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Social security numbers are the basis and entry point to hack when it comes to the cyber intrusion into the IRS. Given the software platform the IRS uses, which is outdated completely, there are warnings there could be more intrusions.
SAN FRANCISCO — A hack of the Internal Revenue service first reported in May was nearly three times as large as previously stated, the agency said Monday.
Thieves have accessed as many as 334,000 taxpayer accounts, the IRS said.
In May, the IRS reported that identity thieves were able to use the agency’s Get Transcript program to get personal information about as many as 114,000 taxpayers.
On Monday, the IRS said an additional 220,000 accounts had also been hacked. In all, 334,000 accounts were accessed, though whether information was stolen from every one of them is not known.
The hackers made use of an IRS application called Get Transcript, which allows users to view their tax account transactions, line-by-line tax return information or wage and income reported to the IRS for a specific tax year.
To enter the Get Transcript system, the user must correctly answer multiple identity verification question.
The hackers took information about taxpayers acquired from other sources and used it to correctly answer the questions, allowing them to gain access to a plethora of data about individual taxpayers.
The Get Transcript service was shut down in May.
Hackers love authentication-based systems because it’s very difficult to distinguish between “the good guys and the bad guys” when someone is trying to get in, said Jeff Hill of STEALTHbits Technologies, a cyber security company.
“Here we have a case where a successful authentication-based attack was discovered in May, and yet the IRS is still unclear of the extent of the breach’s damage months later. Even now, how confident is the IRS they fully understand the extent of the attack completely, or should we expect yet another shoe to drop in the coming weeks?” Hill said.
Notification of the increased number of hacked accounts came Monday.
In a statement the agency said, “as part of the IRS’s continued efforts to protect taxpayer data, the IRS conducted a deeper analysis over a wider time period covering the 2015 filing season, analyzing more than 23 million uses of the Get Transcript system.”
That analysis revealed an additional 220,000 accounts had also potentially been accessed.
In addition to accounts the hackers were successfully able to access, the IRS disclosed hack attempts that didn’t succeed. There were 111,000 attempts on accounts disclosed in May and 170,000 disclosed on Monday, for a total of 281,000 of accounts where the hackers “failed to clear the authentication processes,” the agency said.
Taxpayers whose information was potentially breached will get letters in the mail from the IRS in the coming days.
They will also get access to free credit protection and Identity Protection PINs, the IRS said in a statement.
Examiner: President Obama’s team has spent more than a half trillion dollars on information technology but some departments, notably the IRS, still run on DOS and old Windows, which isn’t serviced anymore, according to House chairman.
“Since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has spent in excess of $525 billion dollars on IT. And it doesn’t work,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
In an address to the centrist Ripon Society, Chaffetz suggested that the slow change of the federal government’s IT led to the recent and historic hack of personal data of millions of current and former federal workers, including CIA and other clandestine employees.
“The IRS still uses the DOS operating system. You have a Patent office that just got Windows 97. They don’t even service Windows 97 anymore. And yet they just got it. So the procurement process is really, really broken in this regard,” he added.
Chaffetz also offered to praise for Obama’s pick to head the Office of Personnel Management, home to the massive computer hack.
No….wait it IS MUCH WORSE…Those pesky FOIA requests…Seems the State Department is about to fall completely. Obstruction too is an understatement.
Gawker: Earlier this year, Gawker Media sued the State Department over its response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed in 2013, in which we sought emails exchanged between reporters at 33 news outlets and Philippe Reines, the former deputy assistant secretary of state and aggressive defender of Hillary Clinton. Over two years ago, the department claimed that “no records responsive to your request were located”—a baffling assertion, given Reines’ well-documented correspondence with journalists. Late last week, however, the State Department came up with a very different answer: It had located an estimated 17,000 emails responsive to Gawker’s request.
On August 13, lawyers for the U.S. Attorney General submitted a court-ordered status report to the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia in which it disclosed that State employees had somehow discovered “5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length” that were sent or received by Reines during his government tenure. Of those emails, the attorneys added, “an estimated 17,855” were likely responsive to Gawker’s request:
The Department has conducted its preliminary review of the potentially responsive electronic documents in its possession, custody, and control from Mr. Reines’ state.gov email account (as opposed to records it received from his personal email account). The assemblage comprises approximately 5.5 gigabytes of data containing 81,159 emails of varying length. Based on a review of a portion of these emails, the Department estimates that 22% of the 81,159 emails may be responsive. Therefore, the Department believes that it will need to conduct a line- by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions. Moreover, some of the responsive records may need to be referred to other agencies for consultation or processing.
