear clandestine radicals could slip into the country among the displaced.
The administration has vowed to help those who fled the civil war by providing homes, furniture, English classes and job training in the United States. It says they’ll be subject to intensive screening before entering the country, and that the overwhelming majority are vulnerable women and children.
“These are people I think that if most Americans met them, their instinct would immediately be, ‘We have to help these people,'” Anne Richard, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
But without reliable intelligence within Syria, some argue that it’s impossible to ensure that someone bent on violence or supporting a militant cause doesn’t come in undetected.
The issue came to the fore at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing earlier this month, when Michael Steinbach, the FBI assistant director for counterterrorism, said the information the intelligence community would normally rely on to properly vet refugees doesn’t exist in a failed country like Syria.
“You have to have information to vet, so the concern in Syria is that we don’t have systems in places on the ground to collect the information,” Steinbach testified.
More than 3.8 million Syrians are believed to have fled their country in the four years since an uprising against President Bashar Assad led to a civil war.
Most who have resettled have traveled to neighboring countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. But those avenues are strained. Lebanon announced plans last month to impose restrictions on Syrians trying to enter the country, and an international human rights group accused Jordanian authorities in the fall of deporting vulnerable refugees, including wounded men and unaccompanied children, back to Syria.
The United States last year resettled nearly 70,000 refugees from dozens of countries and accepts the majority of all referrals from U.N. refugee programs. More than 500 Syrian refugees are in the U.S., and plans call for adding a few thousand more in the next couple of years.
But aid groups say they’d like to see the U.S. move more quickly to take in more, given the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
“They need countries like the United State that have capacity to host significant numbers to really start to share that burden,” said Anna Greene, a policy and advocacy director at International Rescue Committee, a New York-based humanitarian organization.
As the Obama administration pushes to boost the numbers, three Republican members of Congress — Reps. Peter King of New York, Michael McCaul of Texas and Candice Miller of Michigan — have asked the administration to say how many Syrian refugees it plans to resettle and to provide a timeline and steps to ensure they’re not a security risk. They warned that a weak screening process could become a “backdoor for jihadists.”
When McCaul raised the issue Wednesday with Secretary of State John Kerry, Kerry assured him that the refugees would be subject to “super-vetting” and that if the FBI expressed concerns about someone, that person would not be let in. “We have amazing ways of being able to dig down and dig deep,” Kerry said at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.
The security concerns echo those voiced over the past decade, when large number of Iraqis sought U.S. refuge from that country’s war.
Two Iraqi refugees who entered the United States in 2009 were charged in Kentucky two years later with plotting to send weapons and money to al-Qaida operatives in Iraq. The case raised particular alarm within the intelligence community because one of the men was able to enter the country even though his fingerprints years several earlier had been left on an unexploded bomb in Iraq. In 2011, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller said the FBI was scrutinizing Iraqi refugees already in the U.S. for possible links to al-Qaida’s affiliate in Iraq.
U.S. officials say they’ve since tightened the controls.
The FBI’s Steinbach told Congress that unlike Iraq, where Americans personnel on the ground were able to gather intelligence, there’s no comparable “footprint on the ground in Syria.”
“All of the data sets, the police, the intel services that normally you would go and seek that information, don’t exist,” he said.
State Department officials say refugees are screened more carefully than all other visitors to the United States, checked against all databases maintained by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and undergo extensive medical checks and fingerprinting. Specially trained officers from the Homeland Security Department conduct overseas, in-person interviews with those seeking refuge. Refugees are far more likely to be victims of violence than criminals themselves.
“I think if we talk about just this faceless mob of people from conflict-ridden lands, it seems very scary,” the State Department’s Richard said. “But if you meet individuals and individual families, you start to understand the very, very human nature of what it means to be a refugee.”

CIA’s Fugitive Banker in Idaho

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This is a story that makes for a great movie script but there are some that would push back especially those involved during the Reagan years and the Contra arms deal.

