Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations

The Black Flag of ISIS Bound for Rome

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IS magazine Dabiq

 

WATCH: Islamic State presents its version of the apocalypse

Video shows jihadist group’s fighters preparing to conquer Rome, destroy St. Peter’s Basilica

ToI: A recently released video by the Islamic State presents the jihadist group’s version of the apocalypse, with its fighters preparing to conquer Rome.

As is now the norm with the group’s videos, the clip is slick and professionally produced. It shows jihadists making final preparations for battle alternating with shots of “Rome” – a symbolic representation of the powerhouse of Christianity — in images of St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican and the ruins of the Roman Colosseum. Tanks supposed to be advancing to the Italian capital are seen flying IS flags as they leave tracks in the desert.

 

Curiously, the end of times-obsessed terror organization’s clip shows the apocalypse not as it is described in the writings of Islam, but rather more in keeping with western, Christian fantasies.

At one point, the video shows flags of some 60 countries with which Islamic State sees itself as being at war, among them Britain, France, Australia and the US. Other sections of the video depict fighters wearing suicide vests or marching toward Europe.

The video was released several weeks after the deadly Paris terror attacks in which 130 people were killed, and for which IS claimed responsibility. A more recent shooting in San Bernardino, California was carried out by a couple who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State but were not directly following a command from the group’s top echelon in Syria.

While viewing this video, what terrifying conditions do you see?

 

Confirmed: Terrorists Have Tried to Exploit Refugee Program

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We cant being to measure the trouble and failed government programs and how it fully impacts national/domestic security.

Primer: During a hearing today in the House with the Director of USCIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services), it was told that Tashfee Malik, one of the two killers in San Bernardino was not processed through the system at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan managed by the State Department as mandated by law. Further it appears cases presented to embassies are rubber-stamped where already during testimony, 80% of refugee applications have been approved by alleged Syrians. Additionally, 23,000 asylum applications have also been approved, year to date for 2015.

What was most curious is Citizenship and Immigration Services has 25 international offices. Most are in countries that are essentially failed countries, which is yet a compounded diplomatic failure of the United Nations, USAID and the U,S, State Department. Consequently failed diplomatic efforts further cost the American taxpayers much more than it ever should.

ODNI Confirms Terrorists Tried to Enter U.S. as Syrian Refugees

JudicialWatch: Individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria have tried to infiltrate the United States through the Obama refugee program that will admit at least 10,000 Syrians, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has confirmed.

The disturbing admission comes amid robust assurances by the administration that the refugees are thoroughly vetted before entering the country. In fact, the State Department publicly guarantees that every Syrian refugee is rigorously screened because “nothing is more important to us than the security of the American people.” The agency also addresses public concerns involving resettling Syrian refugees by asserting that it’s a “myth” that “all Syrians are dangerous.” In fact, “none have been arrested or removed on terrorism charges,” the State Department writes in a bulletin. Admission is only granted “after the most extensive level of security screening of any category of traveler to the United States,” according to the agency.

Nevertheless, in early October the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Matthew Emrich, admitted during a congressional hearing that there’s no way to adequately screen the new arrivals from the war-torn Muslim nation that’s a hotbed of terrorism. That’s because the Syrian government doesn’t have an intelligence database to run checks against so there’s no reliable method to accurately verify the identity of the new arrivals. Emrich did ensure during his congressional testimony that “we check everything that we are aware of” and that “we are in the process of overturning every stone.” This may not sound all that reassuring to most Americans.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Assistant Director Michael Steinbach has also conceded that the U.S. government has no system to properly screen Syrian refugees. “The concern in Syria is that we don’t have systems in places on the ground to collect information to vet,” Steinbach said. “That would be the concern is we would be vetting — databases don’t hold the information on those individuals. “You’re talking about a country that is a failed state, that is — does not have any infrastructure, so to speak. So all of the data sets — the police, the intel services — that normally you would go to seek information don’t exist.” Judicial Watch reported on these two alarming revelations back in October.

