Pakistani IT Congressional Case was a Spy Ring Tied to Hizbollah

Posted on December 20, 2017December 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

Very little was advancing in this case that media was able to report. Now it seems the matter of the Pakistani IT personnel that worked for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and several other Democrat congressional members had a much more nefarious operation in Washington DC and in Falls Church, Virginia. Embarrassment is permeating through some key offices in Congress and if any of the people associated with this case were aware of any piece parts, well…draining the swamp could be in over drive soon…or should be.

Seems the FBI may have taken over the case from the Capitol police…..yikes

We have this doctor that appears to have fled the United States:

Ali A. al-Attar, born in Baghdad in 1963, a 1989 graduate of the American University of Beirut Faculty of Medicine. He subsequently emigrated to the United States and set up a practice in internal medicine in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. Al-Attar eventually expanded his business to include nine practices that he wholly or partly owned in Virginia and Maryland.

Al-Attar prospered and moved to upscale McLean, Virginia, but he soon found himself in trouble with both regulatory and tax authorities. In April 2009, his license to practice medicine was suspended by the Maryland State Board of Physicians due to “questionable billing practices.” Al-Attar refused to cooperate with the Board in subsequent investigations, which included inquiry into the level of care he was providing as well as his “unprofessional conduct” relating to sexual relationships with patients. His license to practice medicine was revoked in September 2011.

Al-Attar was also being investigated by the FBI for large scale health care fraud in 2008-9. He and his partner Dr. Abdul H. Fadul charged insurance companies more than $2.3 million for services their patients did not actually receive, with many of the false claims using names of diplomats and employees enrolled in a group plan at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. In one case, the doctors claimed an embassy employee visited three of their clinics every 26 days between May 2007 and August 2008 to have the same testing done each time. The insurance company paid the doctors $55,000 for more than 400 nonexistent procedures for that one patient alone.

Al-Attar exploited the fact that he had a number practices in two states with separate billing and banking arrangements, including individual tax numbers, which enabled him to shift money around to fool his own accountants regarding his actual income. As in the case of the Egyptian Embassy, he was able to multiple-bill for the frequently fabricated services rendered once he obtained insurance information.

Al-Attar was indicted by the federal government acting on behalf of the IRS in March 2012 for having fraudulently prepared tax returns between 2004 and 2006. The IRS claimed that he and his business partner Fadul systematically diverted payments from the accounts of their several offices into their personal accounts, siphoning off more than $500,000. The government case involved the instances of fraud that were easiest to prove in court, but it was likely just the tip of an iceberg with millions more in additional money being diverted to offshore accounts in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Dr. Ali A. Al-Attar fled the United States after the indictment to avoid arrest and imprisonment. Late in 2012 he was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official. It turns out that al-Attar is only a first generation Iraqi. He was born in Baghdad, but his parents were both from Iran. More here.

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DC: The used car dealership known as CIA never seemed like an ordinary car dealership, with inventory, staff and expenses.

On its Facebook page, CIA’s “staff” were fake personalities such as “James Falls O’Brien,” whose photo was taken from a hairstyle model catalog, and “Jade Julia,” whose image came from a web page called “Beautiful Girls Wallpaper.”

If a customer showed up looking to buy a car from Cars International A, often referred to as CIA, Abid Awan — who was managing partner of the dealership while also earning $160,000 handling IT for House Democrats — would frequently simply go across the street to another dealership called AAA Motors and get one.

“If AAA borrows a car to Cars International and they have a customer, it was simply take the car across the street and sell it, and then later on give the profit back or not,” Nasir Khattak, who ran the longstanding AAA dealership, testified in a lawsuit. “There was no documentation… If you go and try to dissect, you will not be able to make any sense out of them because there were many, dozens and dozens, of cars transferred between the two dealerships and between other people.”

Khattak did not explain why he would ruin his existing business to help the Awans. “All of those transactions was to support Cars International A from AAA Motors,” he testified. “That’s why I did not make any money from my dealership because my resources were supporting Cars International A.”

He said only Imran Awan knew what became of the money. “It was Imram, [Abid] Awan’s brother, who was running the business in full control,” he said.

Imran Awan and his family members were congressional IT aides who investigators said made unauthorized access to the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times. At the same time as they worked for and could read all the emails of congressmen who sat on committees like Intelligence, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs, they also ran a car dealership that took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive and whose financial books were indecipherable and business patterns bizarre, according to testimony in court records.

While Imran and Abid Awan ran their car dealership in Falls Church, Va. in the early part of the decade, Drug Enforcement Agency officials a few miles away in Chantilly were learning that the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism, according to an explosive new Politico expose.

The money that disappeared between the Awans’ dealership, some $7 million in congressional pay, the equipment suspected of disappearing from Congress under their watch, and their other side businesses — all while they displayed few signs of wealth and frequently haggled in court over small amounts of money — raise questions about whether the Awans might have been laundering money or sending it to a third party.

“Based on the modest way Awan was living, it is my opinion that he was sending most of his money to a group or criminal organization that could very well be connected with the Pakistani government,” said Wayne Black, a private investigator who served as law enforcement group supervisor in Janet Reno’s Miami public corruption unit. “My instincts tell me Awan was probably operating a foreign intelligence gathering operation on US soil.”

Officials told Politico that prosecutors refused to help them punish top Hezbollah operatives involved in its money laundering network because of political concerns, such as fears of jeopardizing the Obama administration’s deal with Iran. Similarly, the Awans, who had close relationships to House Democrats including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Gregory Meeks, have not been charged with any crimes surrounding the dealership nor with their House activities. The disclosure of a House IT breach shortly before the election by Pakistani-born Democratic staffers would have had political fallout.

