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Category Archives: Libya Benghazi Muslim Brotherhood murder
For more than five years, Donald Trump’s new top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, lobbied for a Washington-based group that Justice Department prosecutors have charged operated as a front for Pakistan’s intelligence service, according to court and lobbying records reviewed by Yahoo News.
Manafort’s work in the 1990s as a registered lobbyist for the Kashmiri American Council was only one part of a wide-ranging portfolio that, over several decades, included a gallery of controversial foreign clients ranging from Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire’s brutal dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to an Angolan rebel leader accused by human rights groups of torture. His role as an adviser to Ukraine’s then prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, prompted concerns within the Bush White House that he was undermining U.S. foreign policy. It was considered so politically toxic in 2008 that presidential candidate John McCain nixed plans for Manafort to manage the Republican National Convention — a move that caused a rupture between Manafort and his then business partner, Rick Davis, who at the time was McCain’s campaign manager.
Manafort’s work for the Kashmiri group has so far not gotten any media attention.
But it could fuel more questions about his years of lobbying for questionable foreign interests before Manafort, 67, assumed his new position as chief delegate counter and strategist for a presidential candidate who repeatedly decries the influence of Washington lobbyists and denounces the manipulation of U.S. policy by foreign governments.
Court records show that Manafort’s Kashmiri lobbying contract came on the FBI’s radar screen during a lengthy counterterrorism investigation that culminated in 2011 with the arrest of the Kashmiri council’s director, Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, on charges that he ran the group on behalf of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, as part of a scheme to secretly influence U.S. policy toward the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Paul Manafort, convention manager for the Trump campaign, on “Meet the Press,” April 10. (Photo: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)
The Kashmiri American Council was a “scam” that amounted to a “false flag operation that Mr. Fai was operating on behalf of the ISI,” Gordon D. Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, said in March 2012 at Fai’s sentencing hearing in federal court. While posing as a U.S.-based nonprofit funded by American donors sympathetic to the plight of Kashmiris, it was actually bankrolled by the ISI in order to deflect public attention “away from the involvement of Pakistan in sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere,” Kromberg said. Fai, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax fraud charges, was then sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Lobbying records filed with the secretary of the Senate show that Manafort’s lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, was paid $700,000 by the Kashmiri American Council between 1990 and 1995. This was among more than $4 million that federal prosecutors alleged came from the ISI; Fai collected the money over 20 years from “straw” American donors who were being reimbursed from secret accounts in Pakistan. (The funds were in some cases delivered to Fai in brown paper bags stuffed with cash — and then the donors reimbursed with wire transfers from ISI operatives, according to an FBI affidavit.)
Manafort, who handled the Kashmiri account for his firm, was never charged in the case, and Kromberg told Yahoo News that what knowledge, if any, he had of the secret source of money from his client was not part of the Justice Department’s investigation. (While registering with Congress as a domestic lobbyist for the Kashmiri American Council, Manafort never registered with the U.S. Justice Department as a foreign agent of Pakistan, as he would have been required to do if he was aware of the ISI funding of his client.)
But a former senior Pakistani official, who asked not to be identified, told Yahoo News that there was never any doubt on Pakistan’s part that Manafort knew of his government’s role in backing the Kashmiri council. The former official said that during a trip from Islamabad in 1994 he met with Manafort and Fai in Manafort’s office in Alexandria, Va., “to review strategy and plans” for the council. Manafort, at the meeting, presented plans to influence members of Congress to back Pakistan’s case for a plebiscite for Kashmir (the largest portion of which has been part of India since 1947), he said. (Internal budget documents later obtained by the FBI show plans by the council to spend $80,000 to $100,000 a year on campaign contributions to members of Congress.) “There is no way Manafort didn’t know that Pakistan was involved with” the council, the former official said, although he added: “Some things are not explicitly stated.”
