Category Archives: Middle East

10 Americans and a Thumbdrive

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One such Islamic State fighter was included in the database/thumbdrive:

NBC: A San Diego man died fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) over the weekend, NBC News reported Tuesday.

In an exclusive report, NBC News said a passport and photos of a body were used to identify Douglas McAuthur McCain, 33.

McCain was one of three men killed in a battle over the weekend, according to the Free Syrian Army.

McCain, an Illinois native, lived in Minnesota for a while before moving to Southern California.  San Diego City College officials confirmed McCain attended the school but would not provide further details.

He was known around a mosque near City Heights and another in El Cajon, according to an acquaintance.

Source: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/American-San-Diego-Man-Dies-Fighting-for-ISIS-in-Syria-California-Jihad-272740991.html#ixzz42WFyqZa6
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He was formerly with the Free Syrian Army, a movement to take back Syria from tyrannical rule by Bashir al Assad. Disenchanted with leadership and support, he joined Islamic State. He soon figured that Islamic State leadership was worse and the power was at the hands of former Saddam Hussein Baathist members.

He uses the moniker Abu Hamed.

He was charged with recruiting for Islamic State, a job that gave him access to soldier applications that had 23 personal questions that included contact information, country of origin and how they jihad applicants were able to travel to Syria.

Disgusted, he downloaded files to a thumbdrive and handed the data to a member of the media in Turkey. 23,000 names, 10 were Americans.

Intelligence officials call this a major cache of data, such that it can be cultivated to learn the entire global network and collaborate with other foreign intelligence agencies. The database will likely shed light on unknown threats in America as well as add additional information on cases that the FBI is currently working on in each of the 50 states.

ISIS registration forms list names, contact info for 22,000 jihadists

FNC: Tens of thousands of documents, containing 22,000 names, addresses, telephone numbers and family contacts of Islamic State jihadis, have been obtained by Sky News.

Nationals from at least 51 countries, including the U.K., had to give up their most personal information as they joined the terror organisation. Only when the 23 question form was filled in were they inducted into IS.

A lot of the names and their new Islamic State names on the registration forms are well known.

Abdel Bary, a 26-year-old from London joined in 2013 after visiting Libya, Egypt and Turkey. He is designated as a fighter but is better known in the U.K. as a rap artist. His whereabouts are unknown.

Another jihadi named in the documents, now dead after being targeted in a drone strike, is Junaid Hussain, the head of Islamic State’s media wing who along with his wife, former punk Sally Jones, plotted attacks in the U.K. Her whereabouts are unknown.

Reyaad Khan from Cardiff, who also entered in 2013, is also among those found among the registration forms. He was well known for appearing in a highly produced Islamic State propaganda video. He was later killed.

But the key breakthrough from the documents is the revealing of the identities of a number of previously unknown jihadis in the U.K., across northern Europe, much of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in the United States and Canada.

Their whereabouts are crucial to breaking the organisation and preventing further terror attacks.

Many of the men passed through a series of jihadi “hotspots” – such as Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan – on multiple occasions, but were apparently unchecked, unmonitored and able to both enter Syria to fight and then to return home.

One of the files marked “Martyrs” detailed a brigade manned entirely by fighters who wanted to carry out suicide attacks and were trained to do so.

Some of the telephone numbers on the list are still active and it is believed that although many will be family members, a significant number are used by the jihadis themselves.

The files were passed to Sky News on a memory stick stolen from the head of Islamic State’s internal security police, an organisation described by insiders as the group’s SS. He had been entrusted to protect the organisation’s core secrets and he rarely parted with the drive.

The man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State who calls himself Abu Hamed.

 

ISIS’s Global Strategy | FindTheData

Data curated by FindTheData

Disillusioned with the Islamic State leadership, he says it has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein.

He claims the Islamic rules he believed in have totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.

I met him in a secret location in Turkey, and he said IS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the group’s birthplace.