Shortly before the 2016 election, investigators found huge amounts of House equipment unaccounted for under the Awans’ stewardship, and when they looked into the family further, they found that they had logged in to members’ computers for whom they did not work. There were signs that the House Democratic Caucus’ server “is being used for nefarious purposes” by the Awans, according to a House investigation, and “steps are being taken to conceal their activity.”

Politico tells the story of Ali Fayad, a “Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria

Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad Ali Fayad, a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014. But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

Abid Awan is married to a Ukranian named Nataliia Sova, who was herself on the House payroll as an IT aide in 2010 and 2011 for Reps. Emmanuel Cleaver, Ted Deutch, and Gabby Giffords. Abid incorporated Cars International in 2008, and Cars International A in 2009, taking out loans from the Congressional credit union while omitting the dealership from House financial disclosures. It was not clear how he could have been working at both the dealership and a high-paid congressional job.

In 2010, the CIA dealership took a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar, who is of Iranian heritage and was a minister in the Iraqi government, according to court records. Al-Attar is a fugitive wanted by the U.S. government. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, wrote that Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012–shortly after the loan was made.

The money was moved from Ali Al-Attar through accounts intended for Fairfax County real estate. Both Imran Awan and Khattak — who also put up $200,000 in cash as an investor in CIA — had realtors licenses.

It’s not clear where the dealership’s money was going, because it was sued by at least five different people on all ends of a typical car business who said they were stiffed. CIA didn’t pay the security deposit, rent or taxes for its building, it didn’t pay wholesalers who provided cars, and it sold broken cars to people and then refused to honor the warranties, the lawsuits say.

“The consignment agreements state it clearly that either Mr. Awan sells the cars for the agreed price no less $62,200 or return my cars back. I need my cars back,” Issmail Alchaleh, one wholesaler, wrote in court documents. Some of the consignment agreements use the same VIN for multiple cars.

Abid declared bankruptcy in 2010 to discharge debts racked up by the car dealership. One person who was listed on bankruptcy documents as being owed money by the dealership, Rao Abbas, later appeared on the House payroll as an IT aide, even though his most recent job experience was working at McDonalds. Democrats have refused to explain why they hired him.

Abid kept ownership of two houses in the bankruptcy by saying he was separated or divorcing from Sova, but even this year, they were still together, and Sova used Abid’s residence when incorporating her own car companies. Sova established a mysterious company called Alain LLC in 2009, followed by Discover EZ Car Buying Co. in 2014 and Regional Car Center Inc. in 2015. Virginia incorporation documents list Abid’s home address as the businesses’ location, and a Google search did not reveal any evidence of the dealerships existing, which is incongruous for a line of work where basic revenue depends on making sure potential customers know where to find them.

Other opaque companies, such as New Dawn 2001 and Acg LLC, were also established in 2011 out of Imran’s house.

A relative of the Awans told TheDCNF that Abid sent huge quantities of iPads and iPhones to Pakistan and that Imran frequently talked about Russia. They also sent money to a Pakistani police officer. The brothers’ stepmother, Samina Gilani, said in court documents that when the family spends time in Pakistan, the brothers are escorted by a motorcade of Pakistani government agents. Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat who employed Abid, filed paperwork saying that $120,000 in technology equipment went missing while Abid managed it for the office.

Despite brothers Imran, Abid and Jamal and Imran’s wife, Hina Alvi, all making chief-of-staff level salaries of $160,000 on Capitol Hill, they displayed few signs of wealth in the US, further raising questions about where all the money was going. Abid is in a lawsuit against his stepmother after Abid replaced her with himself on his father’s life insurance policy, and his attorney, Jim Bacon, told a judge he needed money. Imran’s lawyer said his children were living in squalor. They reported few holdings on their House ethics disclosures.

They bought houses will little money down, then rented them out, insisting that rent be paid in cash, tenants told TheDCNF. Sources said the FBI generated Suspicious Activity Reports hundreds of pages long based on large cash deposits and international wires.

Members of Congress have refused to acknowledge what is well-known among the House bureaucracy, that investigators found conclusive evidence that the Awans wantonly violated House IT regulations. “There’s no question about it: If I was accused of a tenth of what these guys are accused of, they’d take me out in handcuffs that same day,” a fellow House IT aide said. But fellow IT aides with knowledge pertinent to the case said the FBI hasn’t even interviewed them.

Politico’s money-laundering story echoed similar themes: “Right now, we have 50 FBI agents not doing anything because they know their Iran cases aren’t going anywhere,” including investigations into allegedly complicit used-car dealers, a prosecutor said.

Meet Omar Mohammed of Mosul, Iraq

Posted on December 13, 2017December 13, 2017 by Denise Simon

One cannot know such bravery, such vision and such atrocity in a lifetime.

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AP: The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear.

He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul.

He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city.

He had spent nearly his entire life in this home, with his five brothers and five sisters. He woke his mother in her bedroom on the ground floor.

“I am leaving,” he said. “Where?” she asked. “I am leaving,” was all he could say. He couldn’t endanger her by telling her anything more. In truth, since the IS had invaded his city, he’d lived a life about which she was totally unaware.

He felt her eyes on the back of his neck, and headed to the waiting Chevrolet. He didn’t look back.

HRW warns of a resurgence of violence if no one is held to account over reports of torture [Reuters] photo

For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.

He wasn’t a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger . As IS turned the Iraqi city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths.

He knew that if he was caught he too would be killed.