Neither Manafort nor the Trump campaign responded to requests for comment for this story. (“I’m not working for any client right now other than working for Mr. Trump,” Manafort recently said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” when asked by moderator Chuck Todd about his past “controversial” clients.)
Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, executive director of the Kashmiri American Council, in 2007. (Photo: Roshan Mughal/AP)
But Manafort’s former partner Charlie Black, now an adviser to rival Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, said that as far as the firm was concerned, the Kashmiri council was a domestic, not a foreign, client. “Nobody was more surprised than me that the guy was taking the money from Pakistan,” Black said in a telephone interview. “We didn’t know anything about it.”
But there was no doubt on the part of the Indian government about where the money was coming from. Its officials repeatedly alleged that the Kashmiri council was a front group for Pakistan during the period that Manafort’s firm was lobbying for it. The issue blew up in September 1993 after Manafort and one of his lobbying associates, Riva Levinson, traveled to Kashmir and, according to Indian officials, posed as CNN reporters in an effort to gather video footage of interviews with Kashmiri officials.
“The whole thing was obviously a blatant operation of producing television software with a deliberate and particularly anti-Indian slant by lobbyists hired by Pakistan for this very purpose,” Shiv Shankar, then the Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a letter to CNN in Atlanta at the time. (Levinson did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News. At the time she denied the Indian allegations, telling a UPI reporter, “We never misrepresented ourselves as journalists.”)
Exactly what Manafort did for the Kashmiri council is unclear from the sketchy lobbying reports his firm filed with the secretary of the Senate. Those reports show his firm first registered as lobbyists for the group in October 1990, the same year the group was founded by Fai. The reports list little beyond the purpose of the lobbying: to seek support for a House resolution by then-Rep. Dan Burton to sponsor a “peaceful resolution” of the Kashmir dispute. They also show payments to the firm of $140,000 a year. (During this time, Black, Manafort had a long list of other domestic clients that included the NRA, the Tobacco Institute and the Trump Organization, which paid the firm $70,000 a year to lobby Congress on casino gambling, aviation and tax issues, according to the lobbying records.)
“We went to the Hill for them to raise the profile of the [Kashmiri] cause,” said Black about the firm’s work for Fai’s council. “But nobody in Bush 41 [the administration of George H.W. Bush] or the Clinton administration wanted to touch it. We never got any real attention for it.”
The FBI came across evidence that ISI was actually not pleased with Manafort’s work. The bureau’s investigation began in 2005 with a tip from a confidential informant (who was seeking a reduced prison term) that Fai and an associate in Pakistan, Zaheer Ahmad, were agents of the ISI. As part of the probe, agents obtained secret national security warrants to wiretap Fai’s communications; they also searched his home and offices. Among the evidence they seized: a December 1995 letter from Fai’s main ISI handler, identified as a Pakistani Army brigadier general named Javeed Aziz Khan, who went by the name of “Abdullah,” that criticized Fai for renewing a contract with a public relations firm, according to the FBI affidavit from a counterterrorism agent, Sarah Webb Linden, that was filed to support Fai’s detention in July 2011.
Lobbyist Charlie Black (Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images)
Eight months later, at Fai’s sentencing hearing, prosecutor Kromberg for the first time identified the public relations firm as Black, Manafort, according to court records. He then detailed a dispute between Fai and his ISI handler over the Black, Manafort contract. Fai wrote back to Khan the next day insisting that the ISI official had in fact approved the renewal of the contract and noted that to “make it appear” that the council was a Kashmiri organization “financed by Americans,” there was a preexisting agreement that nobody from the Pakistani Embassy would ever contact Black, Manafort, said Kromberg. But Fai was overruled, according to Kromberg’s account. The ISI handler wrote back to Fai stating that that “‘we’ — a reference to the ISI — were unsatisfied with the performance of Black, Manafort & Stone, and advised Fai to terminate the contract immediately,” according to a transcript of Kromberg’s statement to the court.