It is not clear how the State Department managed to locate this tranche of Reines’ correspondence when it had previously asserted that the emails simply didn’t exist. These newly discovered records are from Reines’ government account, and are not related to the 20 boxes of government-business emails stored on his personal account that Reines recently handed over to the government, despite his prior claims to Gawker that his official use of non-governmental email was limited: “My personal email was the last place I wanted reporters intruding.”
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Considering the number of potentially responsive emails contained in Reines’ State.gov email account, it’s hard to see the agency’s initial denial as anything other than willful incompetence—if not the conscious effort, or the result of someone else’s conscious effort, to stonewall news outlets. Either way, the precedent it establishes is pernicious: Journalists should not have to file expensive lawsuits to force the government to comply with the basic provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
According to the same status report, the State Department intends to produce the first set of Reines’ emails on September 30, 2015—three years and six days after Gawker filed its initial request.
We’ve asked the State Department and Reines for comment and will update this post if we hear back from either.
Breitbart: The State Department sent a safe to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer in early July in an effort to ensure a thumb drive containing classified emails was being stored securely. The unusual move by State came to light Friday, more than a week after the drive itself was turned over to the Department of Justice.
McClatchy reports that evidence of classified information on Hillary’s personal email sever first turned up in May, earlier than previously known. A debate ensued between the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community and the State Department about whether the material, including copies of Hillary’s emails on a thumb drive kept by her attorney, were properly secured. It is not known what, if any, security precautions were taken between May and July, but in early July the State Department became concerned enough that it delivered a safe to Kendall’s office.
The State Department has previously mentioned that it had physically verified the security of the thumb drive in Kendall’s office, but never mentioned providing a safe. On July 30th, about a week after word of the thumb drive’s existence became public knowledge, a State Department spokesman told Politico, “We’ve provided the lawyers with instructions regarding appropriate measures for physically securing the documents and confirmed via a physical security expert that they are taking those measures.”
Nearly a week later, State spokesman Mark Toner again noted that State had sent a security expert to Kendall’s office. He told CBS News, “We simply cleared the site where they’re being held, made sure that it was a secure facility, and capable of holding what could be classified material.” Again, there was no mention of State providing a safe in which to keep the thumb drive.
Throughout this time the State Department has firmly denied that any material on Hillary’s server was classified at the time it was generated. But two Inspectors General–for State and for the Intelligence Community–have been equally firm in saying some of the emails were classified “when they were generated.”
State’s decision to deliver the safe to Kendall’s office in July could be seen in one of two ways: as an admission by the Agency that there is indeed classified material on the drive, despite what its spokespeople have said publicly, or as an effort by State to placate the Inspectors General.
Earlier this week, Senator Chuck Grassley published a letter from the Intelligence Community Inspector General which indicated that two emails in Hillary’s inbox had been judged to contain Top Secret information. Shortly afterwards, Hillary announced that she had agreed to turn over her email server, which had been wiped clean and was sitting in a data center in New Jersey.
McClatchy reports that the thumb drive in Kendall’s possession was actually turned over on August 6th, a day after stories indicated the FBI was seeking to verify the security of the drive. It’s not clear what prompted the decision to take the drive at that time or why the FBI waited another week to collect the server.
There is no word on whether the State Department has retrieved its safe from Kendall’s office.
*** First there were 2 emails, then 60 and now over 300?
More than 300 of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — or 5.1 percent of those processed so far — have been flagged for potential secret information, the State Department reported to a federal court Monday.
Officials insisted, however, that the screening process is running smoothly and they are back on track after falling behind a judge’s schedule for making all of the emails public.
The reviewers have screened about 20 percent of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton returned to the department, which means if the rate of potentially secret information remains steady, more than 1,500 messages will have to be sent to intelligence community agencies, known in government as “IC,” to screen out classified information.
“Out of a sample of approximately 20% of the Clinton emails, the IC reviewers have only recommended 305 documents — approximately 5.1% — for referral to their agencies for consultation,” the Obama administration said in new court papers.
Officials are trying to head off a request by the plaintiffs, who sued to get a look at Mrs. Clinton’s emails and who want the court to impose new oversight to make sure the State Department is working quickly and fairly.