“I am writing this for the history , because I know this will end. People will return, life will go back to normal,” is how he explained the blog that was his conduit to the citizens of Mosul and the world beyond. “After many years, there will be people who will study what happened. The city deserves to have something written to defend the city and tell the truth, because they say that when the war begins, the first victim is the truth.”

He called himself Mosul Eye . He made a promise to himself in those first few days: Trust no one, document everything.

Neither family, friends nor the Islamic State group could identify him. His readership grew by the thousands every month.

And now, he was running for his life.

But it would mean passing through one Islamic State checkpoint after another, on the odds that the extremists wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t find the hard drive that contained evidence of IS atrocities, the names of its collaborators and fighters, and all the evidence that its bearer was the man they’d been trying to silence since they first swept in.

The weight of months and years of anonymity were crushing him.

He missed his name.

___

From the beginning, Mosul Eye wrote simultaneously as a witness and a historian. Born in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war in 1986, he had come of age during a second war, when Saddam Hussein fell and the Americans took over. At 17, he remembers going to a meeting of extremists at the mosque and hearing them talk about fighting the crusaders. “I should be honest, I didn’t understand.”

As for the Americans, whose language he already spoke haltingly, he couldn’t fathom why they would come all the way from the United States to Mosul. He thought studying history would give him the answers.

The men in black came from the north, cutting across his neighborhood in brand new trucks, the best all-terrain Toyotas money could buy. He had seen jihadis before in Mosul and at first figured these men would fade away like the rest. But in the midst of pitched fighting, the extremists found the time to run down about 70 assassination targets and kill them all, hanging enormous banners announcing their arrival in June 2014.

By then a newly minted teacher, the historian attended a staff meeting at Mosul University, where the conquerors explained the Islamic State education system, how all classes would be based upon the strictest interpretation of the Quran. To a man who had been accused of secularism during his master’s thesis defense just the year before, it felt like the end of his career.

In those first few days, he wrote observations about IS, also known by the acronym ISIS, on his personal Facebook page — until a friend warned that he risked being killed. With the smell of battle still in the air, he wandered the streets, puzzling over its transformation into a city at war. He returned to find his family weeping. The smell of smoke and gunfire permeated the home.

On June 18, 2014, a week after the city fell, Mosul Eye was born .

“My job as a historian requires an unbiased approach which I am going to adhere to and keep my personal opinion to myself,” he wrote. “I will only communicate the facts I see.”

By day, he chatted with Islamic State fighters and vendors, and observed. Always observed. By night, he wrote in his native Arabic and fluent English on a WordPress blog and later on Facebook and Twitter.

The city turned dark, and Mosul Eye became one of the outside world’s main sources of news about the Islamic State fighters, their atrocities and their transformation of the city into a grotesque shadow of itself. The things IS wanted kept secret went to the heart of its brutal rule.

“They were organized as a killing machine. They are thirsty (for) blood and money and women.”

He attended Friday sermons with feigned enthusiasm. He collected and posted propaganda leaflets, including one on July 27, 2014, that claimed the Islamic State leader was a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter. Back home, writing on his blog in his other, secret identity, he decried the leaflet as a blatant attempt “to distort history” to justify the fanatics’ actions.

He drank glass after glass of tea at the hospital, talking to people who worked there. Much of the information he collected went up online. Other details he kept in his computer, for fear they would give away his identity. Someday, he told himself, he would write Mosul’s history using these documents.

The most sensitive information initially came from two old friends: one a doctor and the other a high school dropout who embraced the Islamic State’s extreme interpretation of religion. He was a taxi driver who like many others in Mosul had been detained by a Shiite militia in 2008 and still burned with resentment. He swiftly joined an intelligence unit in Mosul, becoming “one of the monsters of ISIS” — and couldn’t resist bragging about his insider knowledge.

Once he corroborated the details and masked the sources, Mosul Eye put it out for the world to see. He sometimes included photos of the fighters and commanders, complete with biographies pieced together over days of surreptitious gathering of bits and pieces of information during the course of his normal life — that of an out-of-work scholar living at home with his family.

“I used the two characters, the two personalities to serve each other,” he said. He would chat up market vendors and bored checkpoint guards for new leads.

He took on other identities as well on Facebook. Although the names were clearly fake, the characters started to take on a life of their own. One was named Mouris Milton whom he came to believe was an even better version of himself — funny, knowledgeable. Another was Ibn al-Athir al-Mawsilli, a coldly logical historian.

International media picked up on Mosul Eye from the first days, starting with an online question-and-answer with a German newspaper. The anonymous writer gave periodic written interviews in English over the years. Sometimes, journalists quoted his blog and called it an interview. In October 2016, he spoke by phone with the New Yorker for a profile but still kept his identity masked.

Intelligence agencies made contact as well and he rebuffed them each time.

“I am not a spy or a journalist,” he would say. “I tell them this: If you want the information, it’s published and it’s public for free. Take it.”

First the Islamic State group compiled lists of women accused of prostitution, he said, stoning or shooting around 500 in the initial months. Then it went after men accused of being gay, flinging them off tall buildings. Shiites, Christians and Yazidis fled from a city once proud of its multiple religions.

When the only Mosul residents left were fellow Sunnis, they too were not spared, according to the catalog of horrors that is Mosul Eye’s daily report. He detailed the deaths and whippings, for spying and apostasy, for failing to attend prayers, for overdue taxes. The blog attracted the attention of the fanatics, who posted death threats in the comments section.