Now we have the ODNI, the broad agency that serves as an umbrella for the intelligence community and advises the president, verifying that indeed terrorists have tried to exploit Obama’s Syrian refugee initiative. The ODNI is composed of more than a dozen spy agencies, including Air Force, Army, Navy, Treasury and Coast Guard intelligence as well as the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This week the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Michael McCaul, released unclassified excerpts of information provided to him by the ODNI regarding possible terrorist exploitation of Syrian refugee flows. It’s scary but, unfortunately, not surprising.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has identified “…individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria attempting to gain entry to the U.S. through the U.S. refugee program,” the ODNI tells the Texas congressman in a document that contains classified information the lawmaker could not make public. The NCTC also wrote this to the congressman: “The refugee system, like all immigration programs, is vulnerable to exploitation from extremist groups seeking to send operatives to the West. U.S. and Canadian authorities in 2011 arrested several refugees linked to what is now ISIL. Early in 2011, Canadian authorities arrested dual Iraqi-Canadian citizen Faruq ‘Isa who is accused of vetting individuals on the internet for suicide operations in Iraq. The FBI, in May of the same year, arrested Kentucky-based Iraqi refugees Wa’ad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi for attempting to send weapons and explosives from Kentucky to Iraq and conspiring to commit terrorism while in Iraq. Alwan pled guilty to the charges against him in December 2011, and Hammadi pled guilty in August 2012.”

The recent attacks in Paris were executed by terrorists who made it to Europe as refugees and the same could feasibly happen in the U.S. But national security has never stopped the Obama administration from assisting potential terrorists to settle in the U.S. Earlier this year JW reported on a “temporary” amnesty the administration is offering to nationals of Yemen, another Islamic Middle Eastern country well known as an Al Qaeda breeding ground. Under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) illegal aliens from Yemen, headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), get to stay in the U.S. for at least 18 months. In its latest Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department reveals that AQAP militants carried out hundreds of attacks including suicide bombers, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations. The media has also documented this for years with one in-depth report confirming that “Yemen has emerged as the breeding grounds for some of the most high-profile plans to attack the U.S. homeland.”

 

ISIS Speaks Mandarin? Threatening Who Now?

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Remember when during the Bush administration, we captured enemy combatants on the battlefield that were known as Uighurs? They were sent to Gitmo and under Barack Obama they were released? Remember when only in recent weeks that Barack Obama said that Islamic State was contained?

How to Say ‘Islamic State’ in Mandarin

ForeignPolicy: New Chinese-language propaganda seems to ignore Uighurs, the group Beijing says has the most terrorist connections.

On Dec. 6, the Islamic State released a slick recording of a Mandarin Chinese-language song glorifying jihad, in what seems to be a direct attempt to recruit Chinese Muslims to the terrorist group’s cause. “Awaken, Muslim brothers! Now is the time to wake up,” proclaims the song in Chinese. “It’s our dream to die on this battlefield.”

Although the Islamic State recording is — horrifyingly — catchy, it is unlikely to make it far on the Chinese-language Internet. The nation’s ruling Chinese Communist Party enforces strict online censorship, filtering in real time posts that it deems destabilizing or overtly critical of the government.

The Islamic State has targeted China on several occasions. In July 2014, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called out China as a country that oppresses its Muslims. In December 2014, the Chinese state-run Global Times reported that 300 Uighurs, a largely Muslim Turkic-speaking ethnic minority that mostly lives in the northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang, had left China to join the militant organization, though there is no way to verify that statistic. And on Nov. 18, the Islamic State announced that it had executed its first Chinese hostage, a Beijing native named Fan Jinghui.

But this new recruitment effort indicates that the Islamic State is not just interested in Uighurs, but in all of China’s Muslims, including the Hui, Chinese speakers whose features are often indistinguishable from the majority Han ethnic group. It’s unlikely this latest song is actually attempting to recruit Uighurs, many of whom speak Mandarin poorly or not at all, particularly those in Xinjiang’s rural southern regions.

Chinese authorities have put particular blame for extremist violence within the country on Uighur separatists, a group that has often chafed under what many feel to be the imposition of Mandarin on their culture and historic homeland. The Chinese government has sought to connect the simmering insurgency among some Uighurs in Xinjiang with international terrorism and more recently with the Islamic State. After November attacks in Paris killed 130 and wounded hundreds, including one Chinese citizen, Beijing called on Western powers to recognize Xinjiang, and recent violent attacks in several cities throughout China, as an important front in the global war on terror. Beijing has denounced the failure of Western countries to do so as a “double standard” on terrorism.

Outside observers and Uighur advocacy groups maintain, however, that the Chinese government conflates dissidents and separatists with terrorists, and Chinese authorities have not publicly released evidence establishing a direct connection between high-profile domestic attacks within China and outside terrorist organizations.