Meanwhile, the FBI pursued even more alarming allegations relating to Ahmad, Fai’s Pakistan-based associate. According to a ProPublica account, the bureau questioned witnesses about a trip that Ahmad had allegedly made to Afghanistan with a Pakistani nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood; the scientist was suspecting of having met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in August 2001 to discuss the terror leaders’ interest in acquiring nuclear weapons.
Manafort, for his part, appears to have expanded his business connections in Pakistan. In 2013 he acknowledged to French investigators that, in 1994, he had received $86,000 from two arms dealers involved in the sale of French attack submarines to Pakistan’s navy. The payments were part of an arrangement to compensate Manafort for political advice and polling he provided to French presidential candidate Édouard Balladur — one part of a wide-ranging French investigation into alleged kickbacks from arms sales dubbed by the French press “the Karachi affair.”
One puzzling question about the Kashmir case is why, six years after the investigation began, the FBI decided to arrest Fai in 2011. One explanation, a source familiar with the case said, is that it came during a period of mounting tensions between the United States and Pakistan, much of it due to concerns among U.S. national security officials about the “double game” being played by the ISI. In May of that year, President Obama ordered the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden without informing the Pakistani military, in part because of fears that elements of the ISI (an arm of the military) might have been protecting the al-Qaida leader. Just weeks later, federal prosecutors in Chicago presented damning testimony in federal court that an ISI handler had directed one of the confessed conspirators in the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai — which killed 164 people, including six Americans — that was perpetrated by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-based group with links to al-Qaida committed to “liberating” Muslims from Indian rule in Kashmir.
Then, on July 18, after Fai returned from a trip to the United Kingdom, the FBI confronted him for the third time about whether he had any connections to the ISI — and he denied it. Fai was arrested, and he and Ahmad (who remained in Pakistan and died later that year) were charged in federal court with being unregistered foreign agents of Pakistan.
Saudi Arabian King Salman’s visit to Egypt is an expression of the warming of ties since al-Sisi became president in June 2013. Morsi’s overthrowing and declaration of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in December 2013 were welcomed by Riyadh and immediately rewarded with a tremendous $12 billion aid package from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE.
Yet with King Abdullah’s passing in January 2015 it seemed that the two states were growing apart. The media was quick to point out disagreements on issues such as the countries’ approaches to Yemen, the Muslim Brotherhood and Syria. However, despite tactical disagreements, the two countries strategically continued to share common interests vis-à-vis regional threats and challenges.
Therefore, Salman’s visit is a testament to the strong relationship – one might even say the alliance – between the two countries. Historically, cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Egypt has been a permanent feature of the Arab state system despite short periods of rivalry. The visit is consequential, primarily for Egypt. According to Egyptian media, no fewer than 36 agreements worth $25 billion were signed during the visit, including establishing a Saudi investment fund worth $16 billion, Saudi aid to rebuild Sinai (including creating a free-trade zone), building a university, and erecting a bridge to connect Sinai and Saudi Arabia. The bridge will allow countless tourists and pilgrims, as well as goods, to cross from one continent to the next. Like the Suez Canal expansion, this project will also contribute significantly to the Egyptian economy.
That Sinai is the focus of governmental aid is not surprising, because it is meant to be part of Cairo’s response to the challenge posed by the radical jihadi organizations. The regime understands full well that the answer to the problems in Sinai is not purely military. Rather, it involves improving the lives of the peninsula’s inhabitants.
During the visit, it was announced that the islands of Tiran and Sanafir, located at the entrance of the Gulf of Eilat, would be handed over to the Saudis, who previously controlled them. In 1950, the Saudis decided to lease the islands to Egypt in order to facilitate the Arab boycott and maritime quarantine of Israel. The islands were conquered by Israel in 1956 and again in 1967 but returned to Egypt after the 1979 peace agreement. Therefore, the current agreement will return them to the rightful owners. Israel has no reason to be concerned, despite the islands’ strategic importance, as Saudi Arabia has not been involved in previous wars with Israel and has no incentive to threaten it. More on the summary here.