___

Less than a year into their rule, in March 2015, he nearly cracked. IS beheaded a 14-year-old in front of a crowd; 12 people were arrested for selling and smoking cigarettes, and some of them flogged publicly. Seeing few alternatives, young men from Mosul were joining up by the dozens.

The sight of a fanatic severing the hand of a child accused of stealing unmoored him. The man told the boy that his hand was a gift of repentance to God before serenely slicing it away.

It was too much.

Mosul Eye was done. He defied the dress requirements, cut his hair short, shaved his beard and pulled on a bright red crewneck sweater. He persuaded his closest friend to join him.

“I decided to die.”

The sun shining, they drove to the banks of the Tigris blasting forbidden music from the car. They spread a scrap of rug over a stone outcropping and shared a carafe of tea. Mosul Eye lit a cigarette, heedless of a handful of other people picnicking nearby.

“I was so tired of worrying about myself, my family, my brothers. I am not alive to worry, but I am alive to live this life. I thought: I am done.”

He planned it as a sort of last supper, a final joyful day to end all days. He assumed he would be spotted, arrested, tortured. The tea was the best he had ever tasted.

Somehow, incredibly, his crimes went unnoticed.

He went home.

“At that moment I felt like I was given a new life.”

He grew out his hair and beard again, put the shortened trousers back on. And, for the remainder of his time in Mosul, smoked and listened to music in his room with the curtains drawn and the lights off. His computer screen and the tip of his cigarette glowed as he wrote in the dark.

The next month, he slipped up.

His friend the ex-taxi driver told him about an airstrike that had just killed multiple high-level Islamic State commanders, destroying a giant weapons cache. Elated, Mosul Eye dashed home to post it online. He hit “publish” and then, minutes later, realized his mistake. The information could have come from only one person. He trashed the post and spent a sleepless night.

“It’s like a death game and one mistake could finish your life.”

For a week, he went dark. Then he invited his friend to meet at a restaurant. They ate spicy chicken, an unemployed teacher and the gun-toting ex-taxi driver talking again about their city and their lives. His cover was not blown.

The historian went back online. Alongside the blog, he kept meticulous records — information too dangerous to share.

His computer hard drive filled with death, filed according to date, cause of death, perpetrator, neighborhood and ethnicity. Accompanying each spreadsheet entry was a separate file with observations from each day.

“IS is forcing abortions and tubal ligation surgeries on Yazidi women,” he wrote in unpublished notes from January 2015. A doctor told him there had been between 50 and 60 forced abortions and a dozen Yazidi girls younger than 15 died of injuries from repeated rapes.

April 19, 2015: “The forensics department received the bodies of 23 IS militants killed in Baiji. They had no shrapnel, no bullets, no explosives and the cause of death does not seem to be explosion. It is like nothing happened to the bodies. A medical source believes they were exposed to poison gas.”

July 7, 2015: “43 citizens were executed in different places, this time by gunfire, which is unusual because they were previously beheadings. A source inside IS said that 13 of those who were executed are fighters and they tried to flee.”

He noted a flurry of security on days when the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, seemed to be in town.

Many in Iraq, especially those who supported the Shiite-dominated leadership in Baghdad, blamed Mosul for its own fate. Mosul Eye freely acknowledged that some residents at first believed the new conquerors could only be an improvement over the heavy-handed government and the soldiers who fled with hardly a backward glance at the city they were supposed to defend.

But he also wrote publicly and privately of the suffering among citizens who refused to join the group. He was fighting on two fronts: “One against ISIS, and the other against the rumors. Trying to protect the face of Mosul, the soul of Mosul.”

He tested out different voices, implying one day that he was Christian, another that he was Muslim. Sometimes he indicated he was gone, other times that he was still in the city. “I couldn’t trust anyone,” he said.

In his mind, he left Mosul a thousand times, but always found reasons to stay: his mother, his nieces and nephews, his mission.

But finally, he had to go.

“I had to run away with the proof that will protect Mosul for years to come, and to at least be loyal to the people who were killed in the city.”

And he did not want to become another casualty of the monsters.

“I think I deserve life, deserve to be alive.”

A smuggler, persuaded by $1,000 and the assurances of a mutual acquaintance, agreed to get him out. He was leaving the next day. Mosul Eye had no time to reflect, no time to change his mind.

He returned home and began transferring the contents of his computer to the hard drive. He pulled out the orange notebook with the hand-drawn map of Mosul on the cover and the outlines of what he hoped would one day be his doctoral dissertation. Into the bag went “Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca,” an obscure American satirical novel from 1770 that he had ordered from Amazon via a new shop that was the only place in town to order from abroad online.

It was time to leave.

He wanted to make sure his mother would never have to watch the capture and killing of Mosul Eye.

On Dec. 15, 2015 he left Mosul, driving with the smuggler to the outskirts of Raqqa, a pickup point that alarmed him. From there he and other Iraqis and Syrians were picked up by a second set of smugglers and driven by convoy to Turkey.

They had no trouble crossing the border.

__

In Turkey, Mosul Eye kept at it: via WhatsApp and Viber, from Facebook messages and long conversations with friends and relatives who had contacts within IS. From hundreds of kilometers away, his life remained consumed by events in Mosul.

By mid-2016, deaths were piling up faster than he could document. The IS and airstrikes were taking a bloody toll on residents. His records grew haphazard, and he turned to Twitter to document the atrocities. In February 2017, he received asylum in Europe with the aid of an organization that learned his backstory. He continued to track the airstrikes and Islamic State killings

He mapped the airstrikes as they closed in on his family, pleading with his older brother to leave his home in West Mosul. Ahmed, 36, died days later when shrapnel from a mortar strike pierced his heart, leaving behind four young children.