He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, The Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition.

Asked if the IS files could bring the network down he nodded and said simply: “God willing”.

From the attacks in Tunisia and the Bataclan massacre in Paris it is clear that IS is refocusing its base of operations abroad and is intent on carrying out high profile attacks in Western countries, something that security chiefs across Europe are warning about right now.

Sky News has informed the authorities about the haul.

Hat Tip Delta Force, Capture of Islamic State CW Expert

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Update: He was captured last month: Sleiman Daoud al-Afari, Iraqi dictator’s chemical and biological arms specialist, captured by Delta Forces. He worked directly for Saddam Hussein.

(CNN) The U.S. military has conducted airstrikes against targets it believes are crucial to ISIS’ chemical weapons program based on information provided by a senior ISIS operative involved in chemical weapons, several U.S. officials told CNN.

The information he provided to interrogators has given the U.S. enough information to begin striking ISIS areas in Iraq associated with the group’s chemical weapons program. One U.S. official said the goal is to locate, target and carry out strikes that will result in the destruction of ISIS’s entire chemical weapons enterprise — mainly mustard agent ISIS produces itself.

It was not immediately clear if the U.S. was able to strike all of the necessary targets. Intelligence and surveillance of the targets had indicated in some Iraqi locations that civilians were present at prospective sites, officials told CNN.

While the goal is to end ISIS’ capability to manufacture and use mustard agent, the actual targets being struck include people, facilities and vehicles. The agent itself is made in relatively small quantities and has a fairly short shelf life, the U.S. government believes. Since the weekend, the U.S. has struck what it is calling “improvised weapons facilities” and other targets near Mosul, Iraq, but officials would not say if these were chemical weapons sites.

The operative was captured in one of the first missions of the so-called Expeditionary Targeting Forces. It is a group of some 200 Special Operations troops assembled in northern Iraq to gather intelligence and pursue ISIS operatives on the ground by either capturing or killing them in Iraq, and eventually in Syria. Carter recently acknowledged the ETF is “having an effect and operating.

U.S. Captures, Interrogates Top Islamic State Chemical Weapons Expert

Capture is among recent U.S. advances in ongoing effort to counter terror network

WSJ: WASHINGTON—The U.S. military captured one of Islamic State’s top chemical weapons experts in a recent raid—and has spent several weeks interrogating him about the terror network’s capabilities and planning, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The detainee, who wasn’t named by U.S. officials, is expected to be released to the Iraqi government at the end of this week, the officials said.

Iraqi military spokesmen declined to comment on his capture. A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The capture was among recent U.S. advances in an ongoing, though uneven, effort to counter Islamic State, which has maintained a foothold in Iraq and Syria while also recently expanding into parts of Libya as well.

In one airstrike last week in Syria, Pentagon officials believe they killed Abu Umar al-Shishani, a top Islamic State commander known fairly widely by the nickname “Omar the Chechen.”

The chemical weapons expert was captured in recent raid the Pentagon acknowledged last week. However, officials at the time said they had captured a high-ranking operative, without providing further detail. His actual role in the organization was disclosed on Wednesday.

The move came as U.S. and Western officials have grown increasingly concerned about the terror network’s plans to use chemical weapons against enemies and in the U.S.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress last month that Islamic State already has used chemical weapons “numerous times” in Iraq and Syria, adding that “aspirationally, they would like to do more.”

It was at least the second time that the U.S. military was able to capture and interrogate a person with valuable intelligence about Islamic State’s operations. In May, U.S. special-operations forces conducted a raid in Syria that killed Abu Sayyaf, considered to be one of the group’s financial chiefs. His wife, Umm Sayyaf, was detained and interrogated by the U.S. military. The intelligence from that raid helped U.S. officials run numerous operations and crack down on the group’s access to money, officials have said.

