Paris Had Their 9/11, who is Next? Interpol

Sorry, but some unvarnished truth is required now and beginning to understand the threat is the first step to safety and self preservation but more, it is both an offensive and defensive measure. This post will be data rich.

July 2015: Interpol has issued a warning to countries operating in the Mediterranean to be on the alert for an attempt by ISIS militants to carry out some sort of operation at sea over the next few days, Italian military sources have told Migrant Report.

Three U.S. governors have taken proactive measures to stop refugees from coming into their respective states but White House senior staffer on the National Security Council, Ben Rhodes stated that the refugee program will continue regardless of matters in Europe and Paris.

Michigan, Alabama, Louisiana are the governors asserting their 10th Amendment authority. The question then becomes if this program continues what other states will be forced to take the refugees?

PARIS (Reuters) – Fingerprints from one of the suicide bombers behind the attacks at the Stade de France in Paris matched the prints of a man registered in Greece in October, a French prosecutor said on Monday.

“At this stage, while the authenticity of a passport in the name of Ahmad al Mohammad, born Sept. 10 1990 in Idlib, Syria needs to be verified, there are similarities between the fingerprints of the suicide bomber and those taken during a control in Greece in October,” the Paris prosecutor said in a statement.

The prosecutor also said a second bomber at the Bataclan concert hall had now been identified. The prosecutor named him as 28-year old Samy Ammour from Drancy, north of Paris and said he was known to counter-terrorism units after being placed under investigation and judicial control for attempting to go to Yemen.

He disappeared in the autumn of 2013 and an international arrest warrant was issued for him.

“Five of the terrorists killed have now been identified,” prosecutor added.

The mastermind of the Paris attack has been identified:

A French official has named the suspected mastermind behind the Paris attacks as a Belgian man called Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He recently traveled to Syria and returned to Belgium.

June 2015: Juergen Stock cited this shift as an emerging trend at a UN Security Council meeting along with changing travel methods being used by foreign fighters seeking to join groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

Stock was a keynote speaker at a meeting attended by half a dozen ministers including US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to assess progress in implementing a US-sponsored resolution adopted last September requiring all countries to prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters preparing to join extremist groups.

On Friday, the Security Council adopted a presidential statement calling for a significant increase in border controls, improved cooperation at all levels “including preventing terrorists from exploiting technology, communications and resources.”

Johnson said the United States will be developing a new passenger data-screening and analysis system within the next 12 months which will be made available to the international community at no cost for both commercial and government organizations to use.

In a report obtained by The Associated Press on April 1, the panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaeda said the number of fighters leaving home to join al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group in Iraq, Syria and other countries has spiked to more than 25,000 from over 100 nations. The panel said its analysis indicated the number of “foreign terrorist fighters” worldwide increased by 71 percent between mid-2014 and March 2015.

There is no intelligence problem from or by an any government intelligence apparatus, but rather the voids are in the laps of the political wings where they themselves remain in a fetal position due to political correctness. Barack Obama is in that mix.

One of the Paris attacks terrorist was previosly charged, the French prosecutor François Molins said.

Fingerprints from one of the suicide bombers behind the attacks at the Stade de France in Paris matched the prints of a man registered in Greece in October, the prosecutor said on Monday.

It is known that International terrorism warrant was issued for one of the attackers by Interpol.

 

This post will be rich in links, so some real study is required here.

  1. BRUSSELS (AFP) – One of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks had links to a Belgian Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militant believed to be the mastermind of an extremist cell dismantled in January, a report said on Monday (Nov 16).The name of Paris attacker Brahim Abdeslam appears in several police files alongside leading militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud relating to criminal cases in 2010 and 2011, Flemish-language newspaper De Standaard reported.
  2. Let’s be clear: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Sunni Salafism across the globe.

    Most Sunni Muslims around the world, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim population, are not Salafis. Salafism is seen as too rigid, too literalist, too detached from mainstream Islam. While Shiite and other denominations account for 10 percent of the total, Salafi adherents and other fundamentalists represent 3 percent of the world’s Muslims.

