Ladies and gentlemen, we are finding ourselves in a deja vu condition again and sadly no one is warning America. It seems that Iran has openly issued a renewed fatwa against the West. There are open forums on the internet where plans of action on waging new attacks are being discussed including Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

While some Democrats are calling Barack Obama ‘flat-footed, detached and incompetent’, this for sure is the case when it comes to many issues least of which is the Veteran’s Administration scandal, but it could be more fatal as we exit Afghanistan for good at the end of this year, leaving yet another country even more vulnerable to the full take-over by al Qaeda factions and the renewed growth of the Taliban.

So, at the core of the chatter is Iran, but who is being offensive in any mission against Iran? Not the White House and not John Kerry. So what is Iran doing exactly?

 

 

Iran’s ayatollah: Jihad will last until America is wiped out

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah  Ali Khamenei, said the era of negotiation of Tehran’s nuclear program has  ended and that those who wanted to deal with America — which he said must be  destroyed — are guilty of treason.

“Those [Iranians] who want to promote negotiations and surrender to the  oppressors and blame the Islamic Republic as a warmonger in reality commit  treason,” he said Sunday during a public address to members of parliament, Fars  News Agency reported.

Mr. Khamenei also said a combative-type  mindset was necessary for Iran to achieve its higher  goals and win over the “oppressors’ front,” The Daily Caller reported.

“The reason for continuation of this battle is not the warmongering of the  Islamic Republic,” he said. “Logic and reason command that Iran,  in order to pass through a region full of pirates, needs to arm itself and must  have the capability to defend itself. Today’s world is full of thieves and  plunderers of human honor … [who] commit crimes and betray human ideals and  start wars in different parts of the world.”

One lawmaker asked how long the battle would wage, The Daily Caller  reported.

His reply: “Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue  to exist. … This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the  oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws  on human mind, body and thought. … This requires a difficult and lengthy  struggle and need for great strides.”

Then we have some unsuspecting adversaries now standing hip to hip in discussions as the U.S. policy needs its own Amber alert. Remember Jews are not allowed to fly into Saudi Arabia on commercial airlines but…..

Former Israeli, Saudi Intel Chiefs Debate Hot-Button Mideast Issues

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Former Israeli and Saudi spy chiefs debated a spectrum of hot-button Mideast issues — including the Iranian nuclear threat, Islamic terror, Syrian civil war and, of course, prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace — in an unprecedented public event Monday in Brussels.

The May 26 debate — discussion, really — brought Prince Turki bin Faisal, youngest son of the late Saudi King who headed Riyadh’s General Intelligence for 22 years, side-by-side with retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, Israel’s military intelligence chief from 2006-2010.

Hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the US and moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, the two agreed on the need to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad for what Turki called “blood crimes” against his people.

They also shared a professed desire and hope to see in their lifetime peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

On Iran, they concurred on the imperative of denying Tehran’s nuclear weapon ambitions, yet differed on matters of substance and strategy.

Yadlin — a former fighter pilot who participated in Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor and managed, as military intelligence chief, Israel’s 2007 attack on a Syrian nuclear complex — made subtle, but clear reference to the so-called military option. “The goal of my government is to do everything so that Iran will not hold a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Turki, in contrast, highlighted Israel’s own nuclear weapon arsenal and the desire of all Mideast countries to rid their region of weapons of mass destruction. The Saudi royal urged Israel to break decades of resistance and agree to enter denuclearization negotiations; a step, he insisted, which would greatly affect the outcome of ongoing talks with Tehran.

“This issue is not one-sided. I’d urge Israel to take that seriously … To have a zone free of weapons of mass destruction,” Turki said.

On Syria, the Saudi prince warned that world powers must not repeat the mistakes of Afghanistan, where “neglect” and the precipitous withdrawal of forces resulted in a breakdown of central authority and stability.

Acknowledging Saudi’s role in arming opposition forces, Turki insisted neither his government nor the forces it supports seeks to dismantle the Syrian state or sovereign control of its territory.

“Should the opposition succeed in Syria, the world community must come together and sustain the viability of the Syrian state. The opposition is not offering to break down the present Syrian state as the Americans did in Afghanistan,” Turki said.

“We want to maintain the state of Syria and its institutions, whether it is the armed forces, police, or government structure … We just want to clear the from blood crimes,” he added.

On prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, the Saudi royal urged Israel to negotiate on the basis of the so-called Saudi Peace Initiative, a plan adopted in March 2002 by the Arab League.

“Israel has atomic weapons, it has means to deliver those weapons” by air and under the sea, Turki said. “So the Arabs are not crazy. Instead of waging war, the Arabs are waging peace … This is what we want to do; just sit down and talk,” he said.

Yadlin noted that at the time the Saudi plan was first proposed, Israel had been struggling with waves of terror that prevented the plan from gaining traction by a public preoccupied by the threat. “Today, 74 percent of [the Israeli public] have no idea what the Arab Peace Initiative is,” he said.

Yadlin then turned dramatically to his Saudi counterpart and invited him to come to Israel to explain the plan. “I suggest that his Highness come to Jerusalem, pray in the mosques … then we’ll drive to the Knesset.”

When asked whether the Saudi would consider the Israeli invitation, Turki replied, “Absolutely not.”

