Category Archives: Middle East

ISIS Bombs Mosque in Saudi, 20 Killed

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20 people killed after suicide bomber strikes Shia mosque

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, US-based monitoring group SITE tweeted. The militant group identified the suicide bomber as Abu ’Ammar al-Najdi, SITE said. The claim could not be independently verified. The bombing in al-Qadeeh in Qatif province was the first to target Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia since November, when gunmen killed at least eight people in an attack during a Shia religious anniversary celebration, also in the east. Activist Naseema al-Sada told the Associated Press the suicide bomber attacked worshippers as they were commemorating the birth of Imam Husayn ibn Ali, a revered figure among Shias. Lebanon’s Al-Manar television channel, run by the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, carried still, blurry pictures of pools of blood inside what appeared to be the mosque where the attack took place. It also showed still images of bodies stretched out on red carpets, covered with sheets.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The Islamic State extremist group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia on Friday. Local media reports said the bombing had killed at least 21 people during midday prayers.

It appeared to be the first official claim of an attack inside the kingdom by the Islamic State, which has seized control of much of Syria and Iraq.

The group attributed the attack to a new unit, the Najd Province, named for the central region of Saudi Arabia around Riyadh. But it was unclear whether the attack was planned by Islamic State leaders, initiated independently by a Saudi sympathizer, or merely claimed opportunistically after the fact.

The attack was a sign that Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the sectarian conflict in Yemen may be escalating tensions at home.

Members of the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia, who make up about 15 percent of the population and live mainly in the Eastern Province, have long complained of insults and discrimination by Saudi Arabia’s Sunni majority and its clerical establishment.

Annotated maps showing the Houthi rebels’ drive south, U.S. airstrikes and historical divisions.

  

During Saudi Arabia’s two-month air campaign against the Houthi movement in Yemen, which practices a form of Shiite Islam and receives backing from Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, Iran, imams at Sunni mosques and commentators in Saudi news media have frequently rallied the public around the war, in part by repeatedly denouncing Shiites as dangerous infidels.

The Saudi Arabian news media has portrayed the Houthis as proxies of Shiite-led Iran and characterized the Yemen campaign as a vital defense against an Iranian incursion.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s participation in the American-led military campaign in Iraq and Syria against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State has raised fears of a backlash from its sympathizers at home. Thousands of Saudis have traveled to join the Islamic State, which follows a puritanical school of Islam that scholars say is similar to that of Saudi Arabia.

Leaders of the Islamic State have called with increasing vehemence for their supporters to carry out attacks in the kingdom, accusing its rulers of hypocrisy. Saudi Arabia’s rulers and clerics deny any similarity between their understanding of Islam and that of the Islamic State.

Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, said in an interview Friday night that investigators were examining DNA samples and other evidence to establish the identity of the bomber.

General Turki said the kingdom was already on guard for attempts by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to establish itself in Saudi Arabia. He noted that Saudi officials had blamed the Islamic State for an attack on Shiites in the same area last fall, although the group did not claim responsibility.

Saudi Arabia also announced last month that it had arrested 65 people accused of “forming a terrorist organization related to ISIS, and their goal was to carry out terrorist attacks and enflame sectarian conflict,” the general said. He insisted that such attempts would fail “because Saudi citizens are unified.”

A group of Islamic State supporters released a video late last year that they said showed the group’s fighters killing a Danish man, Thomas Hoepner, who was shot while driving in Riyadh. The claim did not appear to come from the Islamic State’s leaders, and could not be confirmed.

Saudi Interior Ministry officials said in interviews this week that they had seen an increase in violence by Sunni extremists, including three separate attacks near the capital, Riyadh, that killed a total of three police officers and injured two others.

But sectarian conflict and violence have been a longstanding issue in the Eastern Province, which contains much of the country’s oil but lags far behind other regions in economic development. The last major outburst came six months ago, when gunmen killed eight people in the Shiite village of Dalwa, in the Al Ahsa region of the Eastern Province, at the end of the Shiite holiday of Ashura. That was the sectarian attack that Saudi officials attributed to the Islamic State.