    Unlike a majority of Sunnis, Salafis are evangelicals who wish to convert Muslims and others to their “purer” form of Islam — unpolluted, as they see it, by modernity. In this effort, they have been lavishly supported by the Saudi government, which has appointed emissaries to its embassies in Muslim countries who proselytize for Salafism. The kingdom also grants compliant imams V.I.P. access for the annual hajj, and bankrolls ultraconservative Islamic organizations like the Muslim World League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

  3. Seven terrorist attacks have been thwarted in the last six months, David Cameron has revealed as he oversees the biggest increase in security in the UK since the 7/7 bombings, including the recruitment of nearly 2,000 new spies.  He warned that the deadly terrorist attacks that hit Paris on Friday night, killing 129 people, “could happen here” and Britain faced a continued threat by Isis.
  4. The French Prime Minister has warned that more terror attacks are being prepared against France and other European nations as police raids continue across the continent.
  5. The fifth named attacker is Ahmad al Mohammad, a Syrian. He is the man who entered the EU through Greece in October as an asylum seeker. The authenticity of his passport, which said he was born in Idlib in 1990, has not been confirmed.

    He blew himself up at the Stade de France.
  6. Samy Amimour was one of the attackers at the Bataclan, French media reports. 
  7. Prosecutors have confirmed the identity of the fourth named suicide bomber. He is  Samy Amimour, born in 1987 in Paris, living in Drancy. He was reportedly known to security services following a terror case in 2012.

Tell Bloomberg About Darknet Arms Trafficking

Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York went off after the Paris attacks stating once again an issue with people having the ability to get their hands on guns. Ah …Michael you trying to do gun control in Europe also? Sheesh. Get a clue Bloomberg, here is a memo on the Darknet.

There is also a State Department visa waiver program that allows foreigners to travel freely in countless countries globally much less, Europe is borderless due to the Schengen Agreement. Borders and documents MATTER! Oh and hey Michael, payment methods often include the bitcoins, track that sir.

The Middle East is full of weapons, all kinds of weapons and to resell them is nothing more than a yard sale. An AK-47 in good condition sells for $50.00 (U.S.) or less.

 

How Dark Net Arms Dealers Could Easily Smuggle Assault Weapons To Paris

Europe’s open-border policy has made it harder for government officials to track illegal weapons that come from as far away as the U.S.

Vocativ: When terrorists in Western Europe want guns, they usually tap into a 20-year-old market that took root and flourished at the end of the Balkan wars. Now with the rise of the dark net, that market has been digitized and deals on illegal guns are only a few minutes away.

Vocativ used our technology to scan several current and active dark net marketplaces and found several postings selling AK-47s, the types of guns eight ISIS terrorists were said to have used during the deadly attacks in Paris on November 13. Across a dozen sites, we found 281 listings of guns and ammunition, including 16 submachine and machine guns, 12 sniper rifles and 40 assault rifles. The majority of the vendors ship from the U.S., as well as Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.

Terrorists likely acquired weapons through the black market or dark net, as France has especially strict gun laws. The French government estimates there are about 7.5 million legally owned guns in the country. Some estimates claim there are as many as 10 to 20 million illegal weapons in France. A European Commission study estimates some 67 million unregistered firearms exist in the EU.

When the illegal firearm market initially grew from weapons originating in the Balkans, criminals and terrorists wanting weapons had to connect with the right crime organization. Now, they just have to connect to the Internet. If a terrorist (or anyone) wants to buy an illegal assault rifle today they just have to download the Tor browser, which allows them to search the web anonymously, then find eBay-like marketplaces, which can be found on the regular Internet.

In January, Philippe Capon, the head of UNSA police union told Bloomberg that AK-47s sell for about 1,000 euros ($1,181 USD) to 1,500 euros ($1,650 USD) on the French black market. Our Vocativ analysis shows that the current going rate for AK-47s on the dark net ranges from 547 eros ($590 USD) to 6,300 euros ($6,785 USD).

“The guns moved from the Balkans to Western Europe and other parts of Europe in small and medium shipments, so that makes it very difficult to monitor and investigate and protect against,” said Cédric Poitevin, head of the  Arms Transfers and Small Arms project at GRIP (Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security), which is based in Brussels. “They can move across criminal networks within Europe. First to Belgium and other parts and then to someone who is linked to criminal or terrorist networks.”

An open-border policy has likely made matters worse. The United Kingdom does not participate in Europe’s open-border program and the country has had very little gun crime, but other European nations have not been so fortunate. “We face the same challenge in all countries with the almost absence of border controls,” Poitevin told Vocativ. “The fact that we are close to the Balkans and, generally speaking, two countries in Eastern Europe with huge stockpiles of guns that have been made available.”

Poitevin say, most of what he and European government officials know about firearm trafficking and smuggling comes from assumptions, arrests and limited studies. “Only recently there has been political priority,” he said. “Until recently there was very little funds to study the issue and build stats and to gather quantitative information.”

One of the most recent efforts to study gun trafficking began in 2013, when Interpol created the Illicit Arms Records and Tracing Management System (iARMS), which allows member countries to report and track weapon trafficking. In 2014, Europol announced they would make gun smuggling a priority. That initiative focused largely on the rise in Internet trafficking. They had some success in October that year. French law enforcement agents raided several homes across the country and found hundreds of weapon stashes, which included assault rifles and machine guns.

*** Meanwhile, the Paris attackers communicated with each other using PlayStation 4 and they in turned communicated with Islamic State using an app called ‘WhatsApp’.

Belgium’s home affairs minister says ISIL communicates using Playstation 4

Quartz: The day after terror attacks in Paris left at least 127 dead and some 300 wounded, attention has turned to Belgium. Several arrests were made in Belgium today (Nov. 14), and a black Volkswagen Polo with a Belgian license plate had been spotted on the night of the attacks near the Bataclan theater. Police have raided a Brussels neighborhood where three of the eight attackers are believed to have lived.

More fighters have joined ISIL from Belgium, per capita, than any Western nation.

Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has previously described Brussels as a weak link in the fight against terror. Speaking at a debate last week, he said: “The thing that keeps me awake at night is the guy behind his computer, looking for messages from IS and other hate preachers.”

Jambon also reportedly warned of the growing use by terror networks of the PlayStation 4 gaming console, which allows terrorists to communicate with each other and is difficult for the authorities to monitor. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,” he said.

The gaming console also was implicated in ISIL’s plans back in June, when an Austrian teen was arrested for downloading bomb plans to his PS4.

Amid Paris Attacks, 5 More Released from Gitmo

Barack left the country too, headed for Turkey.

The nefarious outside legal council group CCR, which was assigned by former Attorney General Eric Holder is the group of lawyers of record for many of the detainees.

Pentagon Transfers 5 Guantanamo Detainees to the UAE as Battle Over Closure Heats Up

Days ahead of signing a legislative freeze on Guantanamo into law, the president defiantly moves five

Files: al Rahzihi    al Qadasi 

al Asani     al Busays     al Nahdi

Hours after President Barack Obama took off for the G20 conference in Turkey, another plane was wheels up, carrying five detainees from the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United Arab Emirates.

The move of Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Razihi, Khalid Abd-al-Jabbar Muhammad Uthman al-Qadasi, Adil Said al-Hajj Ubayd al-Busays, Sulayman Awad Bin Uqayl al-Nahdi, and Fahmi Salem Said al-Asani brings the total population to 107, with 48 more cleared to go.

The transfer comes just days ahead of Obama signing the annual defense authorization bill, in which lawmakers extended and added restrictions intended to freeze such moves into 2017, potentially dooming Obama’s campaign pledge and 2009 order to close Guantanamo.

The administration insists it will continue to use the transfers to chip away at the population. Sunday’s transfer also follows a string of single moves in recent weeks, a sign that a bureaucratic logjam at the Pentagon has loosened under presidential pressure.

But officials have acknowledged they won’t be able to achieve their goal of emptying the prison — or at least getting the population so low the cost of keeping them in Cuba becomes indefensibly high — unless they are able to move larger groups of detainees, such as they did Sunday, rather than one-by-one.

 

 

The move also takes on a defiant tone amid preemptive political outcry over the Obama administration’s ever-imminent plan to close Guantanamo, which officials say will include a series of options for alternative sites in the U.S., and its refusal to rule out executive action to ultimately shutter the facility in Cuba.