Dozens of messages already released publicly have had information redacted as classified, raising questions about Mrs. Clinton’s security practices when she declined to use the regular State.gov system and instead issued herself an email account on a server she kept at her home in New York.
Mrs. Clinton has insisted she never sent any information that was classified and said she never received information from others that was marked classified at the time — though it has since been marked as such.
“I was permitted to and used a personal email and, obviously in retrospect, given all the concerns that have been raised, it would have been probably smarter not to,” she told Iowa Public Radio last week. “But I never sent nor received any classified email, nothing marked ’Classified.’ And I think this will all sort itself out.”
She also took credit for the release of the emails, which she returned to the government nearly two years after she left office, saying that “if I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of this would have been in the public arena.”
The emails, however, are being made public by federal District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, in response to the lawsuit from Jason Leopold, a reporter at Vice.
Judge Sullivan has set a strict schedule for the State Department to meet in releasing the emails on a monthly basis. The department, however, missed the July target by more than 1,000 pages of emails, and blamed the need to screen out classified information as the reason for breaking the judge’s order.
In its new filing Monday, the State Department said it will catch up by the end of September, saying intelligence community screeners are now integrated into the process.
Russian-backed rebel forces in Ukraine are building up to “full combat readiness” after an urgent meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and some of his top military advisers.
The announcement that the rebels were getting prepared in eastern Ukraine came hours after Putin called the defense meeting.
The situation on the ground in Ukraine has been tense lately. Violence has surged in recent months.
Ukrainian officials have claimed that the pro-Russian forces have violated a peace treaty signed in February and have targeted Ukrainian troops with heavy weaponry.
The head of Ukraine’s national security and defense council has said that the “shelling is carried out around the clock using large-calibre artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, prohibited by the [peace agreements]. During the day, the enemy carried out 153 artillery attacks.”
War, apparently, is imminent and soldiers in the area had their August vacation leave taken away following concerns that the violence might escalate more and result in an all out confrontation.
Also on Friday, it was reported that Russia and Finland might be preparing to go to war with one another. The two countries share over 800 miles of border. The reserve units in Finland on active duty jumped from 6,000 to 18,000 from last year to this year as tensions between Helsinki and Moscow have become increasingly strained. More details found here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is visiting Russian-occupied Crimea today at a time when the fighting in Ukraine looks like it is about to explode.
Ukraine Today reports that, among other things, Putin will be chairing a meeting of the Russian State Council to discuss increasing tourism to the peninsula which was illegally annexed by Russia last March. Tourism has been hindered due to three key factors: sanctions passed by the US and the EU prohibit tourism, Ukrainian citizens are not visiting the peninsula, and the collapse of the Russian economy means that many Russian citizens cannot afford to go on vacation either.
Any visit by Putin to Crimea is seen as a provocation by the Ukrainian government and many in the West, but the timing of this visit has not gone unnoticed by Kiev. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Putin’s trip a “challenge to the civilized world” and stressed that it needed to be viewed in context of events in eastern Ukraine. RFE/RL reports:
“Such trips mean further militarization of the occupied Ukrainian peninsula and lead to its greater isolation,” the presidential spokesman quoted Poroshenko as saying.
Poroshenko said that Crimea has a future only as a part of Ukraine.
“This is a challenge to the civilized world and a continuation of the plan to escalate the situation which is being carried out by Russian troops and their mercenaries in the Donbass (east Ukraine),” Poroshenko said in a Facebook post.
The reasons that Poroshenko and the Ukrainian people might be upset by Putin’s visit are obvious — the Russian military seized control of the peninsula at the end of February, 2014, all the while claiming that the gun-wielding “little green men” were local activists (Putin later admitted the obvious — these were Russian troops), and then held an illegal, deeply flawed, and internationally unrecognized referendum on annexation. Russia then directly intervened in the Donbass, culminating in the “Russian invasion” that effectively cut a large part of the Donbass off from the rest of Ukraine.
But is Poroshenko right that Putin’s visit is linked to violence in eastern Ukraine?
Last week a key leader of the self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic,” Denis Pushilin, warned that “full-scale fighting could break out at any moment.” We noted at the time that his statement was part of a flurry of warnings and heated rhetoric coming out of both the Kremlin (and the Russian state-run media) and the leadership of the Russian-backed separatists, corresponding to an increase in fighting and troop movement in eastern Ukraine. We also noted that this pattern matched what preceded other major escalations in Ukraine such as the “Russian invasion” one year ago, the conclusion of the battle for Donetsk airport, and the run-up to February’s capture of Debaltsevo.