The bombing on Friday took place in the town of Al Qudaih, near Qatif, the regional center. The area has been the site of sectarian tensions and of calls for democratic reform in the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolts four years ago, including sporadic, Shiite-dominated street protests.

Saudi Arabia, in response, has jailed at least two prominent Shiite clerics who have called for political overhauls such as adopting a constitutional monarchy. Last year, one firebrand cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, was sentenced to death for his role in leading street protests in Qatif, and his sentence set off new protests around the region.

In what appeared to be an attempt to tamp down tensions after the attack on Friday, state television broadcast a telephone call from Saudi Arabia’s senior religious authority, the grand mufti, Abdulaziz al-Asheikh, who called the attack a “painful” and “criminal” act against the “sons of the homeland.”

But on social media, some Saudis rushed to blame Iran for the bombing, asserting that it might have been carried out to provoke Shiites in Saudi Arabia to turn against the kingdom.

“Iran won’t hesitate in scarifying Shia, to create a war between Sunni and Shia,” Luftallah Khoja, a prominent Saudi religious scholar, said in a Twitter message. He blamed Iran for creating the Islamic State, as well.

A number of Saudis said they were refusing to donate blood for Shiites who were injured in the bombing. “I wish to donate, but I am afraid I would donate and a Shia would take it, and he does not deserve even my spit,” one Saudi posted online. “You donate to infidels?” another wrote.

Jafar al-Shayeb, head of the Qatif Municipal Council and a Shiite community leader, blamed the “sectarian discourse” that has spread through Saudi Arabia since the start of the air campaign in Yemen. “People feel like this is a direct result of the atmosphere that is turning everybody against each other through speeches and media and social media,” he said. “It will lead young people to sacrifice themselves and kill others in this region, and people are very angry about it.”

Frederic Wehrey, an analyst who follows Saudi Arabia at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued that the tension might persist even after the Yemen campaign. “Sectarianism, once you have unleashed it, you can’t bottle back it up,” he said. “It afflicts people every day.”

U.S. Ships 1000 missiles to Iraq, Palmyra Falls

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Islamic State now controls half of the Syrian territory. Control of Palmyra, a 2000 year old archeological site which predates Islam is in the hands of less than 1000 Islamic State fighters.

Palmyra is also the site of a prison and a military air base along with an Assad regime intelligence center. An estimated 65,000 residents of Palmyra are in peril as under 2000 have been able to flee.

Inside Palmyra, the Ancient City ISIS Just Sacked

Hours after the terror group grabbed its second city in a week, Palmyra was pitch-black and silent. But residents are bracing for bloody reprisals—and the destruction of historic sites.
by: Michael Weiss

Palmyra holds a dual significance to Syrians as being home to some of the world’s most celebrated ruins and one of the Assad regime’s most feared detention and torture facilities. Both, as it happens, will gain new prominence in the days ahead, as ISIS has just swept through the desert tableland, sacking its second city in the course of a week in which a few hundreds of its militants stormed Ramadi, the provincial capital of al-Anbar, largely uncontested by skedaddling Iraqi Security Forces. That sacking put ISIS in firm control of strategic foothold some 70 miles north of Baghdad, and well within striking distance of the Iraqi capital, where suicide and car bombings have spiked recently.

Similarly, the taking of Palmyra puts ISIS on a theoretically straight trajectory for mounting an incursion into Homs—once the cradle of Syria’s revolution and now mostly retaken by the Assad regime—and then possibly onto Damascus, where the terror organization had briefly conquered the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp last month. The loss of Palmyra is a clear threat to Syria’s cultural patrimony, consisting as it does of the standing remnants of 2,000 year-old temples and tombs, because of ISIS’s designation of “idolatrous” pre-Islamic art and architecture—or anything too big for ISIS to hawk on the black market—as worthy only of powdering.

“The fighting is putting at risk one of the most significant sites in the Middle East,” Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, said in a statement, while Syria’s chief of antiquities, Mamoun Abdulkarim, told AFP that many statues and artifacts in Palmyra’s museum been relocated already but that immovable monuments were now helpless.