The newspaper article found here expands even further, naming more names.

A Nugan Hand branch in the Thai opium-producing country, for example, abutted the office of the American Drug Enforcement Administration – and even shared a receptionist with it. Important American companies in Saudi Arabia backed Nugan Hand’s aggressive sales there to American workers; big investment money was raked in, sometimes being carried away in plastic garbage bags, much of it disappearing forever. In 1979, Nugan Hand hoped to gain United Nations money to settle Indochinese refugees in the Turks and Caicos Islands, seen as ideal Caribbean transshipment points on the narcotics routes from South America.

FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker

How Michael Jon Hand, who founded an Australian bank with ties to American military and intelligence officials that defrauded depositors and investors, was tracked to Idaho.
By Raymond Bonner, Special to ProPublica

It was one of the greatest disappearing acts of modern times.

Amid a swirl of allegations and rumors that the Nugan Hand Bank was involved in arms smuggling, drug-running, and covert operations for the CIA, the institution’s American founder vanished from Australia. Thirty-five years later, that man, Michael Jon Hand, was tracked to a small town in Idaho where he has been living under the name of Michael Jon Fuller.

Hand was found by an Australian writer, Peter Butt, whose just-released book, Merchants of Menace, discloses Hand’s whereabouts after decades of mystery.

If finding Hand, now 73, solves one mystery, it raises another. How could he have lived in the United States so long without being detected? He changed his name only slightly, from Hand to Fuller, and did not get a new Social Security number, according to Butt.

Hand’s company, G.M.I. Manufacturing, is registered with the Idaho secretary of state. The company “now manufactures tactical weapons for US Special Forces, special operations groups and hunters,’’ Butt writes. Has Hand/Fuller been brazen, foolish, or, as Butt asks, does he belong “to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind?”

Two years after fleeing Australia, in 1982, when the CIA was involved in a covert operation to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Hand was working as a military adviser in the region where the anti-Sandinista “contras” were based, according to an Australian intelligence document, which was declassified earlier this year.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The CIA has previously denied it had any links to Hand.

Hand had been a Green Beret in Vietnam and a CIA operative in Laos before moving to Australia, where he and Frank Nugan, a wealthy playboy, established the Nugan Hand Bank in 1973, with $80. Hand fled Australia seven years later, after Nugan was found dead inside his Mercedes-Benz, his left hand holding the barrel of a .30-caliber rifle a few inches from his head, his right hand near the trigger.

During an inquest into Nugan’s death, Hand testified that the bank was insolvent, owing investors large and small some $50 million. The inquest ruled Nugan’s death a suicide, a finding many Australians found dubious.

With depositors and law enforcement authorities in pursuit, Hand, with assistance from a former CIA officer, secured a forged Australian passport, donned a false mustache and beard, and fled Australia in June of 1980. He flew to Fiji, then on to Canada, from which he could cross into the United States without a visa.

The Sydney Morning Herald first reported on Butt’s findings on Monday. In a segment that aired Sunday night, Australia’s 60 Minutes filmed Hand/Fuller emerging from a pharmacy at a shopping mall in Idaho Falls. He has a full beard and neck brace, and was wearing sunglasses and a blue checked shirt. He refused to answer any questions or speak at all when confronted by 60 Minutes reporter Ross Coulthart.

Suspicions about the bank’s links to the CIA arose almost immediately after Nugan was found dead. His wallet contained the business card of William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.

Colby was forced to resign when it was reported that the agency had been engaged in illegal spying on American citizens. He became a legal adviser to Nugan Hand, and on the back of his business card were handwritten dates when someone, presumably Colby, would be in Hong Kong and Singapore.

As reporters began digging into Nugan Hand, they found that Colby wasn’t the only individual with an intelligence or military background involved with the bank.

“Nugan Hand had enough generals, admirals, and spooks to run a small war,” Jonathan Kwitny, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, wrote in the definitive book about the bank, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA.