Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience

ISIS Embedded in Urban Areas, Fake Passports

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Reuters: Honduras detains 5 Syrians heading for U.S. with stolen Greek passports-police

Honduran authorities have detained five Syrian nationals who were trying to reach the United States using stolen Greek passports, but there are no signs of any links to last week’s attacks in Paris, police said.

 

Check out this interactive graphic on Syrian refugee arrivals in the U.S., by the Reuters Graphics team. http://reut.rs/1OfytDd

‘420 potentially dangerous Islamists live in Germany’

Berlin, Nov 17 (IANS/EFE) Around 43,000 people are part of Islamist circles in Germany and around 420 are considered potentially dangerous, the president of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (or BKA) has said.

In an interview with Die Welt newspaper after the attacks in Paris, Holger Munch recalled that Islamist terrorism attacks European values, with Germany also in its sight.

As he noted, the coordinated work of the security forces has prevented 11 attacks in the country, but Paris has shown that the risk of international terrorism is “high” and that Germany may also be affected.

The jihadists, he explained, are younger than they were a few years ago and radicalized much faster; sometimes they spend a few months or a few weeks until a person decides to travel to Syria.

Many have criminal records behind them and often, before travelling abroad to join the jihadists, come into contact with Salafist groups in Germany.

According to data from the BKA, more than 750 Islamists have left Germany bound for Iraq and Syria and there is information about 70 people who have returned after receiving military training or combat experience.

 

French Prosecutor: 7 Hour Siege 5000 Rounds, Paris

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A dead dog too, sadly that was instrumental to the investigation and raid.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Top Suspect in Paris Attacks, Not Arrested in Morning Raid

  • NYT: The police stormed the Paris suburb of St.-Denis and arrested eight. At least two people died, including one who blew herself up.
  • The prosecutor said that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected of organizing Friday’s attacks, and another fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, were not among those arrested.
  • Everything we know about the attackers is here.
  • Here are profiles of some of the victims.

Details for Bataclan Attack Found on Cellphone in Paris Trash Can

A cellphone that could belong to one of the attackers was found in a trash can near the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, according to the French publications Le Monde and Mediapart.

Investigators found a detailed plan of the Bataclan assault and a text message sent at 9:42 p.m. on Friday that read, “On est parti on commence.” This can be translated as “Here we go, we’re starting,” or, more literally, “We have left, we’re starting.”

The identities of the sender and the recipient of the text message remained unclear.

Investigators told Le Monde that geolocation services on the phone led them to one of the places the attackers were last seen, in the Paris suburb of Alfortville.

French authorities kill 2, detain 7 terror suspects in violent raid

Here are the latest details related to the French police raid on suspected terrorists in a Paris suburb, as well as the larger fight involving ISIS and the West:

Latest developments:

• Officials have not yet identified the two dead in Wednesday’s raids in Saint-Denis, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said. Belgian state broadcaster RTBF reported that the woman who blew herself up during that operation is a cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader in Friday’s attacks in Paris.

Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam, who also was allegedly involved in last week’s bloodshed, are not among the seven detained in connection with that Saint-Denis operation, the prosecutor said.

• The Saint-Denis shootout began at 4:20 a.m. local time (10:20 p.m. ET Tuesday) and lasted nearly an hour, according to Molins.

• Three coordinated teams of commandos committed Friday’s Paris attacks, arriving nearly simultaneously at three locations, Molins said. Authorities have been able to identify five of the seven terrorists killed in that bloodshed.

Full story:

For the second time in a week, gunfire and explosions ripped through France on Wednesday — this time in an hours-long ordeal that ended with two terror suspects dead, seven detained, new attacks potentially thwarted and further proof, according to French President Francois Hollande, that his country is “at war” with ISIS.

Authorities zeroed in on a building in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis after picking up phone conversations indicating that a relative of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of last week’s bloody attacks, might be there, a Belgian counterterrorism official said. French police also believed Abaaoud himself was then still in the country, though they didn’t know exactly where.

By late Wednesday, the new question was whether or not he is even alive. Investigators are using DNA to analyze the body parts found in the Saint-Denis building where a female suspect first blew herself up and then French forces used powerful munitions to combat others, which led to one floor of the building collapsing.

Hollande was among those who offered congratulations to French police on the raid. Yet he also stressed that his country’s fight against terrorists, specifically those linked to ISIS, is anything but over. In fact, the violent nature of Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis is further proof that “we are at war,” Hollande said.

“What the terrorists were targeting was what France represents. This is what was attacked on the night of November 13th,” he said. “These barbarians targeted France’s diversity. It was the youth of France who were targeted simply because they represent life.”

Given this threat, Hollande said that Wednesday evening he would present legislation to extend France’s state of emergency for three more months — a measure that, among other things, gives authorities greater powers in conducting searches, holding people and dissolving certain groups.

The French President also said he’d appeal to world leaders — including meetings next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have been at odds on what to do in the ISIS stronghold of Syria — to form a wider coalition to go after the savage Islamist extremist group.

“There is no more … divide. There are only men and women of duty,” he said. “… We must destroy this army that menaces the entire world, not just some countries.”

‘We could see the bullets’

As France learned Friday — when a series of coordinated attacks left a trail of horror, sorrow and questions, with 129 dead and hundreds more wounded — terrorists act with savagery on their own schedule.

And those in Saint-Denis were “about to move on some kind of operation” again, police sources told CNN, adding that the Wednesday raid happened “just in time.”

Some 110 police swarmed on the diverse, working-class area that is home to the Stade de France sports stadium — where three suicide bombings took place days earlier. They first went into one apartment that had been under surveillance since Tuesday, a Paris police source said. That raid led them to another apartment on the same street.

The French police met fierce resistance when they entered the building, including the female suicide bomber — who Belgian state broadcaster RTBF claimed was Abaaoud’s cousin. They answered with powerful munitions of their own, a fact that produced piles of rubble interspersed with body parts, according to the Belgian counterterrorism official.

“We could see the bullets,” a woman, who identified herself only as Sabrine, told CNN affiliate France 2 of the drama. “We could feel the building shaking.”

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said there could end up being more than the two suspected terrorist deaths. As of Wednesday afternoon, seven suspects — including three in one apartment, the person who loaned the apartment to the suspected terrorists and his friend — ended up in custody from this operation alone. Two of them are hospitalized, Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told France Info radio.

Five French officers, meanwhile, were slightly wounded, while a police dog died in the operation, according to police.

Saadana Aymen, a 29-year-old who lives one street down, couldn’t believe what was happening in his neighborhood.

“When you think of Saint-Denis, you don’t think of terrorists,” he told CNN. “I’m shocked! Why would the terrorists pick this neighborhood?”

Phones offer clues

Yet Saint-Denis wasn’t the only place where French authorities fanned out Tuesday night into Wednesday, as part of their security clampdown.

The Interior Ministry announced in a statement that 118 searches led to the detention of at least 25 people, the confiscation of 34 weapons and the discovery of illicit drugs in 16 instances. This is on top of hundreds of similar operations conducted in recent days, which have resulted in 64 people being held and 118 put under house arrest.

Authorities have not yet laid out what connection any of these arrests have to Friday’s attacks. Yet counterterrorism and intelligence officials say that investigators have uncovered what could be a big break: cell phones believed to belong to the attackers.

According to the officials, one of the phones contained a message, sent sometime before the Friday attacks began, to the effect of: OK, we’re ready.

But cracking into their communication won’t be easy.

Investigators have found encrypted apps on the phones, which appear to have left no trace of messages or any indication of who would have been receiving them, according to officials briefed on the French investigation.

‘These are not regular people’

Seven attackers died during Friday night’s wave of violence, and an international arrest warrant is out for one suspect, Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman. The identity of the possible ninth suspect, seen in a video that shows two gunmen inside a black car and perhaps a third person driving the vehicle, is unknown.

Mohamed Abdeslam has urged his younger brother Salah, who was stopped but then let go en route to the Belgian border hours after the attacks, to turn himself into authorities. He acknowledged noticing Salah and another brother — 31-year-old Ibrahim, who is among the seven terrorists killed — had been adopting more radical views, though that didn’t mean the family isn’t shocked.

“My brother who participated in this terrorist act must have been psychologically ready to commit such an act. These are not regular people,” he told CNN.

“You cannot have the slightest doubt that they have been prepared, that they must not leave any trace which would cause suspicion that they might do such things. And even if you saw them every day, their behavior was quite normal.”

Official: Belgian authorities lost track of 2 suspects

Both Salah Abdeslam and Ibrahim were known to authorities: Belgian prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told CNN’s Ivan Watson police questioned the Abdeslam brothers in February. The brothers were released, the federal prosecutor said, after they denied wanting to go to Syria.

And Salah Abdeslam and Abaaoud served time together in a Belgian prison in 2011, when the former spent a month for an alleged theft, a Belgian federal prosecutor said.

Belgian authorities believe Abaaoud has spent previous months in Raqqa, the Syrian city that’s now the de facto capital of the Islamic State, or ISIS, a counterrrorism official in that European nation said. There, in Syria, Abaaoud is thought to have worked with several senior French figures in ISIS — members of the so-called Artigat network including Sabri Essid and Fabien Clain, whose voice can be heard on the claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks — to plot a series of attacks in France.

Already, Essid and Clain have been traced to an April plot to attack a Paris church and the August armed assault on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train that was thwarted by three Americans.

As to those behind the latest violence, Belgian authorities didn’t even know Abaaoud was back in Europe, according to the counterterrorism official. They’d also lost track of Salah Abdeslam.

And, the senior Belgian official said, the bombmaker who made the suicide vests used in Paris is also thought to still be at large.

What’s next for ISIS?

ISIS was born in Iraq and blossomed in Syria, taking advantage of the power vacuum from that country’s chaotic, years-long civil war. In the process, the militant group employed bold, ruthless and sometimes sadistic tactics — as evidenced by the taking of women and girls as sex slaves, broadcasting the beheading of journalists and aid workers, destroying centuries-old historic artifacts and massacring those who don’t subscribe to its twisted, extreme interpretation of Islam.

The group has managed to take over vast swaths of Iraq and Syria in this campaign. But it’s not content to stop there.

Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon and other nations have all been sites of ISIS-claimed attacks in recent months. The militant group has also boasted about bloodshed inside Europe, including January’s massacre on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

While some have faulted world leaders for not stepping up sooner, there has been a more concerted effort of late. The United States conducted airstrikes for months, which U.S. Army Col. Steven Warren estimated have killed at least one mid- to high-level ISIS figure every day since May. More recently, Russia has stepped into the fray, in part, to support its longtime ally Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s embattled President.

Then there’s Turkey, whose involvement has been complicated by the fact that its longtime adversaries, the Kurds, have been fighting against ISIS. On Wednesday, the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported that Turkish police had detained eight ISIS-linked suspects who’d arrived at an Istanbul airport from Casablanca. The eight Moroccans said they had booked a hotel in Turkey and were preparing to head to Germany — via Greece, Serbia and Hungary — the report added, pointing to a document — seized by police — that detailed the travel route.

France has been part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS for months. But it has enhanced its role — symbolically and in practice — in the wake of the latest Paris attacks. And Hollande says that the arrival of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle within striking distance of Syria will triple France’s capacity to conduct airstrikes.

And, despite their differing stances on Syria’s future and other matters, Russia’s armed forces are ready to organize joint military operations with the French navy “to combat terrorists in Syria,” Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, citing army official Andrey Kartapolov.

WH Refuses Governors Information on Refugees

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Governors Press White House for Refugee Information

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In a call with senior Obama administration officials Tuesday evening, several governors demanded they be given access to information about Syrian refugees about to be resettled by the federal government in their states. Top White House officials refused.

Over a dozen governors from both parties joined the conference call, which was initiated by the White House after 27 governors vowed not to cooperate with further resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states. The outrage among governors came after European officials revealed that one of the Paris attackers may have entered Europe in October through the refugee process using a fake Syrian passport. (The details of the attacker’s travels are still murky.)

The administration officials on the call included White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, State Department official Simon Henshaw, FBI official John Giacalone, and the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center John Mulligan.

On the call several Republican governors and two Democrats — New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and California’s Jerry Brown — repeatedly pressed administration officials to share more information about Syrian refugees entering the United States. The governors wanted notifications whenever refugees were resettled in their states, as well as access to classified information collected when the refugees were vetted.

“There was a real sense of frustration from all the governors that there is just a complete lack of transparency and communication coming from the federal government,” said one GOP state official who was on the call.

The administration officials, led by McDonough, assured the governors that the vetting process was thorough and that the risks of admitting Syrian refugees could be properly managed. He added that the federal government saw no reason to alter the current method of processing refugees.

Florida governor Rick Scott asked McDonough point blank if states could opt out of accepting refugees from Syria. McDonough said no, the GOP state official said.

In a readout of the call Tuesday night, the White House said that several governors “expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to better understand the process and have their issues addressed.” The White House noted that “others encouraged further communication” from the administration about the resettlement of refugees.

Hassan, one of two Democrats to challenge the administration on the call, had already come out in favor of halting the flow of Syrian refugees to the United States. She expressed anger that state officials aren’t notified when Syrian refugees are resettled in their territory.

Brown said he favored continuing to admit Syrian refugees but wanted the federal government to hand over information that would allow states to keep track of them, the GOP state official said.

McDonough responded to Brown that there was currently no process in place to give states such information and the administration saw no reason to change the status quo. The non-governmental organizations that help resettle the refugees would have such information.

Brown countered by noting that state law enforcement agencies have active investigations into suspected radicals and that information about incoming Syrian refugees could help maintain their awareness about potential radicalization. He suggested the U.S. had to adjust the way it operates in light of the Paris attacks.

McDonough reiterated his confidence in the current process. While promising to consider what Brown and other senators had said, he emphasized that the administration had no plans to increase information sharing on refugees with states as of now.

Top GOP senators echoed the concerns of governors Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr joined House Speaker Paul Ryan’s call for a “pause” in the flow of Syrian refugees, which is intended to include 10,000 people by 2016. McConnell said “the ability to vet people coming from that part of the world is really quite limited.”

Democratic senators are split on the issue. Senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday there may be a need for a pause in accepting Syrian refugees but they both wanted to hear more from the administration about the issue. Sen. Dick Durbin said that refugees aren’t the primary source of concern. He pointed to the millions of foreign visitors who enter America each year.

“Background checks need to be redoubled in terms of refugees but if we’re talking about threats to the United States, let’s put this in perspective,” he said. “Let us not just single out the refugees as the potential source of danger in the United States.”

The White House is trying hard to engage governors and lawmakers. Top administration officials held several briefings about the issue Tuesday on Capitol Hill. But if they don’t agree to share more with state and local politicians, the opposition to accepting Syrian refugees could quickly gain ground.

*** Meanwhile Speaker Ryan asked DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and FBI Director James Comey for a Paris briefing. It happened behind closed doors, and did not go well.

TheHill:

Partisan divisions over continuing to allow refugees fleeing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) into the U.S. deepened Tuesday as Obama administration officials briefed the House on last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and FBI Director James Comey offered House members a classified briefing following the Friday massacre in the French capital that killed more than 120. Senators are expected to be briefed Wednesday. Johnson said he reviewed the domestic security “enhancements” enacted in recent days following the attacks in Paris.

He further maintained that the U.S. should continue allowing vetted Syrian refugees into the country despite calls from Republicans to halt the program in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.
“I believe that a lot of countries in the world right now are looking to the United States for leadership,” Johnson told reporters after the briefing.
“It is a careful, time-consuming process. And we are committed to continuing that process with regard to Syrian refugees,” he said.
Intelligence and law enforcement officials have previously warned about “gaps” in the data that they can scan to screen refugees headed to the U.S.
On Tuesday, Republicans indicated that Johnson and Comey had not quelled their concerns about those blind spots.
The House plans to vote Thursday on legislation to require refugees from Syria and Iraq to undergo FBI background checks. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI would further have to verify that the refugees do not pose security threats.
Both chambers are expected to adjourn Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday recess, adding pressure on lawmakers to act quickly before they depart Washington.
There is “really very little information about these refugees’ past,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said after the briefing.
“You don’t know who they are and you don’t have anything about their past, in terms of intelligence or databases,” McCaul said.
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said Syrian refugees presented a risk because they “come from a terrorist country, where there’s a large amount of ISIS and al Qaeda.”
King also said he thought allowing visa waivers to Europeans who travel to the U.S. was ”definitely something that has to be looked at, because circumstances have changed.”
Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) concluded: “I’m leaving this briefing far less comfortable than when I came in the first place.”
Democrats are largely standing by the president’s plan, arguing that the rigorous screening process ought to account for any gaps in security.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) emerged as one notable exception, but it appeared unlikely that any prominent House Democrats would join him in his concern.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said refugees coming into the U.S. are “very thoroughly vetted.”
“It takes two years, most times, to come through this process,” said Smith, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.
“It’s worth noting that the evidence at this point — aside from this one mysterious passport, which hasn’t been attributed to anybody — that the people who committed the attacks in France were all born in France or Belgium,” he added.
As both sides dig in, however, the effort seems destined to be largely partisan.
“Anything constructive would be welcome,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “But I think there would be a lot of resistance within the Democratic caucus on an effort to close the door on mothers and children who are fleeing the violence around the world. “
Asked whether he was concerned about Republicans potentially trying to halt the refugee program through an upcoming government spending bill, Johnson noted that the agency that vets refugee applications isn’t subject to the congressional appropriations process.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is funded through application fees.
“It’s an organization that pays for itself,” Johnson said.

AG Lynch, Law Prevents Gitmo Detainees in U.S.