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Meanwhile the United States has an estimated 700 troops in the Sinai and this has been an area of hostilities with the Islamic State cell operating there. Discussions have been underway to remove our 700 troops but a final decision has not been made rather they could just be moved further south and replaced with technology. The Sinai is of major significance to Egypt for tourism, something that Egypt relies on for revenue and to show stability in the region.
The Pentagon has notified Egypt and Israel that it is reviewing its peacekeeping operations in Egypt’s violence-wracked Sinai Peninsula.Officials said they are looking into the possibility of technology replacing the work of around 700 US peacekeepers in the region.”I don’t think anyone’s talking about a [complete] withdrawal,” Pentagon spokesperson Jeff Davis told a press conference on Tuesday.”I think we’re just going to look at the number of people we have there and see if there are functions that can be automated or done through remote monitoring.”However, a spokesperson for the White House on Tuesday maintained that Washington’s “commitment to this treaty and this mission has never been stronger.”Israel, which fears attack from within Egyptian territory in the restive Sinai Peninsula, last year protested proposals to cut back peacekeeping forces in the region, saying such a move would “reward terrorism”.
Chris Wallace asked Obama about Hillary’s email and server. In Obama’s answer he made the guarantee twice there would be no political cover for Hillary. He went on to describe that the White House never got involved in cases where there were ongoing investigations. What???
Barack Obama also defended his decisions to play golf….and his timing was not in question. Too bad Chris could not ask him about not joining other leaders in Paris and instead sent John Kerry later accompanied with James Taylor to perform ‘You’ve Got a Friend’. Sheesh really?
EXCLUSIVE: Obama vows no influence in Clinton email probe, defends terror fight
FNC: President Obama repeatedly vowed there would be no political influence over the Justice Department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state — in a wide-ranging interview with “Fox News Sunday” in which he also ardently defended his efforts to defeat the Islamic State and other terror groups amid criticism about his perceived indifference.
“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case,” Obama told “Fox News Sunday.” “Nobody is above the law. How many times do I have to say it?”
His remarks came less than three months after White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest publicly downplayed a possible indictment for Clinton.
Obama praised Clinton’s tenure running the State Department from 2009 to 2013 and said he still doesn’t think the emails to and from her private server breached national security.
However, he acknowledged, as Clinton has done, that her using the private server was not a good idea, in part after revelations that roughly 2,000 of the emails included classified information.
“There’s carelessness in terms of managing emails, that she has owned, and she recognizes,” Obama told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, in his first interview with the cable network since 2008.
Obama defended efforts to stop the growing international terror threat and his response to terrorists.
“My No. 1 job is to protect the American people,” Obama said, in an interview taped Friday at the Unversity of Chicago, where he was a professor. “My No. 1 priority right now is defeating ISIL (the Islamic State.) … I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So let’s be very clear about how much I prioritize this: This is my No. 1 job.”
Obama also defended his actions after several deadly attacks, including playing a round of golf after American James Foley was beheaded and going to a baseball game in Cuba after the Brussels terror bombings last month, for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
“In the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been my view consistently that the job of the terrorists, in their minds, is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change who they are. And what I’ve tried to communicate is, “You can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you.
“And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston, after the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ballgame. And do all the other things that make our life worthwhile. … That’s the message of resilience. That we don’t panic, that we don’t fear, we will hunt you down and we will get you.”
The president also dug in on his position that the GOP-controlled Senate should vote on whether to confirm his nomination to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
He argued lawmakers have a constitutional responsibility and suggested that Garland would pass the confirmation process.
“I think that if they go through the process, they won’t have a rationale to defeat him,” Obama said.
The president nevertheless acknowledged that congressional Republicans are in a tough election-year position, considering he’s out of office in about nine months, with the possibility the next president could be a Republican who will make his own nomination.