Since we wrote than analysis on August 12, daily fighting has only grown more intense, civilian and military casualties have risen, and the conflict feels even closer to an ignition point.
One-third of Londoners are said to be “uncomfortable” with the idea of a Muslim mayor, according to a new YouGov poll for LBC radio. What seems to have especially excited some is the revelation that 73 percent of UK Independence Party (UKIP) voters in London feel the same way. But can they really be blamed?
The reason some of the people are “uncomfortable” is undoubtedly going to be a level of xenophobia. But the majority, I believe, are subconsciously internalising the public performances of Muslim politicians in the United Kingdom and are rightly concerned by them.
Critics might point to the fact that UKIPers, across the board according to the poll, are less “progressive,” leading the field in discomfort for the idea of a female mayor (12 percent), a homosexual mayor (26 percent) and an ethnic minority mayor (41 percent). Well, yes, UKIP is a party of traditionalists and conservatives first and libertarians second. I don’t think anyone should try to hide from that or try to explain it away. But the discomfort about a Muslim mayor (73 percent) requires some deeper thought.
Sayeeda Hussain Warsi (left) resigned from Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, calling his Israel policy “morally indefensible.” Former Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman (center) fell due to corruption charges. MEP Amjad Bashir (right) was kicked out of UKIP for “grave” financial irregularities.
Look at the shining examples we have of high profile Muslim politicians in the United Kingdom: Baroness Warsi, former Mayor Lutfur Rahman, ex-UKIPer Amjad Bashir, and of course one of the people tipped to challenge for the Labour candidacy, Labour MP Sadiq Khan.
“But wait! What about Syed Kamall? Sajid Javid? Khalid Mahmood? Rehman Chishti?” I hear you ask.
By and large, Muslim politicians in the UK tend to be far more … divisive, to be polite. There are several camps. Some, like Lutfur Rahman and Baroness Warsi, have Islamist links. Some have questionable backgrounds, such as the defence of Louis Farrakhan or Guantanamo Bay detainees (Sadiq Khan), and one let UKIP down in a big way, while being investigated for improper behaviour (Amjad Bashir).
Humza Yousaf (left), a member of the Scottish parliament, was previously media spokesman for a radical Islamist charity. Labour MPs Shabana Mahmood (center) and Yasmin Qureshi (right) are more concerned with boycotting Israel than serving their constituents.
Others engage in sectarian politics at a whim. George Galloway, though he doesn’t claim to be a Muslim (others claim he converted), divided and conquered in Bradford West and was, as a result, turfed out. Politicians like Ali, Mahmood, and Qureshi are united by their demonisation of Israel and tolerance of extremism.
And Tory-elected officials like Kamall, Javid, and Chishti are precisely why Conservative voters in London are more comfortable (39 percent against) with a Muslim mayor. One of their leading candidates is a practicing Muslim – they’d have to be.
Perhaps the argument can be made that UKIP voters are not xenophobic or anti-Muslim – although one might argue they are more likely to be anti-Islam, and that’s a discussion for another time – but rather that they have simply been paying attention.
When you couple the backgrounds of a lot of leading Muslim politicians in Britain with the more objective, black-and-white worldview that UKIP voters have, they are naturally predetermined to be more sceptical.
You might argue that UKIP voters shouldn’t see things in such a clear-cut way and shouldn’t attribute the failings of one Muslim politician to others. There are evident trends, similarities, and commonalities, but that contention would be a decent compromise approach.
Unfortunately, while there are a handful of decent Muslim politicians in Britain, I can’t help but think that the highest-profile ones have let people with my name and background down. It’s no different than UKIPers being sceptical of a Conservative mayor, or Labour being sceptical of a Tory one.
Maybe I should run for London mayor on a UKIP ticket? Or maybe not.
Intelligence officials are comparing a newly discovered secret Islamic State document to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” as it blames Israel for the rise of the Islamic State and crowns U.S. President Barack Obama as the “Mule of the Jews.”
Found in Pakistan’s remote tribal region by American Media Institute (AMI), the 32-page Urdu language document promotes an “end of the world” battle as a final solution. It argues that the Islamic leader should be recognized as the sole ruler of the world’s 1 billion Muslims, under a religious empire called a “caliphate.”