The same can practically be said for the evaporated Syrian army. So desperate were Assad’s troops that they resorted to freeing Palmyra’s prisoners to get them to fortify the city in a last-ditch and pathetically unsuccessful attempt to hang on, one local resident told The Daily Beast.

According to Khaled Omran, a member of the Palmyra’s anti-Assad Coordinating Committee, the regime tried to reinforce its collapsing front lines Wednesday with detainees from the notorious Tadmour Prison. Most, however, ran away from the ISIS onslaught rather than stay and fight for their jailers. “I saw about 10 busloads of prisoners being driven to the front,” Omran said Wednesday evening via Skype. “Maybe 1,000 men.” They added to the regime’s “thousands” of soldiers and forcibly conscripted tribal militias who were used, in Omran’s words, as “cannon fodder.”

Assad’s military were stationed throughout the city and its outlying districts, which are home to several security installations, including an important airbase that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has used in the past to deliver resupplies to its overstretched and attrited ally, and the Syrian air force has used to wage sorties on mostly civilian and non-ISIS targets in the war-torn country. However, the use of prisoners to defend against ISIS stands as an interesting contrast to how the terror army did the jailbreaking in Ramadi earlier in the week in order to swell their own ranks.

“Four days ago, ISIS started their preparations to storm” Palmyra, Omran explained. “Regime forces called in reinforcements, mainly to the military security branch and the citadel, but relied heavily on their air force. The number of ISIS fighters was quite small—they were in the hundreds. They weren’t very heavily equipped, save for antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks in six positions around the city.” These rudimentary air defenses were enough to deter to the fighter planes and attack helicopters. “I didn’t see them down any jets, but the guns were enough to deter most of the aerial assaults.”

Video footage uploaded by activists does show what appear to be some aerial bombing.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked monitor, claimed that the regime withdrew or evacuated its forces on Wednesday, though Omran insisted that many of these also deserted because of fear of inevitable ISIS atrocities, such as beheadings, photographs of which were circulated on social media as the militants invaded in a now characteristic form of psychological warfare. “Regime troops were fleeing left and right,” he said. “Most of the senior Alawite officers in the army fled earlier and left their men—Sunnis—to their own devices.” Assad’s forces also evidently pulled away from the phosphate mines abutting the main M3 highway system, theoretically giving ISIS a straight shot to Homs and Damascus.

If Omran’s account is true, it would signal a uncanny replay of another ignominious regime defeat in August 2014, at Tabqa Airbase in the eastern province of Raqqa, when ISIS seized the installation and captured or executed hundreds of Syrian soldiers, some of whose heads were cut off and stuck on pikes. A video later posted online by Assad loyalists accused the regime of treason after Syrian generals reassured their rank-and-file that helicopters were en route to deliver 50 tons of ammunition and resupplies when in fact those aircraft turned up only to spirit away the generals, leaving the rank-and-file to perish. The video also accused Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi of covering up this betrayal of Syrian soldiers and led many pro-Assad activists to begin to seriously question the competence and willingness of the dictator to combat terrorism.

Mohammed Ghanem, the director of government relations at the Washington D.C.-based Syrian American Council, said he could not understand how an imminent ISIS advance wasn’t stopped by either regime or coalition aircraft. “We are mystified as to how ISIS columns with hundreds of fighters were able to traverse the Syrian desert and reach Palmyra without suffering a single air raid,” he told The Daily Beast. “The areas between ISIS-controlled cities and Palmyra are sparsely populated, and any significant military convoy should have been extremely easy to spot. Yet neither Assad nor the coalition conducted raids against ISIS.”

For now, Palmyra remains “calm,” but the mood is undeniable anxious. The departing army destroyed the electrical transformers, Omran said, bathing the ancient city in darkness. Batteries are being used to power computers, but Internet access is spotty. Another source of concern is regime propaganda after the withdrawal: State television has made false claims that Damascus evacuated all of Palmyra’s civilians before its men withdrew. “We’re worried that this was to lay the groundwork for an imminent bombing raid that will make no distinction between Daesh and us,” Omran said, using the derogatory Arabic word for ISIS.