Washington, D.C.— Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (SC-04) released the following statement after the committee today received from the State Department a production of more than 1,100 pages of records, including files stored on network folders used by senior employees within the Office of the Secretary, and emails from Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, Susan Rice, and Patrick Kennedy:
“It is deplorable that it took over a year for these records to be produced to our committee, and that our Democrat colleagues never lifted a finger to help us get them. Shame on them and everyone else who has demanded this committee to give up before gathering all of the facts. This investigation is about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, and it could have been completed a lot sooner if the administration had not delayed and delayed and delayed at every turn. For example, the committee still does not have records we requested over a year ago, and we are still waiting for some witnesses to be made available for interviews. As soon as possible, we will release our report and interview transcripts so everyone can see the evidence for themselves, and I’m confident the value and fairness of our investigation will then be abundantly clear to everyone.”
Today’s production is responsive to a request made by the Select Committee in November 2014, and subpoenas issued in March 2015 and August 2015, and includes work-related emails from the personal email accounts of Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Huma Abedin, which the State Department has had since summer 2015.
Prior to today’s production, the Select Committee had already obtained and reviewed more than 72,000 pages of documents never before seen by a congressional committee. Just recently, the Select Committee received more than 1,600 pages of documents from the Office of the Secretary of State and gained access to crucial CIA records it sought for nearly a year. After months of negotiations with the White House, the Select Committee was finally able to question both Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes, which no other congressional committee had done.
Yesterday the Select Committee interviewed its 90th witness: General Philip Breedlove, former Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa. This was the 71st witness who had never before been interviewed about Benghazi by a congressional committee, and the 35th witness interviewed since the Select Committee’s public hearing in October 2015.
NYT: A terrorist hoping to buy an antiaircraft weapon in recent years needed to look no further than Facebook, which has been hosting sprawling online arms bazaars, offering weapons ranging from handguns and grenades to heavy machine guns and guided missiles.
The Facebook posts suggest evidence of large-scale efforts to sell military weapons coveted by terrorists and militants. The weapons include many distributed by the United States to security forces and their proxies in the Middle East. These online bazaars, which violate Facebook’s recent ban on the private sales of weapons, have been appearing in regions where the Islamic State has its strongest presence.
This week, after The New York Times provided Facebook with seven examples of suspicious groups, the company shut down six of them.
The findings were based on a study by the private consultancy Armament Research Services about arms trafficking on social media in Libya, along with reporting by The Times on similar trafficking in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
A seller based in Tripoli, Libya, offered components of a man-portable antiaircraft defense system, or Manpads, in a closed Facebook group.Credit Armament Research Services
1. The Weapons Have Included Heavy Machine Guns and Heat-Seeking Missiles
Many sales are arranged after Facebook users post photographs in closed and secret groups; the posts act roughly like digital classified ads on weapons-specific boards. Among the weapons displayed have been heavy machine guns on mounts that are designed for antiaircraft roles and that can be bolted to pickup trucks, and more sophisticated and menacing systems, including guided anti-tank missiles and an early generation of shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles.
The report documented 97 attempts at unregulated transfers of missiles, heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, rockets and anti-matériel rifles, used to disable military equipment, through several Libyan Facebook groups since September 2014.
Last year ARES said it had documented an offer on Facebook to sell an SA-7 gripstock (pictured above), the reusable centerpiece of a man-portable antiaircraft defense system, or Manpads, a weapon of the Stinger class. Many of these left Libyan state custody in 2011, as depots were raided by rebels and looters. ARES said it documented Libyan sellers claiming to have two complete SA-7s for sale, two additional missiles and three gripstocks. An old system, SA-7s are a greater threat to helicopters and commercial aircraft than to modern military jets.
Machine guns, rifles and a shotgun advertised on Facebook groups in Libya.