“It reads like the caliphate’s own Mein Kampf,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who reviewed the document. “While the world is watching videos of beheadings and crucifixions in Iraq and Syria the Islamic State is moving into North Africa the Middle East, and now we see it has a strategy in South Asia. It’s a magician’s trick, watch this hand and you’ll never see what the other is doing.”
Retired U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Michael Flynn and other U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the authenticity of the document based on its unique markings, specific language used to describe leaders and the writing style and religious wording that matched other Islamic State records.
Flynn said the undated document, “A Brief History of the Islamic State Caliphate (ISC), The Caliphate According to the Prophet,” is a campaign plan that “lays out their intent, their goals and objectives, a red flag to which we must pay attention.”
The document serves as a Nazi-like recruiting pitch that attempts to unite dozens of factions of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban into a single army of terror. It includes a never-before-seen history of the Islamic State, details chilling future battle plans and urges al-Qaeda to join Islamic State.
Its tone is direct: “Accept the fact that this caliphate will survive and prosper until it takes over the entire world and beheads every last person that rebels against Allah. This is the bitter truth, swallow it.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal center for human rights who heads Center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project, compares the Islamic State threats in the document to the rise of Nazism pre-World War II.
The brutal killing of a teacher and three children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012 by an Algerian Islamist was a major signal to the Jewish community that Europe was no longer safe and that not enough was being done to curtail the rise of anti-semitism, he said.
“It’s important to remember what our founder, Wiesenthal said, ‘it often starts with the Jews but it never ends with the Jews,” Cooper said. “As a matter fact [Islamic State] did not create anti-semitism but they are taking advantage of it, and they are building on it.”
The document advocates creating a new terrorist army in Afghanistan and Pakistan to trigger a war in India and provoke an Armageddon-like confrontation with the United States. It also details Islamic State’s plot to attack U.S. soldiers as they withdraw from Afghanistan and target America diplomats and Pakistani officials and blames the rise of jihadi organizations on the establishment of Israel.
“No sooner had the British government relinquished control of Israel, Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jews, declared the independence of the State of Israel, triggering a global migration of Jews to the Jewish State, and launching the systematic persecution of Palestinian Muslims who had to abandon their homes and migrate,” the document states.
The document discloses the history of Islamic State dating back to the early 1990s and explains why in 2011 its leader, Abu Bakr al- Bagdhadi, unleashed car bombs to avenge Osama bin Laden’s death, and boasts about the suicide rates of American soldiers.
“Urban centers across Iraq exploded with car bombs and IED’s. The losses inflicted upon Americans, apostates, and heretics were unprecedented, as were the suicide rates amongst U.S soldiers,” the document states. “This state of affairs forced Mule of the Jews, U.S President Obama to announce an exit plan.”
The battle plan to “end the world” is described in six phases (three of which have already passed) – ripping pages from al-Qaeda’s original plans to defeat the west, in a graphic illustration of how ISIS sees itself as the true heirs to Osama Bin Laden’s legacy.
Phase 1 “Awakening” 2000-2003: Islamic State calls for “a major operation against the U.S. .. to provoke a crusade against Islam.”
Phase 2 “Shock and Awe” 2004 – 2006: Islamic State will lure U.S. into multiple theatres of war, including cyber-attacks and establish charities across the Muslim and Arab world to support terrorism.
Phase 3 “Self-reliance” 2007-2010: Islamic State will create “interference” with Iraq’s neighboring states with particular focus on Syria.
Phase 4 “Reaping/extortion/receiving” 2010-2013: Islamic State will attack “U.S and Western interests” to destroy their economy and replace the dollar with silver and gold and expose Muslim governments’ relations with Israel and the U.S.
Phase 5 Declaring the Caliphate 2013-2016: Not much details offered here. The document just says, “The Caliphate According to The Prophet.”
Phase 6, Open Warfare 2017-2020: Islamic State predicts faith will clash with non-believers and “Allah will grant victory to the believers after which peace will reign on earth.”
The document urges followers of al-Qaeda and the Taliban to join the Islamic State in overthrowing Arab governments who have relations with the U.S. and Israel, unlike al-Qaeda, which believed it was “important to weaken the U.S before launching an armed revolt in Arab states and establishing a caliphate.”
In response to the document, a senior ranking Israeli official said that in the Middle East the world faces two threats – from Islamic State and from Iran. “We need not strengthen one at the expense of the other. We need to weaken both and prevent the aggression and arming of both,” he warned.