Word on the street is that ISIS has already begun its barbarous counterintelligence work, claiming to have compiled a list of regime agents and sympathizers—a number that, in its view, includes opposition activists opposed to both Assad and ISIS. “The search is on for them,” Omran said.

How were the city’s some 50,000 residents coping, less than 24 hours into ISIS rule? “There’s almost no movement inside the city itself,” he said. “ISIS didn’t introduce a curfew yet, but there’s no one on the street, so you’d think there was one.”

And the mood? “Some people have resigned to their fate,” Omran said. “Most of the key services have been shut down. The bakery has run out of flour. The regime shut the lights. People are fearful. They’re not sure what tomorrow holds.”

The Buzzwords are Refugee and Asylum

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UN pushes for migrants to be called refugees

In part: SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States and Mexico to accept tens of thousands of people currently ineligible for asylum.

Officials with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees say they hope to see movement toward a regional agreement on that status Thursday when migration and interior department representatives from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America meet in Nicaragua. The group will discuss updating a 30-year-old declaration regarding the obligations that nations have to aid refugees.

Sure there are thousands and in some cases millions that have fled their home country over brutal regimes, civil wars, disease, lack of economic opportunity and to perhaps incite attacks and terrorism in other countries.

U.N. Calls on Western Nations to Shelter Syrian Refugees

With Syria’s neighbors increasingly shutting their borders to refugees and thousands trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of safety, the war in Syria is creating the worst global refugee crisis in decades, putting new pressure on the United States and other Western countries to open their doors — and in turn, prompting domestic political backlash.

Not since the wave of people who fled Southeast Asia after the war in Vietnam have the world’s industrialized countries been under such intense pressure to share the burden of taking in refugees, experts say. Nor has the task of offering sanctuary been so politically fraught.

The United States is scheduled to take in its largest group of Syrian refugees to date — up to 2,000 by the fall of this year, compared with a total of about 700 since the civil war in Syria began four years ago, according to the State Department.

Here is a disturbing fact, the work that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees division does for refugees and asylees does NOT collaborate with U.S. agencies as they claim, unless it is on an exceptional basis. They maintain a database of applications and fingerprints that is not integrated or actually shared for background checks.

UNHCR seeks to contribute to informed decision-making and public debate by providing accurate, relevant and up-to-date statistics. As such, the Statistical Online Population Database provides data and trends on the “Population of concern to UNHCR”: refugees, asylum-seekers, returned refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) protected/assisted by UNHCR, returned IDPs, stateless persons, and others of concern to UNHCR, in more than 180 countries.

In a single electronic platform, UNHCR’s Statistical Online Population Database is bringing together for analysis and comparison standardized data on UNHCR’s population of concern at country, regional, and global levels.

The database is work-in-progress and will be updated on an ongoing basis. Currently, data up to 31 December 2012 can be downloaded from the Statistical Online Population Database. Some of the statistics contained in the Statistical Online Population Database, in particular the ones for 2012 should be considered provisional and subject to change. Some data in the database may differ from statistics published previously due to retroactive changes or the inclusion of previously unavailable data.

 

‘All data refer to the number of individuals with the exception of asylum-seekers in the United States of America, where figures are available only for the number of cases (which may include several individuals) submitted to the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, applications submitted to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) of the United States department of Justice are recorded as individuals.’

‘A combination of armed conflict, deterioration of security or humanitarian situation and human rights concerns in a number of countries – notably the Syrian Arab Republic – have been among the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers registered among the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers registered among industrialized countries during 2014.’  Full document here. (It is a must read).

Sample application for asylum:

Note the cost of security weakness and lack of full collaboration:

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government’s issuance of Saudi passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers may have obtained their passports legitimately or illegitimately with the help of a family member who worked in the passport office.

 

 

 

bin Ladin Wrote a Letter to America

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Guest house at the bin Ladin compound.

If you wanted to be an al Qaeda fighter, you had to fill out an application, found here.