France Does Strike Back Against ISIS

France has begun major strikes on Islamic State in Raqqah. 10 jets bombed 20 targets including: training camps & munitions depot.

Activist from Raqqa reports that as of yet, there are no civilian casualties as a result of French bombing.

Raqqa no Civilian got killed or Wounded by the Warplanes Airstrikes until now according to the Raqqa Hospitals.  France is using precision bombs likely some of ours hence no collateral damage.

French planes took off from Jordan and the UAE, the raids were also in coordination with the US. The US is giving France the strike targets. It cannot be forgotten that Russia was purposely omitting ISIS targets and concentrated on other anti Assad forces but did targets did not include Raqqah. Russia was and is using dumb bombs and cluster munitions, something no other country uses except Syria and Iran.

*** Of particular note, it is apparent that Barack Obama would not give the GO order to our own air campaign, but rather to France. One must ask why?

WSJ: The U.S. is expanding intelligence sharing with France and has agreed to speed the delivery of detailed targeting information in support of French retaliatory strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, officials said.

In response to Friday’s coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.S. has started sharing so-called “targeting packages” with France, identifying Islamic State targets for strikes by French warplanes. It also plans to roll back restrictions that impede intelligence sharing to make it easier for France to intensify its air campaign.

Officials said the changes amount to giving France a seat at the table alongside America’s most-trusted intelligence-sharing partners in developing future target packages for strikes against Islamic State.

France has fighter aircraft positioned at bases in the region, in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, which could be used in retaliatory strikes against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq once targets have been identified.

Defense officials said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has been an advocate of easing restrictions on intelligence sharing with France.

After Mr. Carter spoke on Sunday with French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian, their second call since the attacks in Paris on Friday night, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said the defense chiefs “agreed on concrete steps the U.S. and French militaries should take to further intensify our close cooperation in prosecuting a sustained campaign” against Islamic State.

In his statement, Mr. Cook didn’t spell out what those “concrete steps” would entail.

France isn’t part of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the U.S. Under the alliance, the five countries have committed to sharing the signals intelligence they collect.

In the past, French officials have pressed their American and British counterparts to allow Paris to join the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. More recently, French officials have instead pressed the U.S. for intelligence-sharing benefits on par with the countries in the alliance, particularly in the area of counterterrorism.

 

 

 

What Jihad in Paris Looks Like

The President of France, Hollande is a passive leader, precisely the same as Barack Obama. Hillary after the CBS debate held on Saturday night, is just as passive. All of them are by themselves a danger to the security of the homeland.

 

 

Fair warning for the last photo at the bottom, but it is important to absorb…it can and has happened here.  Exactly what is a ‘watch list’ in America, what is being watched by those on the list? Too little too late as noted by the Tsarnaev brothers. Time to ask hard questions and make new demands.

The FBI has already dispatched a team to Paris for forensic and investigation with French intelligence services. Meanwhile:

FNC:  French man believed to be directly involved in Friday’s Islamic terror attack in Paris that killed 129 and injured 352 was on the run Sunday afternoon and was being hunted by authorities, French security officials said.

The man, one of three brothers believed involved in the killings in central Paris, rented the black Volkswagen Polo used by a group of hostage-takers that left at least 89 people dead inside the Bataclan concert hall, one official said.

One other police official said the manhunt is believed to involve at least one suspect. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. One of the suspect’s brothers has been arrested in Belgium and another brother died in the attack, the first official said.

Three of the seven Islamist suicide bombers have already been identified as French citizens, as was at least one of seven other people arrested in neighboring Belgium in connection to the deadly attacks.

One suicide attacker, who was identified from a skin sample, had been living in a Paris suburb, French police said Sunday. A Belgian official said two of the seven suicide bombers were French men living in Brussels, and one of the attackers was living in the Molenbeek neighborhood, which is considered a focal point for religious extremism and fighters going to Syria. Among the seven people arrested  was another French citizen living in the Belgian capital.

The new information highlighted growing fears of possible homegrown terrorism in France, a country that has exported more jihadis than any other in Europe.