It was only then that Mosul Eye revealed his secret to a younger brother — who was proud to learn the anonymous historian he had been reading for so long was his brother.

“People in Mosul had lost hope and confidence in politicians, in everything,” his brother said. Mosul Eye “managed to show that it’s possible to change the situation in the city and bring it back to life.”

As the Old City crumbled, Mosul Eye sent coordinates and phone numbers for homes filled with civilians to a BBC journalist who was covering the battle, trying to get the attention of someone in the coalition command. He believes he saved lives.

Then, with his beloved Old City destroyed, Mosul Eye launched a fundraiser to rebuild the city’s libraries because the extremists had burned all the books. None of his volunteers knew his identity.

An activist who helped co-found a “Women of Mosul” Facebook group with Mosul Eye describes him as a “spiritual leader” for the city’s secular-minded.

“He was telling us about the day-to-day events under ISIS and we were following closely with excitement as if we were watching a movie. Sometimes he went through hard times and we used to encourage him. He won the people’s trust and we became very curious to know his real personality,” said the activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she believed she was still in danger.

From a distance, finally writing his dissertation on 19th century Mosul history in the safety of a European city, he continued to write as Mosul Eye and organize cultural events and fundraisers from afar — even after Mosul was liberated.

The double life consumed him, sapped energy he’d rather use for the doctoral dissertation and for helping Mosul rebuild. And it hurt when someone asked the young Iraqi why he didn’t do more to help his people. He desperately wanted his mother to know all that he had done.

He felt barely real, with so many people knowing him by false identities: 293,000 followers on Facebook, 37,000 on WordPress and 23,400 on Twitter.

In hours of face-to-face conversations with The Associated Press over the course of two months, he agonized over when and how to end the anonymity that plagued him. He did not want to be a virtual character anymore.

On Nov. 15, 2017, Mosul Eye made his decision.

“I can’t be anonymous anymore. This is to say that I defeated ISIS. You can see me now, and you can know me now.”

He is 31 years old.

His name is Omar Mohammed.

“I am a scholar.”

Tillerson: Child Soldiers Conscription Violations

Posted on November 21, 2017November 21, 2017 by Denise Simon

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The United Nations has a list of shame, fine but it is merely a list and a gesture.

Child soldiers are children (under 18) who are used for military purposes.

Some child soldiers are used for fighting – they’re forced to take part in wars and conflicts, forced to kill, and commit other acts of violence. Some are forced to act as suicide bombers. Some join ‘voluntarily’, driven by poverty, sense of duty, or circumstance.

Other children are used as cooks, porters, messengers, informants, spies or anything their commanders want them to do. Child soldiers are sometimes sexually abused.

Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Myanmar, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Thailand, the UK and Yemen all use child soldiers, meaning on person under the age of 18.

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Exclusive – State Dept. revolt: Tillerson accused of violating U.S. law on child soldiers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of about a dozen U.S. State Department officials have taken the unusual step of formally accusing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of violating a federal law designed to stop foreign militaries from enlisting child soldiers, according to internal government documents reviewed by Reuters.

A confidential State Department “dissent” memo not previously reported said Tillerson breached the Child Soldiers Prevention Act when he decided in June to exclude Iraq, Myanmar, and Afghanistan from a U.S. list of offenders in the use of child soldiers. This was despite the department publicly acknowledging that children were being conscripted in those countries.[tmsnrt.rs/2jJ7pav]

Keeping the countries off the annual list makes it easier to provide them with U.S. military assistance. Iraq and Afghanistan are close allies in the fight against Islamist militants, while Myanmar is an emerging ally to offset China’s influence in Southeast Asia.

Documents reviewed by Reuters also show Tillerson’s decision was at odds with a unanimous recommendation by the heads of the State Department’s regional bureaus overseeing embassies in the Middle East and Asia, the U.S. envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the department’s human rights office and its own in-house lawyers. [tmsnrt.rs/2Ah6tB4]

“Beyond contravening U.S. law, this decision risks marring the credibility of a broad range of State Department reports and analyses and has weakened one of the U.S. government’s primary diplomatic tools to deter governmental armed forces and government-supported armed groups from recruiting and using children in combat and support roles around the world,” said the July 28 memo.

Reuters reported in June that Tillerson had disregarded internal recommendations on Iraq, Myanmar and Afghanistan. The new documents reveal the scale of the opposition in the State Department, including the rare use of what is known as the “dissent channel,” which allows officials to object to policies without fear of reprisals.

The views expressed by the U.S. officials illustrate ongoing tensions between career diplomats and the former chief of Exxon Mobil Corp appointed by President Donald Trump to pursue an “America First” approach to diplomacy.

INTERPRETING THE LAW

The child soldiers law passed in 2008 states that the U.S. government must be satisfied that no children under the age of 18 “are recruited, conscripted or otherwise compelled to serve as child soldiers” for a country to be removed from the list. It currently includes the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Mali, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

”The Secretary thoroughly reviewed all of the information presented to him and made a determination about whether the facts presented justified a listing pursuant to the law,” a State Department spokesperson said when asked about the officials’ allegation that he had violated the law.

In a written response to the dissent memo on Sept. 1, Tillerson adviser Brian Hook acknowledged that the three countries did use child soldiers. He said, however, it was necessary to distinguish between governments “making little or no effort to correct their child soldier violations … and those which are making sincere – if as yet incomplete – efforts.”

Hook made clear that America’s top diplomat used what he sees as his discretion to interpret the law.