The entire file of released documents are found here.  You will likely never see all the documents and that should be accepted as it would reveal the sources and methods on the actions today by intelligence and the rules of engagement against global enemies but al Qaeda was never on the run.

Curious timing of the declassification on the documents seized from the Usama bin Ladin compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, altering the focus from the failed campaign against ISIS in Ramadi to released bin Ladin documents by DNI.

George Bush was right, this was going to be a long slog of a war. Once control was gained in Afghanistan and Iraq, but since 2011, the wider slog of war continues without any campaign definition from the White House that provided a comprehensive foundation of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) delivered from Obama to Congress.

The Usama bin Ladin bookshelf is found here.

Here’s Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to the American People

Usama bin Laden wanted to speak directly to the American people.

An undated letter promising endless war is one of hundreds of documents collected in the May 2, 2011 raid on his compound in Pakistan that was released Wednesday. The full text is below.

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

From Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin to the American people,

I speak to you about the subject of the ongoing war between you
and us. Even though the consensus of your wise thinkers and
others is that your time (TN: of defeat) will come, compassion
for the women and children who are being unjustly killed,
wounded, and displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan
motivates me to speak to you.

First of all, I would like to say that your war with us is the
longest war in your history and the most expensive for you
financially. As for us, we see it as being only halfway
finished. If you were to ask your wise thinkers, they would tell
you that there is no way to win it because the indications are
against it. How will you win a war whose leaders are pessimistic
and whose soldiers are committing suicide? If fear enters the
hearts of men, winning the war becomes impossible. How will you
win a war whose cost is like a hurricane blowing violently at
your economy and weakening your dollar?

The Bush administration got you into these wars on the premise
that they were vital to your security. He promised that it would
be a quick war, won within six days or six weeks; however, six
years have passed, and they are still promising you victory and
not achieving it. Then Obama came and delayed the withdrawal
that he had promised you by 16 more months. He promised you
victory in Afghanistan and set a date for withdrawal from there.
Six months later, Petraeus came to you once again with the
number six, requesting that the withdrawal be delayed six months
beyond the date that had been set. All the while you continue to
bleed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are wading into a war with no
end in sight on the horizon and which has no connection to your
security, which was confirmed by the operation of ‘Umar al-Faruq
(Var.: Umar Farouk), which was not launched from the battlefield
and could have been launched from any place in the world.

As for us, jihad against the tyrants and the aggressors is a
form of great worship in our religion. It is more precious to us
than our fathers and sons. Thus, our jihad against you is
worship, and your killing us is a testimony. Thanks to God, Almighty, we
have been waging jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and
then against you. Not a single one of our men has committed
suicide, whereas every 30 days 30 of your men commit suicide.
Continue the war if you will.

(TN: Two lines of poetry that say the Mujahidin will not stop
fighting until the United States leaves their land.)

Peace be upon those who follow right guidance.

We are defending our right. Jihad against the aggressors is a
form of great worship in our religion, and killing us means a
high status with our Lord. Thanks to God, we have been waging
jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and then against you.
Not a single one of our men has committed suicide, whereas every
30 days 30 of your men commit suicide. Continue the war if you
will. Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best
way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made
the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our
brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift
your oppression from us.

Financial Structure of ISIS and a Phone App

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Follow the money, we know where it comes from and where it goes. Islamic State uses the same mafia model, theft, extortion, payment for protection, winning the hearts and minds and then a phone app. Personally I had a gut feeling that there was a Russian component and well, there is…

This also creates a couple of extra issues. Will anyone challenge Russia to stop the app technology and is the West willing to compete with ISIS financially, meaning more than $2 million per day?

ISIS Finances Are Strong

By SARAH ALMUKHTAR

The Islamic State has revenue and assets that are more than enough to cover its current expenses despite expectations that airstrikes and falling oil prices would hurt the group’s finances, according to analysts at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that researches public policy.