2. Others Are the Standard Arms of Militant and Terrorist Groups
Machine guns and missiles form a small fraction of the apparent arms trafficking on Facebook and other social media apps, according to Nic R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of ARES and an author of the report. Examinations by The Times of Facebook groups in Libya dedicated to arms sales showed that sellers sought customers for a much larger assortment of handguns and infantry weapons. The rifles have predominantly been Kalashnikov assault rifles, which are used by many militants in the region, and many FN FAL rifles, which are common in Libya.
All of these solicitations violate Facebook’s policies, which since January has forbidden the facilitation of private sales of firearms and other weapons, according to Monika Bickert, a former federal prosecutor who is responsible for developing and enforcing the company’s content standards.
Images from Facebook groups selling weapons in Iraq.
3. Weapons Sales Greased by Social Media Sites Have Become a Feature of Many Conflicts
The use of social media for arms sales is relatively new to Libya. Until a Western-backed uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, which ended in his death at the hands of an armed mob, the country had a tightly restricted arms market and limited Internet access. But social media-based weapons markets in Libya are not unique. Similar markets exist in other countries plagued in recent years by conflict, militant groups and terrorism, including arms-sales Facebook groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
On Monday, The Times shared links for seven such groups with Facebook to check whether they violated the rules. By Tuesday, Facebook had taken down six of the groups. Ms. Bickert said that one Facebook group — which displayed photographs of weapons but only discussed them and expressly forbade sales — had survived the company’s scrutiny.
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Online weapons markets in Iraq and Libya.
4. Facebook’s Rules on Arms Sales Are Related to Changes in How Facebook Is Used.
Ms. Bickert described the company’s policies as evolutionary, reflecting shifts in its social media ecosystem.
“When Facebook began, there was no way to really engage in commerce on Facebook,” she said. But in the past year, she noted, the company has allowed users to process payments through its Messenger service, and has added other features to aid sales. “Since we were offering features like that, we thought we wanted to make clear that this is not a site that wants to facilitate the private sales of firearms.”
It is not clear how extensive arms trafficking on the site has been, but the rate of new posts has been unmistakably brisk, with many groups offering several new weapons a day. Mr. Jenzen-Jones said that ARES documented 250 to 300 posts about arms sales each month on the Libya sites alone, and that sales appeared to be trending up. Over all, using data from arms-sales Facebook groups across the Middle East, he said, “We’ve got about 6,000 trades documented, but it’s probably much bigger than that.”
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A Facebook user in Syria shared an image of Islamic State fighters.
5. Facebook Relies on Users to Report the Arms Trafficking It Bans
Ms. Bickert said the most important part of Facebook’s effort “to keep people safe” was to make it easy for users to notify the company of suspected violations, which can be done with a click on the “Report” feature on every Facebook post.
In this way so-called Community Operations teams — Facebook employees who review the reports in dozens of languages — can examine and remove offending content. How effective the policy is, in practice, is unclear. Several groups from which the photographs for this article were downloaded operated on Facebook for two years or more, accumulating thousands of members before Facebook announced its ban on arms sales.
This trafficking occurred in countries where the Islamic State is at its most active and where armed militias or other designated terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, have a persistent presence. In all four countries, government forces do not control large areas of territory and civil society is under intense pressure. Christine Chen, a Facebook spokeswoman, said the company relied on the nearly 1.6 billion people who visit the site every month to flag offenders. “We urge everyone who sees violations to report them to us,” she said.
Pistols have been widely sold and sought on Facebook in Libya.
6. In Libya, Widespread Pistol Sales on Facebook
ARES has documented many types of buyers and sellers. These include private citizens seeking handguns as well as representatives of armed groups buying weapons that require crews to be operated effectively, or appearing to offload weapons that the militias no longer wanted. Different markets have different characteristics. In Libya, fear of crime seemed to drive many people to buy pistols, Mr. Jenzen-Jones said. “Handguns are disproportionately represented,” he said. “They are widely sought after — primarily for self-defense and particularly to protect against carjackings — with many prospective buyers placing ‘wanted’ posts.” They were also expensive, ranging from about $2,200 to more than $7,000 — a sign that demand outstrips supply.