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In part from ToI: The two Iraqi officials identified the man as Sleiman Daoud al-Afari, who worked for Saddam Hussein’s now-dissolved Military Industrialization Authority where he specialized in chemical and biological weapons. They said al-Afari, who is about 50 years old, heads the Islamic State group’s recently established branch for the research and development of chemical weapons.

He was captured in a raid near the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, the officials said. They would not give further details.

The officials, who both have first-hand knowledge of the individual and of the IS chemical program, spoke on condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to talk to the media. No confirmation was available from US officials.

Airstrikes are targeting laboratories and equipment, and further special forces raids targeting chemical weapons experts are planned, the intelligence officials said. They and the Western official also spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

IS has been making a determined effort to develop chemical weapons, Iraqi and American officials have said. The militant group, which emerged out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is believed to have set up a special unit for chemical weapons research, made up of Iraqi scientists from the Saddam-era weapons program as well as foreign experts.

Iraqi officials expressed particular worry over the effort because IS militants gained so much room to operate and hide chemical laboratories after overrunning around a third of the country in the summer of 2014, territory which they then joined with territory they controlled in neighboring Syria. Full article here.

American fatally stabbed in Israel

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TERROR – TEL AVIV: 4 Israelis wounded in an Arab terrorist stabbing attack near Jaffa port, terrorist neutralised.

TRAGIC LOSS: Latest terror victim stabbed to death in Tel Aviv, US Vet Taylor Force who served in Afghanistan & Iraq

1 Israeli died of his wounds, additional 9 wounded in Arab terrorist stabbing attack in Tel Aviv.

American fatally stabbed in Israel terror attack that wounds 10 others
(CNN) A former U.S. Army officer who was part of a Vanderbilt University tour group was stabbed to death in a terror attack that left 10 others wounded in an old section of Tel Aviv, officials said Tuesday.

Taylor Force, a first-year student in the graduate school of management, was killed, Vanderbilt chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos announced.

“This horrific act of violence has robbed our Vanderbilt family of a young hopeful life and all of the bright promise that he held for bettering our greater world,” Zeppos said.

The school said in a separate statement that Force was among 29 students and four staff members who had gone to Israel to study global entrepreneurship. They were in Jaffa by the Mediterranean Sea when they were attacked.

All the other trip participants from Vanderbilt are safe, the Nashville, Tennessee, school said.

 According to Force’s LinkedIn page, he graduated from West Point in 2009 and was a field artillery officer in the U.S. Army until 2014.

Force, 28, started an MBA study in 2015. At the time, he told the website Poets and Quants that he went to Vanderbilt because of the support for veterans, the diversity of students and the quality of education.

Taylor Force

Taylor Force

“In addition to learning the skills needed to be successful in business, I want to establish life-long connections and friendships with my fellow students from the U.S. and around the globe,” he said.

The U.S. State Department confirmed Force’s death and condemned the attack.

“We offer our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Taylor and all those affected by these senseless attacks, and we wish a speedy recovery for the injured,” spokesman John Kirby said. “As we have said many times, there is absolutely no justification for terrorism.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent his condolences to Force’s family.

“May his memory be a blessing,” Netanyahu said.

Attack was near Biden visit

The stabbing attack occurred along a popular oceanfront boardwalk in southern Tel Aviv not far from where U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was visiting.

“In these moments, terror attacks are taking place in streets adjacent to us,” said former Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres during a meeting with Biden at the Peres Center for Peace.

Biden “condemned in the strongest possible terms the brutal attack” that took the life of one of his countrymen at the same time, and around the same area, that he was meeting with Peres.

“There is no justification for such acts of terror,” the vice president’s office said in a statement. “(Biden) expressed sorrow at the tragic loss of American life.”

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld tweeted that the attacker, a Palestinian from the West Bank, was fatally shot by police.

 

Iran’s 800km Ballistic Missile, Did Anyone Notice?

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It is no wonder that Prime Minister Netanyahu cancelled his meeting with Obama this month.