‘A POWERFUL MESSAGE’

Foreign militaries on the list are prohibited from receiving aid, training and weapons from Washington unless the White House issues a waiver based on U.S. “national interest.” In 2016, under the Obama administration, both Iraq and Myanmar, as well as others such as Nigeria and Somalia, received waivers.

At times, the human rights community chided President Barack Obama for being too willing to issue waivers and exemptions, especially for governments that had security ties with Washington, instead of sanctioning more of those countries.

“Human Rights Watch frequently criticized President Barack Obama for giving too many countries waivers, but the law has made a real difference,” Jo Becker, advocacy director for the children’s rights division of Human Rights Watch, wrote in June in a critique of Tillerson’s decision.

The dissenting U.S. officials stressed that Tillerson’s decision to exclude Iraq, Afghanistan and Myanmar went a step further than the Obama administration’s waiver policy by contravening the law and effectively easing pressure on the countries to eradicate the use of child soldiers.

The officials acknowledged in the documents reviewed by Reuters that those three countries had made progress. But in their reading of the law, they said that was not enough to be kept off a list that has been used to shame governments into completely eradicating the use of child soldiers.

‘UNCONSCIONABLE ACTIONS’

Ben Cardin, ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Tillerson on Friday saying there were “serious concerns that the State Department may not be complying” with the law and that the secretary’s decision “sent a powerful message to these countries that they were receiving a pass on their unconscionable actions.”

The memo was among a series of previously unreported documents sent this month to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the State Department’s independent inspector general’s office that relate to allegations that Tillerson violated the child soldiers law.

Legal scholars say that because of the executive branch’s latitude in foreign policy there is little legal recourse to counter Tillerson’s decision.

Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University in Washington, said U.S. courts would be unlikely to accept any challenge to Tillerson’s interpretation of the child soldiers law as allowing him to remove a country from the list on his own discretion.

The signatories to the document were largely senior policy experts with years of involvement in the issues, said an official familiar with the matter. Reuters saw a copy of the document that did not include the names of those who signed it.

Tillerson’s decision to remove Iraq and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, from the list and reject a recommendation by U.S. officials to add Afghanistan was announced in the release of the government’s annual human trafficking report on June 27.

Six days earlier, a previously unreported memo emailed to Tillerson from a range of senior diplomats said the three countries violated the law based on evidence gathered by U.S. officials in 2016 and recommended that he approve them for the new list.

It noted that in Iraq, the United Nations and non-governmental organizations “reported that some Sunni tribal forces … recruited and used persons younger than the age of 18, including instances of children taking a direct part in hostilities.”

Ali Kareem, who heads Iraq’s High Committee for Human Rights, denied the country’s military or state-backed militias use child soldiers. ”We can say today with full confidence that we have a clean slate on child recruitment issues,” he said.

The memo also said “two confirmed cases of child recruitment” by the Myanmar military “were documented during the reporting period.” Human rights advocates have estimated that dozens of children are still conscripted there.

Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay challenged accusers to provide details of where and how child soldiers are being used. He noted that in the latest State Department report on human trafficking, “they already recognized (Myanmar) for reducing of child soldiers” – though the report also made clear some children were still conscripted.

The memo said further there was “credible evidence” that a government-supported militia in Afghanistan “recruited and used a child,” meeting the minimum threshold of a single confirmed case that the State Department had previously used as the legal basis for putting a country on the list.

The Afghan defense and interior ministries both denied there were any child soldiers in Afghan national security forces, an assertion that contradicts the State Department’s reports and human rights activists.

Drug Cartels Upped the Game with Weaponized Drones

Posted on November 15, 2017November 15, 2017 by Denise Simon

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Police in Mexico pulled over four men in a pickup truck near the city of Salamanca in Guanajuato state on October 20 and got a nasty surprise. Along with an AK-47 assault rifle, the men had in their possession an unmanned aerial vehicle fitted with a “large explosive device” and a remote detonator.

That’s right: a weaponized drone.

Police didn’t say whether they suspected the men of ties to drug cartels. But Guanajuato is currently contested by several drug gangs, including the Sinaloa cartel, Los Zetas, and Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG, according to Dr. Robert Bunker, a fellow with Small Wars Journal, a military trade publication.

ISIS set up factories in Iraq and Syria to modify mortar bombs—basically, small artillery shells—to fit on small drones. During intensive fighting in the Iraqi city of Mosul in February, ISIS’s drones were “the main problem” for coalition troops, Captain Ali, an Iraqi officer, told War Is Boring.

The cartels, for their part, have been using so-called “potato bombs”—hand-grenade-size improvised explosive devices—in attacks on each other and authorities. Bunker said the explosive the police found alongside the drone in Guanajuato is “consistent” with a potato bomb.

The cartels could also draw inspiration from online-retailer Amazon and its delivery drones. “As both Islamic State and Amazon have shown, small drones are an efficient way of carrying a payload to a target,” said Nick Waters, a former British Army officer and independent drone expert. “Whether that payload is your new book or several hundred grams of explosive is up to the sender.”

But don’t panic, Waters and other experts said. Drug cartels were plenty dangerous before they weaponized flying robots. Potato bomb-hauling drones might just give narcos more options for perpetrating crimes they are perfectly capable of pulling off some other way. “Considering their already impressive traditional capability, I think this will probably be another tool rather than a game-changing capability,” Waters said.

You should be “no more worried than you should be by cartels also using machine guns, car bombs, machetes, etc,” Singer said. More here.

New report shows how Mexican cartels are infiltrating Texas

Mexican cartels smuggle more drugs into the U.S. than any other criminal group, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration said in a new report.