ISIS Relies on Extortion and Taxation

The Islamic State takes in more than $1 million per day in extortion and taxation. Salaries of Iraqi government employees are taxed up to 50 percent, adding up to at least $300 million last year; companies may have their contracts and revenue taxed up to 20 percent. As other revenue streams have stalled, like banks and oil, the Islamic State has adjusted these rates to make taxation a larger portion of its income.

ISIS’ estimated assets as of the fall of Mosul in June 2014

$875 mil.

ISIS’ estimated major revenue sources in 2014

$600 mil.

Extortion and taxation in Iraq

$500 mil.

Stolen from state-owned banks in Iraq

$100 mil.

Oil

Kidnapping ransoms

$20 mil.

ISIS’ estimated assets as of the fall of Mosul in June 2014

$875 mil.

ISIS’ estimated major revenue sources in 2014

$600 mil.

Extortion and taxation in Iraq

$500 mil.

Stolen from state-owned banks in Iraq

$100 mil.

Oil

Kidnapping ransoms

$20 mil.

ISIS’ estimated assets as of

the fall of Mosul in June 2014

$875 mil.

ISIS’ estimated major

revenue sources in 2014

Extortion and taxation in Iraq

$600 mil.

Stolen from state-owned banks in Iraq

$500 mil.

Oil

$100 mil.

Kidnapping ransoms

$20 mil.

Oil Is Not the Main Source of Cash

The Islamic State’s oil infrastructure, especially refineries, has been targeted by the United States-led airstrikes. Oil revenue has fallen to about $2 million per week, but the group is not dependent on oil income. Much of the production is used for its own fuel. Past oil sales show that the Islamic State was already selling oil at deep discounts that fluctuated between local markets — for instance, selling oil for less in Kirkuk than in Mosul.

Smoke is seen rising from the Baiji oil refinery on April 18, 2015, during ongoing clashes for control.

A U.S. airstrike on the Islamic State-controlled Mayadin modular oil refinery in Syria on Sept. 24, 2014.
The New York Times|Sources: NASA/USGS Landsat, U.S. Central Command

ISIS Invests in People, Not Infrastructure

The largest expenditure is salaries, which is estimated to be between $3 million and $10 million every month. The Islamic State also invests in police-state institutions, such as committees, media, courts, and market regulation, but provides relatively few services. The group avoids investment in infrastructure because it can be an easy target for attacks, and the territory it holds can change quickly.

Islamic State fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Reuters

ISIS Keeps Its Costs Low

The group minimizes costs by looting military equipment, appropriating land and infrastructure, and paying relatively low salaries. The group also limits its vulnerability by shifting operations, transitioning between expanding its territory and fueling terrorist activity. The Islamic State’s loss of ground in Tikrit last month, for example, has not stopped it from launching attacks in other parts of Iraq and Syria and taking the Iraqi city of Ramadi this weekend.

Islamic State fighters march in the Syrian city of Raqqa in an image posted on a militant website on Jan. 14, 2014. Uncredited/Militant Website, via Associated Press

Now for that phone app…

IS Militants Use Popular Russian Web Payment System To Raise Cash

A  group of Islamic State (IS) militants from Russia’s North Caucasus region are using the popular Russian QIWI wallet electronic payment system to raise money online.

The group’s use of the QIWI wallet sheds light on how individual factions within IS carry out their own fundraising and outreach, and shows that this particular group has managed to raise cash openly using mainstream resources in Russia even though Moscow has banned IS and donating money to it illegal.

The militants involved in the fundraising are doing so through an unofficial Russian-language IS media activist group, ShamToday, which mostly comprises people from the North Caucasus who are with IS in Syria and Iraq.

ShamToday is closely associated with the Chechen-led IS fighting faction Katibat al-Aqsa, a group known to have been close to IS’s military commander in Syria, Umar al-Shishani.

A key ShamToday figure, a Chechen militant named Ilyas Deniev, was killed last month in clashes in Baiji in Iraq.

Another figure associated with the group is a prominent social media activist who goes by the name Murad Atajev. It is thought that Atajev, who maintains accounts on Facebook and VKontakte, operates out of Turkey.