In part USAToday: WASHINGTON — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has canceled his trip to Washington this month, prompting annoyance and surprise from White House officials who said they had been working to schedule a meeting with President Obama.

The incident is just the latest outward sign of tension between the two leaders, who also missed out on a meeting a year ago as Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress to voice his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. The White House said a meeting then wouldn’t have been appropriate because it was just two weeks before Netanyahu faced a re-election bid.

The dust-up comes as Vice President Biden touched down in Tel Aviv on Tuesday during his week-long visit to the Middle East. He’s scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Wednesday. The two countries are in the midst of renegotiating a 10-year security agreement.

The White House said the Israeli government first initiated talks about a meeting this month, requesting a meeting of the two leaders March 17 or March 18. The White House had offered March 18 — two days before Obama’s trip to Cuba and Argentina when the trip was canceled.

“We were looking forward to hosting the bilateral meeting, and we were surprised to first learn via media reports that the prime minister, rather than accept our invitation, opted to cancel his visit,” said Ned Price, the spokesman for Obama’s National Security Council. “Reports that we were not able to accommodate the prime minister’s schedule are false.” Full article here.

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) fired a 800-km range ballistic missile, dubbed Qiam, from an underground silo during a nationwide missile exercise on Tuesday.   

According to Tasnim dispatches, one of the projectiles launched from a silo on Tuesday was Qiam, a ballistic missile with pinpoint accuracy.  

A report broadcast by the state television showed missile silos at seemingly impregnable underground facilities, full of advanced missiles. The underground silos are seen as complementary gear for the IRGC’s underground “missile cities.”  

In comments on the sidelines of the drill, codenamed ‘Might of Velayat’, IRGC Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said the launch of various types of missiles in the exercise was only a slight indication that the IRGC’s missile silos, scattered all over the country, are fully operational. The missile drill has been in progress for a couple of days, but its final stage kicked off on Tuesday in different parts of the country. 

According to the IRGC, the exercise is meant to demonstrate Iran’s might and sustainable security in light of unity, convergence, empathy and harmony.

Iran Threatens to Walk Away From Nuke Deal After New Missile Test

Islamic Republic breached international agreements by test-firing ballistic missiles


FreeBeacon: Iran on Tuesday again threatened to walk away from the nuclear agreement reached last year with global powers, hours after the country breached international agreements by test-firing ballistic missiles.

Iran’s most recent ballistic missile test, which violates current U.N. Security Council resolutions, comes a day after the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed that it is prohibited by the nuclear agreement from publicly reporting on potential violations by Iran.

Iranian leaders now say that they are poised to walk away from the deal if the United States and other global powers fail to advance the Islamic Republic’s “national interests.”

“If our interests are not met under the nuclear deal, there will be no reason for us to continue,” Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, warned during remarks delivered to a group of Iranian officials in Tehran.

“If other parties decide, they could easily violate the deal,” Araqchi was quoted as saying by Iran’s state-controlled media. “However, they know this will come with costs.”

Araqchi appeared to allude to the United States possibly leveling new economic sanctions as a result of the missile test. The Obama administration moved forward with new sanctions earlier this year as a result of the country’s previous missile tests.

Iran’s latest missile test drew outrage from longtime regime critics on Capitol Hill.

“The administration’s response to Iran’s new salvo of threatening missile tests in violation of international law cannot once again be, it’s ‘not supposed to be doing that,’” Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) said in a statement. “Now is the time for new crippling sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ministry of Defense, Aerospace Industries Organization, and other related entities driving the Iranian ballistic missile program.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) warned that the nuclear agreement has done little to moderate Iran’s rogue behavior.

“Far from pushing Iran to a more moderate engagement with its neighbors, this nuclear deal is enabling Iran’s aggression and terrorist activities,” McCarthy said in a statement. “Sanctions relief is fueling Iran’s proxies from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. Meanwhile, Khamenei and the Iranian regime are acting with impunity because they know President Obama will not hold them accountable and risk the public destruction of his nuclear deal, the cornerstone of the president’s foreign policy legacy.”