The 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment released in October lists six cartels as having major influences across the country and Texas.

Cartels’ influence in Texas is far-reaching, affecting cities hundreds of miles from the state’s border with Mexico.

San Antonio is the only city in the state with a drug trade controlled by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, which deals mostly with methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana, according to the DEA.

The Gulf Cartel has a hold on cities in Texas’ tip and coastal bend. McAllen, Brownsville, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Houston and Beaumont are impacted most by the Gulf Cartel which mostly brings marijuana and cocaine into the area, according to the DEA. Drugs smuggled through the Gulf Cartel are mostly brought in through the area between the Rio Grande Valley and South Padre Island.

Every week in Houston, a relative of a Gulf Cartel leader receives 100 kilograms of cocaine, according to the DEA.

Moving West, Los Zetas control two cities and the Juarez Cartel has a hold on Alpine, Midland, El Paso and Lubbock.

While the arrests of two Los Zetas leaders has weakened the cartel’s influence on Eagle Pass and Laredo, its presence is still felt because of members who have assumed control, bringing cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into Texas.

The Sinaloa Cartel, formerly run by prison escape artist Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman,” is most found in Dallas, Lubbock and Fort Worth, according to the DEA.

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The FY 2017 OCDETF Program Budget Request comprises 2,975 positions, 2,902 FTE,

and $522.135 million in funding for the Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement (ICDE)

Appropriation, to be used for investigative and prosecutorial costs associated with OCDETF cases targeting high-level criminal drug and money laundering networks as well as priority transnational poly-crime organizations whose primary criminal activity may not necessarily be drug-related. Go here to read the full report.

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Testimony: Hezbollah, the Illicit Networks Global Reach

Posted on November 8, 2017November 8, 2017 by Denise Simon

Place of Origin: Lebanon

Year of Origin: 1982

Founder(s): Ali Akbar Mohtashemi—Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria; Imad Fayez Mughniyeh; Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah; Abbas al-Musawi

Places of Operation: Lebanon, Syria, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, United Arab Emirates

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Emanuele Ottolenghi
House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Western Hemisphere Subcommittee
8 November 2017

Chairman Cook, allow me first to congratulate you on your recent appointment as the new chairman of this subcommittee. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Sires, members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.

In 2011, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) indicted Ayman Saied Joumaa, a Lebanese-Colombian dual national whose global network of companies operating out of Latin America, West Africa, and Lebanon laundered money for Mexican and Colombian cartels to the tune of $200 million a month of drug proceeds.[1] Joumaa worked with Hezbollah as the kingpin in one of many networks Hezbollah runs globally to sustain its financial needs. When his case came to light, the New York Times quoted a DEA official as saying that Hezbollah operated like “the Gambinos on steroids.”[2]

The United States cannot continue to combat a threat of such magnitude unless it leverages all its tools of statecraft in a combined, sustained, and coordinated fashion. Over the past decade, Hezbollah’s terror finance outside Lebanon has evolved from a relatively small fundraising operation involving trade-based money laundering and charitable donations into a multi-billion dollar global criminal enterprise.

Increasing quantities of Schedule 2 drugs like cocaine invade the U.S. from Latin America, adding fuel to the opioid pandemic that has already cost so many lives.[3] Cocaine consumption is as much a national epidemic as opioids, Mr. Chairman, and Hezbollah helps make it available to U.S. consumers.

This makes Hezbollah, its senior leadership, and its numerous operatives involved in running illicit drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations on a global scale the perfect candidates for Kingpin and Transnational Crime Organization designations, in addition to the terrorism and terror finance designations already in place.

The U.S. government has, over the years, developed remarkably sharp and effective tools to counteract Hezbollah’s terror finance threat, but is not using them as vigorously as it should. The Kingpin Act is one such instrument. But like all other instruments of statecraft, its impact would be much greater if used consistently and in conjunction with other tools. The challenge for Congress, the executive branch, the intelligence community, and law enforcement agencies is to leverage these tools in a manner that will outsmart Hezbollah and disrupt its cash flows enough to inflict irreparable damage to the terror group’s finances.

In pursuit of this goal, America needs to better coordinate the application and enforcement of all instruments available from the formidable toolbox created over the past two decades by legislation and executive orders, including leveraging Executive Orders 13581 and 13773 on combating transnational organized crime, Executive Order 13224 on combating sources of terror finance, the 1999 Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, the 2015 Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act (HIFPA), the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act of 2016, and soon the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act Amendment of 2017, which is now awaiting reconciliation between its House and Senate versions and which will, once approved, expand on HIFPA.

In doing so, it should focus significantly on the Western Hemisphere, where Hezbollah’s global footprint, especially in Latin America, is most menacing.

Hezbollah’s regional operations are part of a global network of illicit financial and commercial enterprises whose goal is to fund Hezbollah’s activities in the Middle East. Where and when needed, these networks can also be activated to provide logistical support to operatives engaged in planning terror attacks. The United States therefore needs to think and act globally to disrupt Hezbollah’s illicit finance networks. Latin America is a very good place to start doing that.

In the remainder of my testimony, I will discuss evidence demonstrating the magnitude of the threat posed by Hezbollah’s terror finance to the national security of the United States. I will also provide evidence of the high-ranking nature of Hezbollah’s operatives in Latin America – a sure sign of the importance of Hezbollah’s Latin American networks to the organization’s budget. And I will discuss the impact of U.S. policy and actions on disrupting Hezbollah’s terror finance activities. The evidence I am presenting today, hopefully, will highlight both strengths and weaknesses of present U.S. policy and offer ways to improve results.