While it was a dying wish of his father to pray in Jerusalem, Turki insisted that such a step would be a diversion based on emotion. “You need genuine commitments to achieving peace. Not to use emotions as a means of influencing or attempting to divert attention on the important issue,” Turki said.

“And the important issue is that the Arabs have put forward what the rest of the world views as a reasonable first step … [You can’t] put me as a stumbling block, or as a key for opening the door. Who am I?”

Open and public calls for jihad against the West. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/04/syria-islamic-jihadist-threatens-jihad-attacks-against-obama-canada-and-the-u-s

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/10687163/Al-Qaeda-unveils-new-magazine-aimed-at-Western-jihadis.html

http://www.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Zelin_Global%20Jihad%20Online_NAF.pdf

 

 

 

 

The UK and several other European countries have been desperate to track down Europeans fighters that went to Syria for front line AQ training and they have returned home. This has been going on for months. Only this past week did Dianne Feinstein just say on a Sunday talk show that the domestic threat by AQ jihadi fighters is growing exponentially such that she has seen the intelligence and the United States now needs to be concerned.

Well at least Feinstein did say something and put out a feeble warning. It is also interesting that the matter of drone strikes ordered by Barack Obama on U.S citizens has come back into the news reports in a small way as there are likely some others that are slated for assassination as approved by Barack Obama.

So, it must be noted that many Americans have also traveled to Syria to get front line al Qaeda training and some too have returned home, yet our own intelligence cant find them.

 

Western intelligence services have been warning that European and American jihadists have been flocking to Syria to fight. But they’ve been reluctant to say how many Americans have joined the extremist forces there—until now. The latest U.S. intelligence estimates say that more than 100 Americans have joined the jihad in Syria to fight alongside Sunni terrorists there.

Senior American intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast that they believe between six and 12 Americans who have gone to Syria to fight Assad have now returned to America. “We know where some are,” one senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “The concern is the scale of the problem we are dealing with.”

The scale of that problem by all accounts has gotten worse. Last fall, the official U.S. estimate on Americans specifically who have joined the jihad in Syria was in the low double digits. In January, the New York Times reported that at least 70 Americans have either traveled or attempted to travel to Syria. Earlier this month FBI Director James Comey told reporters that he believed “dozens” of Americans were suspected to be foreign fighters in Syria, but declined to give a more precise number.

In recent months, the U.S. intelligence community has made the tracking of all Westerners going to fight into Syria a top priority. Speaking in March before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, described in vague terms an effort by the whole government to find Western citizens traveling to Syria and to track their travel.

“In light of the large foreign fighter component in Syria crisis, we are working together to gather every piece of information we can about the identity of these individuals,” he said at the time.

More recently, the issue of Western foreign fighters came up in top-level meetings between the Syrian opposition delegation and the Obama administration last week to Washington, D.C.

“We view all foreign fighters as a threat and they are not welcome. There is a convergence of interests between the moderate Syrian opposition and the international community in fighting these foreign fighters and insuring they do not use Syria as a launching pad for external attacks,” said Oubai Shabandar, a strategic communications adviser to the Syrian opposition’s foreign mission in Washington. “This was a major topic of conversation this month in meetings with the Syrian opposition delegation and top U.S. officials.”

The problem, U.S. counter-terrorism and intelligence officials tell The Daily Beast, is that there are just so many jihadists with Western passports traveling to fight in Syria that they worry some of them may slip back into the United States without being detected.

“The NSA does not have the ability to track thousands of bad guys—and on the human intelligence side, this is even more difficult,” another senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “So we are worried that people are slipping through the cracks.”

Olsen in his March testimony said there were thousands of foreign fighters in Syria and that hundreds of those fighters held Western passports.

“This raises our concern that radicalized individuals with extremist contacts and battlefield experience could return to their home countries to commit violence on their own initiative or participate in al Qaeda-directed plots aimed at Western targets outside of Syria,” he said. Olsen also said that a group of “al Qaeda veterans” from Afghanistan and Pakistan have gone to Syria, making the prospect of recruiting new members for the organization even more likely.

Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who closely tracks the flow of foreign fighters into Syria, said, “In the past when we’ve seen Americans go abroad to fight in foreign countries and a number of individuals have been trained to go back to attempt attacks on the homeland.” The best example he said is Faisal al-Shahzad, the Pakistani American who traveled to Taliban training camps in Pakistan and then attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square in 2010. Al-Shahzad failed to properly detonate his bomb and was reported to the New York police by a Muslim-American street vendor.

“It’s not just Americans who are going to Syria, but there are up to 3,000 European citizens from countries that have visa waivers with the United States who have also joined the jihad in Syria,” Zelin said. “This is why so many Western counter-terrorism officials are so worried, it’s much easier to get into our country with a Western passport.”

Those Americans that have gone off to fight in Syria also do not fit the typical terrorist profile. Last May, the Detroit Free Press reported that Nicole Lynn Mansfield, a convert to Islam, was killed in fighting in Syria fighting Assad. In April of 2013, a federal court charged Eric Harroun, a former U.S. Army private, with firing a rocket-propelled grenade while fighting alongside al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria. If U.S. intelligence estimates are correct, these cases could be unfortunate harbingers of things to come.

In case you need more on this go here. This is a time to raise your own local situational awareness.