McCarthy went on to demand that the Obama administration step forward with new sanctions as punishment for the missile test.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department had difficulty Monday explaining why the nuclear agreement limits public reporting by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, on potential deal violations by Iran.

Yukiya Amano, the IAEA’s chief, disclosed on Monday that his agency is no longer permitted to release details about Iran’s nuclear program and compliance with the deal. The limited public reporting is a byproduct of the nuclear agreement, according to Amano.

When asked about these comments again Tuesday, a State Department official told the Free Beacon that the IAEA’s reports would continue to provide a complete picture of Iran’s nuclear program, though it remains unclear if this information will be made publicly available.

“There isn’t less stringent monitoring or reporting on Iran’s nuclear program,” the official said. “The IAEA’s access to Iran’s nuclear program and its authorization to report on it has actually expanded. It’s a distortion to say that if there is less detail in the first and only post-Implementation Day IAEA report then that somehow implies less stringent monitoring or less insight into Iran’s nuclear program.”

While the IAEA “needs to report on different issues” under the final version of the nuclear agreement, the agency continues to provide “a tremendous amount of information about Iran’s current, much smaller nuclear program,” the source maintained.

The IAEA’s most recent February report—which was viewed by nuclear experts as incomplete and short on detail—“accurately portrays the status of Iran’s nuclear program,” including its efforts to uphold the nuclear deal, the official added.

“We expect this professional level of reporting to continue in the future,” the official said.

 

 

 

 

IAEA Obstructed from Reporting Iran Violations

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 Hey  you have a call holding on line 3.

IAEA: Iran Nuke Deal Limits Public Reporting on Possible Violations

Nuclear watchdog says deal limits agency oversight

FreeBeacon: The head of the international community’s nuclear watchdog organization disclosed Monday that certain agreements reached under the Iran nuclear deal limit inspectors from publicly reporting on potential violations by the Islamic Republic.

Yukiya Amano, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, which is responsible for ensuring Iran complies with the agreement, told reporters that his agency is no longer permitted to release details about Iran’s nuclear program and compliance with the deal.

Amano’s remarks come on the heels of a February IAEA oversight report that omitted many details and figures related to Iran’s nuclear program. The report sparked questions from outside nuclear experts and accusations from critics that the IAEA was not being transparent with its findings.

Amano disclosed in response to questions from reporters that the last report was intentionally vague because the nuclear agreement prohibits the IAEA from publishing critical data about Iran’s program that had been disclosed by the agency in the past.

“The misunderstanding is that the basis of reporting is different,” Amano said. “In the previous reports, the bases were the previous [United Nations] Security Council Resolutions and Board of Governors. But now they are terminated. They are gone.”

Most U.N. measures pertaining to Iran—including its military buildup and illicit work on nuclear technology—were removed following the nuclear agreement, which essentially rewrote the organization’s overall approach to the country.

The IAEA, which operates under the U.N. umbrella, must now follow the new resolutions governing the implementation of the nuclear pact, Amano said.

“These two resolutions and the other resolutions of the Security Council and Board are very different,” he said. “And as the basis is different, the consequences are different.”

Amano said that going forward, the agency would only release reports that are consistent with the most recent Security Council resolutions on Iran, meaning that future reports are likely to impact the international community’s ability to determine if Iran is fully complying with its end of the agreement.

Last month’s report was viewed as particularly significant because it allowed the nuclear agreement to proceed to its implementation stage. However, the dearth of information in it has angered some experts.

The latest report “provides insufficient details on important verification and monitoring issues,” Olli Heinonen, the IAEA’s former deputy director general, stated in a policy brief.

“The report does not list inventories of nuclear materials and equipment or the status of key sites and facilities,” Heinonen said in his analysis, which was published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Without detailed reporting, the international community cannot be sure that Iran is upholding its commitments under the nuclear deal.”