Download the full testimony here.

[1] U.S. Department of the Treasury, Press Release, “Treasury Targets Major Lebanese-Based Drug Trafficking and Money Laundering Network,” January 26, 2011. (https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pagés/tg1035.aspx); see also: U.S. Department of the Treasury, Press Release, “U.S. Charges Alleged Lebanese Drug Kingpin with Laundering Drug Proceeds for Mexican and Colombian Drug Cartels,” December 13, 2011. (https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/vae/news/2011/12/20111213joumaanr.html)

[2] Jo Becker, “Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing,” The New York Times, December 13, 2011. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/world/middleeast/beirut-bank-seen-as-a-hub-of-hezbollahs-financing.html)

[3] Nick Miroff, “American cocaine use is way up. Colombia’s coca boom may be why,” The Washington Post, March 4, 2017. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/04/colombias-coca-boom-is-showing-up-on-u-s-streets/?utm_term=.d370be3ebe9c)

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*** A short briefing from the State Department on October 10, 2017 by National Counter-terrorism Center Director, Nick Rasmussen:

Hizballah’s use of terrorism across the globe, which has persisted for several decades; second, the group’s continued effort to advance terrorism acts worldwide; and third, the fact that the organization is, in fact, focused on U.S. interests, including here in the homeland. And that is part of the reason why we are here today.

Lebanese Hizballah has repeatedly demonstrated for the world its true character. It is an organization that relies on terrorism as well as other forms of violence and coercion to achieve its goals. And this takes place in spite of the group’s attempts to portray itself as a legitimate political party. Prior to September 11th, I think everybody knows Hizballah was responsible for the terrorism-related deaths of more U.S. citizens than any other foreign terrorist organization.

Now, for many Americans, their introduction to the threat posed by this group came after Hizballah’s attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April of 1983. That horrific attack killed 63 and wounded an additional 120 individuals, and it was followed by an even more deadly attack on our Marine barracks in October of 1983 which killed 241 Americans and wounded an additional 128 Americans.

So Hizballah’s penchant for violence has not changed over the last three decades. We’ve seen time and time again with its international terrorism unit, the External Security Organization, also known as the IJO, the Islamic Jihad Organization, and Unit 910, 9-1-0. But its deployment of operatives to nearly every corner of the globe continues to engage in terrorism-related activity.

In 2012 the group carried out a bomb attack in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian national, and a number of Hizballah operatives have been caught laying the groundwork for attacks in places like Azerbaijan, in Egypt, in Thailand, in Cyprus, and in Peru. And there are other instances of Hizballah-related arrests and disruptions around the world that are at this point unpublicized and remain classified.

But all of this together shows us that the group seeks to develop and maintain a global capability to carry out acts of terror. I can assure you that the conversation today would be much different had some of these disrupted plots actually succeeded. Casualty counts would be higher and many innocent lives would have been forever altered. The group is also known to focus on areas populated by tourists, almost guaranteeing that with their attacks innocent victims – innocent civilians will be victims.

Now, with respect to the homeland here in the United States, let me say this. While much of our work in the government since 9/11 has focused on al-Qaida and more recently on ISIS, in the 20 years since Hizballah’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization, we have never taken our focus off of Hizballah and on the threat it represents to the homeland.

***

Syria, ISIS, and the Broader Middle East

As an Iranian proxy, Hezbollah has taken up arms alongside Syrian and Iranian forces in defense of the Syrian regime in that country’s civil war. In 2012, the U.S. Treasury levied additional sanctions on Hezbollah for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. According to Treasury, since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in early 2011,

Hezbollah provided “training, advice and extensive logistical support to the Government of Syria’s increasingly ruthless efforts to fight against the opposition.” 45

As of October 2016, Hezbollah and Syrian forces were reportedly besieging some 40,000 Syrians in three towns, preventing them access to medical treatment. 46

During an October 2016 rally in Beirut, Nasrallah promised that Hezbollah

would “continue to bear our great responsibilities of jihad” in Syria. 47

In January 2015, in response to Israeli airstrikes on alleged weapons shipments to Hezbollah in Syria, Nasrallah called the strikes an aggression against Syria’s regional allies.

As such, Syria’s allies have the right to retaliate, according to Nasrallah. 48

Hezbollah’s activity in Syria has its domestic detractors as well. Subhi al-Tufayli, Hezbollah’s first secretary-general from 1989 to 1991, has accused Hezbollah of being

a “partner in the killing of the Syrian people.” He denounced Hezbollah members who fight alongside Russians, and called on the Hezbollah leadership to heed Lebanese opposition to the group’s involvement in Syria. 49

Hezbollah’s role in Syria is not limited to fighting anti-government rebels. Under Iranian direction, Hezbollah has also fought against ISIS, which Nasrallah described as a growing threat to the region and an existential threat to Lebanon in an August 2014 interview with the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. 50

Hezbollah has also fought against the Nusra Front (Jabhat Fateh al-Sham).51

On October 19, 2016, Qassem told Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV that Hezbollah “will not leave Syria as long as there is a need to confront takfiri groups.” 52

In November 2016, Hezbollah held a public parade in the Syrian city of Qusair to highlight its role in the conflict. The terror group showcased U.S. and Russian armored personnel carriers and tanks. The U.S. State Department issued a statement that it was “gravely concerned” and investigating how Hezbollah acquired U.S. equipment. 53

The United States provides aid to the Lebanese military, which denied that U.S.-provided weaponry had been transferred to Hezbollah 54. Read the full report here.