Alistair Baskey, deputy spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council said Islamic State is being monitored “closely to see whether their emergence will have a meaningful impact on the threat environment in the region.”
The document builds on evidence that Islamic State is expanding into the region where the September 11 attacks were born. A united Taliban, backed by the hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenue now enjoyed by Islamic State, would be a “game-changer,” officials said.
The document warns that “preparations” for an attack in India are underway and predicts that an attack will provoke an apocalyptic confrontation with America: “Even if the U.S tries to attack with all its allies, which undoubtedly it will, the (entire global Muslim community) will be united, resulting in the final battle.”
A war in India would magnify Islamic State stature and threaten the stability of the region, said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution who served more than 30 years in the CIA. “Attacking in India is the Holy Grail of South Asian jihadists.”
Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry denied the presence of Islamic State in the region, calling it only “a potential threat.”
Unlike al-Qaida, whose focus was the United States and other western nations, the document said Islamic State leaders believe that’s the wrong strategic goal. “Instead of wasting energy in a direct confrontation with the U.S., we should focus on an armed uprising in the Arab world for the establishment of the caliphate,” the document said.
The failure to target the radical Islamic ideas has given the group breathing room to spread throughout the world much like Hitler did.
“We did a lousy job predicting what Hitler was going to do in the 1920s, 1930s – honestly, we blew it,” Cooper said. “It’s hard to take seriously or believe that such hatred was real or would be possible. They made jokes about Jews, degraded Jews but nobody believed that they would be capable of what they were saying. So now, when groups, like [Islamic State] come along and say they are going to do A B and C, you have to take them for their word.”
***
This is not the first revelation when it comes to Islamic State in Pakistan, such that who in the White House, the National Security Council or at the United Nations is really taking heed from 2014?
NBC: QUETTA, Pakistan — ISIS has created a 10-man “strategic planning wing” with a master plan on how to wage war against the Pakistani military, and is trying to join forces with local militants, according to a government memo obtained by NBC News.
Labeled “secret,” the memo was sent by the government of Balochistan, a southwestern province that borders Afghanistan, to authorities and intelligence officials across Pakistan last week. Akber Durrani, the province’s home secretary, called it “routine” and said Sunni militant group and its sympathizers do not have a stronghold there.
But the document suggests that ISIS has Pakistan in its cross-hairs, warning that the group aims to stir up sectarian unrest by dispatching the local militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi on offensives against Pakistan’s minority Shiite Muslim community, further destabilizing a country already battling Taliban and al Qaeda elements. Most Pakistanis are Sunni Muslims. Mistrust has existed between Shiites and Sunnis for around 1,400 years.
Secret letter sent by the government of Balochistan regarding ISIS activity in Pakistan. NBC News
ISIS has seized large areas of Syria and Iraq. It claims to have recruited 10,000 to 12,000 followers in tribal areas on the Afghan border, including in Hangu, which is known for hostility between Shiites and Sunnis, the memo says.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has claimed responsibility for violence against Shiites, and Sipa-e Muhammed, which has struck against Sunnis, were banned after 9/11.
Just days ago, the chief minister of Balochistan, Dr. Malik Baloch, told journalists he had no information about the presence of ISIS in the province. “However, there are fundamentalists whose approach is similar to that of ISIS,” he said.
The memo recommended “strict monitoring” of militants and “extreme vigilance” to ward off any attacks.
There have been other signs of ISIS flexing its muscles in the region. In late September, a pamphlet apparently made by the self-proclaimed caliphate was distributed among Afghan refugees in Pakistan exhorting them to pledge allegiance and lashing out against “America and the rest of the infidels.”In late September, ISIS-aligned militants launched a brutal offensive in Afghanistan alongside Taliban fighters that has left more than 100 people dead. Fifteen family members of local police officers were beheaded and at least 60 homes were set ablaze, officials said.
Sayeeda Hussain Warsi (left) resigned from Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, calling his Israel policy “morally indefensible.” Former Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman (center) fell due to corruption charges. MEP Amjad Bashir (right) was kicked out of UKIP for “grave” financial irregularities.
Humza Yousaf (left), a member of the Scottish parliament, was previously media spokesman for a radical Islamist charity. Labour MPs Shabana Mahmood (center) and Yasmin Qureshi (right) are more concerned with boycotting Israel than serving their constituents.