The IAEA’s latest report also failed to disclose information about Iran’s stockpiles of low-enriched uranium, which is supposed to be significantly reduced as part of the nuclear deal.

Additional information about Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, the machines responsible for enriching uranium, also was withheld by the IAEA.

Other critics accused the Obama administration of misleading Congress during negotiations over the deal. White House officials maintained at the time that the agreement would provide increased transparency into Iran’s nuclear endeavors.

“When nuclear negotiations began in late 2013, the administration asked Congress to stand down on pressuring the Iranians, and promised to force the Iranians to dismantle significant parts of their nuclear program if Congress gave negotiators space,” Omri Ceren, an official with The Israel Project, which works with Congress on the Iran issue, wrote in an analysis sent to reporters on Monday.

“U.S. negotiators eventually caved on any demands that would have required the destruction of Iran’s uranium infrastructure, and instead went all-in on verification and transparency: Yes, the Iranians would get to keep what they’d built, and yes, their program would eventually be fully legal, but the international community would have full transparency into everything from uranium mining to centrifuge production to enriched stockpiles,” Ceren explained.

However, “now Amano has revealed that the nuclear deal gutted the ability of journalists and the public to have insight into Iran’s nuclear activities,” he said. “In critical areas, it’s not even clear that the IAEA has been granted the promised access.”

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What else does Kerry know about Iran and their history?

Fresh evidence emerging of Iran’s deadly nuclear and terror ties to Argentina

Amb. Noriega: Last week, an Argentine intelligence official testified that Iran sought nuclear technology from that South American country and that a prosecutor investigating suspected Hezbollah bombings in Buenos Aires had been murdered for attempting to expose Tehran’s dangerous plot.

This fresh testimony supports reports I published in July 2011 regarding suspicious nuclear diplomacy in 2007 and a massive cash transfer in 2010 involving then Iranian and Argentine leaders, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Nestor Kirchner, respectively. Despite congressional inquiries and mounting evidence, the State Department has chosen to ignore this blind spot in strategy for containing Iran’s illicit nuclear program.

According to the Argentine daily newspaper, Clarin, a former Argentine senior intelligence official, Antonio Stiuso, confirmed in two days of testimony before a judge that the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, interceded with Nestor Kirchner to resume nuclear cooperation with Iran, which had been suspended in 1991. Also, according to Stiuso’s testimony, Ahmadinejad was interested in using Argentina’s technology to produce plutonium bombs, which he characterized as more sophisticated than the ones Iran was trying to make with enriched uranium.

Stiuso noted that Venezuela did not possess the technical knowledge to make use of the nuclear technology sought by Chávez from Argentina. Instead, because Iran’s nuclear plans were designed by Argentines in the 1960s, Stiuso’s theory is that Tehran was the ultimate beneficiary of such nuclear cooperation.

 

Stiuso also testified that the former prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, was murdered for refusing an order from former president Cristina Kirchner to cease investigating Iran’s role in the 1992 and 1994 bombings and its corrupt dealings with Argentine officials. In a draft criminal complaint discovered after the prosecutor was found dead last year in an apparently staged suicide, Nisman accused Cristina Kirchner of covering up the involvement of five Iranians who have been charged with planning the 1994 terrorist attack against the Jewish Community Center in the heart of Argentina’s capital city.

In a separate development, last Thursday, Nisman’s family disclosed a written statement by a prosecutor from Argentina’s federal appeals court saying that scientific tests failed to find evidence that he fired the pistol found near his body. This is the first formal statement by a government official confirming suspicions that Nisman was the victim of a homicide.

From the US side, the Obama State Department has systematically neglected the dangerous liaisons among Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran. As dramatic evidence of Iran’s deadly provocations in our own neighborhood continues to come to light, it is fair to ask whether its cluelessness was by accident or design. … Much more here.