Ismael Omar Mostefai, a 29-year-old French citizen who had been flagged for ties to Islamic radicalism, was identified Sunday as one of the assailants by a French judicial official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Mostefai’s ID comes as Balkan authorities work to track the travels of a man whose Syrian passport was found next to a dead suicide bomber at France’s national stadium on Friday night. It is still not clear if that Syrian passport is authentic, or if it belonged to the dead bomber. European officials say there is a brisk trade in fake Syrian passports to help people obtain refugee status in the European Union.

Serbian police said Sunday the owner of the passport, identified only as A.A., formally requested asylum in Serbia. Prosecutor Francois Molins told Sky News the passport was found at the Stade de France bombing site and belonged to a Syrian citizen born in 1990.

Officials said the passport holder entered Greece on Oct. 3 through Leros, one of the eastern Aegean islands that tens of thousand of people fleeing war and poverty have been using as a gateway into the 28-nation EU. Serbian police said the holder of the passport then registered at its border entry with Macedonia on Oct. 7. Croatian police said the passport holder was checked at a refugee center on Oct. 8, but the man was not flagged as suspicious and continued his journey toward Hungary and Austria, according to police spokeswoman Helena Biocic.

The FBI is sending to Paris a team of agents that specialize in recovering information from electronic devices, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The FBI is reportedly anticipating a bevy of information coming from French officials in the days ahead and wants to have sufficient manpower to handle and interpret it.

While investigators work to figure out how the attack was planned and if anyone connected with it is still at large, the so-called “City of Light” has gone dark as top Paris tourist attractions such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre art museum remain closed in the wake of the attacks perpetrated by Mostefai and seven other terrorists. The Islamist attackers wielded AK-47s and wore suicide belts while carrying out a series of coordinated attacks at six sites around Paris on Friday night.

Mostefai, identified by his fingerprints, was one of the terrorists inside the Bataclan concert hall, where at least 89 people were murdered during a concert by the American band Eagles of Death Metal, Sky News reported. He was known to the French Secret Service for his radicalism, Fox News has confirmed.

Little is known about Mostefai’s background, but French investigators have learned he grew up in a tough French housing project and turned to radicalism five years ago.

The mayor of the French city of Chartres, Jean-Pierre Gorges, identified Mostefai as a resident in a Facebook post, and Molins told Sky News that Mostefai had a criminal record, but didn’t spend time in jail.

“In 2010, he was blacklisted by the police due to extreme behaviors, but never been classified into any illegal extremist groups,” Molins said.

An unidentified prosecutor told AP Mostefai was identified from fingerprints on a finger found in the carnage of the Paris attacks Friday night.

“In 2010, he was blacklisted by the police due to extreme behaviors . . .”

– Prosecutor Francois Molins

The official said Mostefai’s father, a brother and other family members have been detained and are being questioned, according to the AP.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the apparent meticulously planned attacks and has warned that France would remain at the “top of the list of targets” over its airstrike on the militant group in Syria and Iraq.

A Seat car containing Kalashnikov rifles was found abandoned by police in Montreuil, approximately 4 miles east of Paris. Molins said Saturday that gunmen armed with automatic rifles pulled up in that model car before opening fire, killing 15 people and injuring 10, but a French official told the AP that authorities couldn’t immediately confirm if it was the same black Seat car linked to the AK-47 attacks on the Le Carillon bar and the Le Petit Cambodge restaurant on Rue Alibert in the city’s 10th district.

Belgian police arrested three in connection with the terror assaults Saturday. Belgium Justice Minister Koen Geens told the VRT network that the arrests came after a car with Belgian license plates was seen Friday night close to the Bataclan concert hall, scene of the deadliest assault, where at least 89 people were massacred by attackers armed with AK-47s and explosives.

Geens said the car was a rental and the arrests stemmed from police raids conducted in the St. Jans Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels.

French President Francois Hollande called the attacks an “act of war” in a nationally televised address Saturday. Hollande vowed France “will be merciless toward the barbarians of Islamic State group.”

ISIS, in an online statement, described Paris as “the carrier of the banner of the Cross in Europe” and described the attackers as “eight brothers wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine rifles.”

French police said Saturday they believed all of the attackers were dead, but were still searching for possible accomplices. The French prosecutor’s office said seven of the eight assailants died in suicide bombings.