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

Taliban Still Holds U.S. Hostages

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It is extraordinary that no one at the State Department, the National Security Council or the White House speaks of Americans held prisoner. It is all left to a military task force to solve. John Kerry is never available for comment.

Exclusive: Secret U.S. Hostage Held by Taliban Allies
Harris, DailyBeast: ‘There are still Americans in captivity in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region,’ a top congressman reveals. The question is: How many? And what’s Washington doing to recover them?
A group of Islamist militants aligned with the Taliban has been holding an American man hostage for more than a year, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with his case, which has not been reported previously.

The disclosure of another American hostage raises questions about how many Americans are being held abroad—and what the U.S. government is doing to recover them. The Obama administration has been working to streamline its hostage rescue efforts, which critics say have suffered from a lumbering bureaucracy that hasn’t kept family members fully informed about their loved ones. How effective those efforts have been is unclear.

The Daily Beast is not publishing the man’s name or many details about him at the request of his family and administration and law enforcement officials, who are concerned for his safety. The man is said to be held by the Haqqani network, a Taliban-aligned group that operates along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Previously, The Daily Beast had agreed not to write anything at all about the hostage. However, on Monday, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), a leading critic in Congress of the Obama administration’s hostage rescue and recovery policies, wrote a public letter to President Obama in which he noted that “there are still Americans in captivity in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”

The only other American known to be held in that region is Caitlin Coleman, who was kidnapped along with her husband, Joshua Boyle, a Canadian citizen, while traveling in Afghanistan in 2012. Coleman had a child while in captivity, multiple U.S. officials have said.

While Hunter’s letter mentions no American hostages by name, a spokesperson for the congressman told The Daily Beast that by “Americans” the lawmaker is referring to “all Americans,” including Coleman, her child, and the American man being held.

The exact details of the man’s kidnapping remain unclear.

The militants said to be holding him have not made any public demands concerning his possible release. The Haqqani are known to negotiate for their captives and have conducted prisoner exchanges. A former government official in Afghanistan said the American man is alive and in good health, although his precise whereabouts remain unknown both to local officials and those in the United States.

U.S. and foreign sources knowledgeable about Coleman and her family’s case told The Daily Beast that they believe she, her husband, and their child are also alive and well. The family is also believed to be held by the Haqqani.
Coleman’s case differs from the American man’s in key respects. Her family, along with her husband’s, decided to issue a public appeal for their children’s safe return. And Coleman and Boyle have appeared in a video asking their governments to work for their release.

Efforts to recover all U.S. hostages are now under the control of a new Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell established in the wake of the abduction and killing of four Americans at the hands of the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS. Families of some of those hostages had publicly criticized the Obama administration for not communicating with them about the fate of their loved ones and of bungling attempts to free them.

The White House declined to comment for this story.
In his letter to Obama, Hunter said he was concerned that the FBI has been put in charge of the new cell and said the president should appoint a new hostage recovery coordinator, as required by a recently enacted defense bill.

“Given that the FBI is chiefly a law enforcement organization, it remains my belief that the FBI—despite its best intentions and efforts—is neither organized nor developed to lead hostage recovery in hostile areas,” Hunter wrote.

However, some family members of Americans now being held hostage have told The Daily Beast that the new fusion cell has improved communication and the flow of information from the government to families and bolstered their confidence that the U.S. government is working to recover their loved ones.
The efforts to recover Coleman and her family, as well as the other American  hostage, can be seen as a test case for how well the new fusion cell is working. But the fact that they’ve been in captivity so long suggests that efforts to free them have been slow going.

The Haqqani are known for negotiating ransom payments and prisoner exchanges, U.S. officials have said. Most notably, the group exchanged Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five senior Taliban fighters in 2015.

The administration justified that swap under what it says are long-standing traditions to exchange military prisoners in times of war. But the trade has also outraged some hostage families, who say their loved ones are being treated differently because they don’t wear a military uniform.

The White House has said that about 30 Americans are being held hostage outside the U.S. In Iran, at least four Americans are being held, including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, Marine veteran Amir Hekmati, pastor Saeed Abedin, and businessman Siamak Namazi. A former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, went missing in Iran in 2007 and is believed to have been kidnapped.

American journalist Austin Tice has been missing since August 2012, when he disappeared south of Damascus. His fate remains unknown, and his family has launched a public campaign to draw attention to his case and spur efforts to bring him home.