ShamToday first emerged in 2013 on Russia’s VKontakte social-networking website, where the group initially had its own dedicated page. Since VKontakte banned its page several months ago as part of a crackdown on pro-IS propaganda, ShamToday has shifted to using a number of different VKontakte accounts and specific hashtags to spread its propaganda, a method used by other IS groups on various social-media platforms.

Unlike other IS media groups, ShamToday has not been involved in producing video propaganda.

Instead, its main activities are recruitment and outreach to IS sympathizers in the Russian Federation, mostly by spreading news about IS’s activities in Syria and Iraq, sharing Russian audio recordings of lectures given by IS preachers and ideologues, and organizing online pro-IS seminars via its dedicated channel on Zello, a social-media app that is widely used by IS to broadcast sermons.

ShamToday’s Zello sermons frequently involve IS’s most prominent North Caucasus ideologues, including a Chechen named Musa Abu Yusuf Shishani, who has previously called on Chechens in Europe to carry out attacks against civilians, and Abu Jihad, an ethnic Karachai who is a close confidant of Umar al-Shishani.

Raising Funds For The ‘Caliphate’

A recent advertisement published by ShamToday includes a request for donations via the QIWI wallet system.

The request for donations does not say what the money will be used for but uses an interesting call to action to persuade supporters in Russia and Central Asia to donate: the Koran’s Surat al-Tawbah, which instructs Muslims to “fight against the disbelievers collectively as they fight against you collectively.”

The donation request also includes an advertisement for two of ShamToday’s Zello channels, including one named Novosti Khalifata (“Caliphate News”) which the group uses to spread information about IS’s advances in Syria and Iraq to a Russian-speaking audience.

Other Russian-speaking militants associated with IS are also using QIWI accounts to fundraise. A post on the “Official Page KHILAFA” account on VKontakte, which posts news about IS in Syria and Iraq, also includes a QIWI account number and requests for donations.

Why Use QIWI?

Ironically, the ShamToday militants prefer to use QIWI for the same reason as millions of security-conscious Russians: the service allows people to transfer money electronically without having to transmit sensitive bank account information, and without having to have a bank account in the first place.

IS sympathizers who want to donate to ShamToday can do so at a dedicated QIWI kiosk (Russia had over 169,000 of these in 2013) or via their smartphone, by transferring money from their own QIWI account to the ShamToday account number, provided by the group on its donation request.

Besides Russia, QIWI is also available to consumers in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. QIWI users in these countries even make transfers abroad, including to Turkey, where the ShamToday account is most likely based.

The account number provided by ShamToday is a Russian mobile-phone number, which is most likely an untraceable anonymous SIM card and not a working number belonging to a member of ShamToday. Attempts to reach the phone number produced an automated message that said the phone was switched off or outside its provider’s coverage area.

Combating Terror Financing

The use of electronic payment systems like QIWI by banned groups is not new.

Russian lawmakers have taken steps to try to quash the use of electronic payment systems like QIWI for terrorist financing.

In January 2014, a group of lawmakers from Russia’s United Russia party (including Shamsail Saraliev, the former External Affairs Minister for the Chechen Republic) and the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia put forward amendments to existing electronic payment legislation, as part of a counterterrorism package.

The proposed amendments initially called for banning all anonymous transfers over 5,000 rubles, a move that caused QIWI stock to plummet 19 percent on January 15, 2014.

However, when the final version of the amended law passed on May 5, 2014, anonymous payments under 15,000 rubles were retained, although the legislation did ban anonymous payments of any size if they were between individuals rather than companies or other organizations.

The open use of QIWI by ShamToday suggests that this legislation has not deterred some extremist groups from using the electronic payment system to raise funds in Russia.

In a response to an inquiry by RFE/RL about the use of its services by ShamToday, QIWI said that it “condemns and does not support terrorist, extremist and other illegal activities” and that it was operating in “strict compliance with applicable legislation including legislation to combat money laundering of criminal funds and terror financing.”

“The company is taking all necessary and applicable legal measures to protect its services from penetration by criminal proceeds and also to minimize the risk of the company being involved in the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and terrorist financing,” QIWI said in an e-mail.