Military weapons originating in the United States have been sold through Facebook groups in Iraq.
7. Weapons Provided to Allies in Iraq Have Filled Facebook Sales Pages
In Iraq, the Facebook arms bazaars can resemble inside looks at the failures of American train-and-equip programs, with sellers displaying a seemingly bottomless assortment of weapons provided to Iraq’s government forces by the Pentagon during the long American occupation. Those include M4 carbines, M16 rifles, M249 squad automatic weapons, MP5 submachine guns and Glock semiautomatic pistols. Many of the weapons shown still bear inventory stickers and aftermarket add-ons favored by American forces and troops.
Such weapons have long been available on black markets in Iraq, with or without advertising on social media. But Facebook and other social media companies seem to provide new opportunities for sellers and buyers to find one other easily; for sellers to display items to more customers; and for customers to peruse and haggle over a larger assortment of weapons than what is available in smaller, physical markets.
A TOW launcher, a wire-guided anti-tank missile system, was advertised on a Facebook group in Syria with this message: “There is a TOW launcher, brand new, whoever wants it should contact us via private messages or WhatsApp.”
8. In Syria, Weapons Identical to Those Distributed to Rebels by the United States Are Offered for Sale
Similarly, weapons identical to those provided by the United States to Syrian rebels have also been traded on Facebook and other social media or messaging apps. In one recent example, a seller in northern Syria — who identified himself as a student, photographer and sniper — offered a pristine-looking Kalashnikov assault rifle that he said came from the Hazm Movement, which received weapons from the United States before the movement was defeated by the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. He noted on Facebook that the rifle was new and had “never fired a shot,” and hinted of either a bonus gift or a discount.
In another example, from October, a Facebook arms-trading group offered a “new TOW launcher,” referring to a wire-guided anti-tank missile system of the same type provided to rebels by the United States and other countries. The post included a phone number for the seller, which linked to WhatsApp, a messaging service. Reached on WhatsApp this week, the seller, whose profile picture shows the face of a corpse, said that he had sold the launcher but added, unconvincingly, that he could not recall the price.
A Facebook page in Libya offered an array of military and police equipment.
9. Social Media Pages Help Armed Groups Find Other Military Equipment
Items offered for sale on Facebook in Libya also included much of the other equipment sought by militias or terrorists for their operations. These included ammunition, bulletproof plates for flak jackets, rifle scopes, hand grenades, two-way tactical radios, fragmenting antipersonnel warheads for rocket-propelled grenade launchers, uniforms (including police uniforms) and forward-looking infrared cameras, used for night imaging.
Ms. Bickert said that using Facebook to help sell items not considered weapons, like bulletproof plates, did not violate the company’s rules. Since the same groups selling plates were also selling weapons, however, they were removed this week.
Online arms trafficking of this magnitude is an “eye opener,” said Nicolas Florquin, research coordinator for the Small Arms Survey, the Geneva-based international research center that underwrote the ARES study, part of an effort to supplement trafficking investigations by the United Nations Panel of Experts. Without addressing Facebook or any particular social-media company directly, he added, “Obviously there has to be more attention to monitoring and controlling it.”
Posts on Facebook advertising trips by boat from Turkey to Greece in a “safe way.”
10. Facebook Groups Also Offer Residents a Means to Flee
One of the arms-trading pages that Facebook took down this week included a stray advertisement, among ones for weapons and crates of 82-millimeter mortar rounds. It was for people looking to escape the miseries and dangers that have settled over some of the territory where such Facebook pages have been a feature of the arms trade. The advertisement offered open-ocean boat rides. Passage to Greece, it said, was “guaranteed.” The advertisement was of a type. In a region struggling with large-scale violence and overrun by militias, terrorists and the many forces fighting them, Facebook groups dedicated to refugee trafficking promise the chance to escape.