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Yippee Skippee…..Loretta Lynch got one right it testimony.

Attorney general: Law ‘does not allow’ Gitmo detainees in the US
The Hill:  The Obama administration is legally prohibited from bringing detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the U.S., Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged on Tuesday, even as the White House searches for ways to close the facility.

“With respect to individuals being transferred to the United States, the law currently does not allow that,” Lynch told the House Judiciary Committee. “That is not, as I am aware of, going to be contemplated, given the legal prescriptions.

“Certainly it is the position of the Department of Justice that we would follow the law of the land in regard on that issue.”
The attorney general noted that President Obama has said he will sign a new defense policy bill that includes additional restrictions on Guantanamo Bay, including new limits on where men at the detention camp can be sent abroad.

Still, Lynch maintained that closing the 13-year-old detention facility “is something that is a part of the administration’s policy.”

“The Department of Justice is committed to fully following that, and the closure of Guantanamo Bay is being carried out in compliance with that law,” she added.

Despite Lynch’s comments, the Obama administration is actively looking for places in Colorado and other states to relocate dozens of detainees from the facility, as part of its broader effort to close the detention facility. Of the 107 men detained at Guantanamo Bay, 48 have been cleared for release to other countries and the administration hopes they will be placed abroad.

This weekend, five Yemeni detainees at the facility were transferred to the United Arab Emirates.

The remaining detainees would need to be placed somewhere in the U.S. The list of possible facilities includes a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado, as well as Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C.

The president is believed to be releasing a formal plan to close Guantanamo Bay in coming weeks. It is sure to be met with vigorous opposition from Republicans, who worry that it would both entail releasing dozens of dangerous terrorists as well as endanger the communities surrounding the prisons of those who are reincarcerated.

“We would expect that to come relatively soon,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said on Friday.

On Tuesday, Lynch told the House panel that no one had ever escaped out of a super-maximum security prison, which Democrats have used as evidence to support the president’s plan.

“I do not believe anyone has escaped from Supermax,” she said.

Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), however, worried that the locations could nonetheless be placed on terrorists’ hit lists.

“If you brought terrorists from Guantanamo Bay and located them in a particular city in the United States, would it not be reasonable to conclude that that would enhance the likelihood that that city could be placed on one of these lists?” Forbes asked.

Further, Lynch was asked questions on refugees and email servers.

UPI: Lynch was asked about other issues during the hearing — such as police-related deaths, radical terrorism, the IRS investigation and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was chief of the U.S. Department of State.

Lynch also discussed a recent plan by the administration to admit a number of Syrian refugees into the United States to aid in the European migrant crisis.

“Not only the Department of Justice but all of our agencies will make every effort to vet every refugee coming into this country,” she said. “Certainly there are challenges to that process.

“We do have the benefit of having that significant and robust screening process in place — a process that Europe has not been able to set up, which renders them much more vulnerable.”

The question and answer session followed a speech delivered by Lynch, which outlined Justice Department achievements and priorities.

“Our highest priority must always be the security of our homeland, and we are acting aggressively to defuse threats as they emerge,” she said. “We remain focused on the threat posed by domestic extremists.”

ISIS has Better Foreigners Control than the U.S.

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Confessions of an ISIS Spy

Michael Weiss  

DailyBeast: He joined the self-proclaimed Islamic State, trained jihadist infantry, and groomed foreign operatives—including a pair of Frenchmen. And now, Abu Khaled says he is ready to talk.
For all the attention paid to ISIS, relatively little is known about its inner workings. But a man claiming to be a member of the so-called Islamic State’s security services has stepped forward to provide that inside view. This series is based on days of interviews with this ISIS spy.

Part One: An Appointment in Istanbul

ISTANBUL — It took some convincing, but the man we’ll call Abu Khaled finally came to tell his story. Weeks of discussion over Skype and WhatsApp had established enough of his biography since last we’d encountered each other, in the early, more hopeful days of the Syrian revolution. He had since joined the ranks of the so-called Islamic State and served with its “state security” branch, the Amn al-Dawla, training jihadist infantry and foreign operatives. Now, he said, he had left ISIS as a defector—making him a marked man. But he did not want to leave Syria, and The Daily Beast was not about to send me there to the kidnap and decapitation capital of the world. I had met him often enough in Syria’s war zones in the past, before the rise of ISIS, to think I might trust him. But not that much. “Lucky for you, the Americans don’t pay ransoms,” he ventured, after the two of us began to grow more relaxed around each other and the question of ISIS hostage-taking inevitably came up. He said he was joking.

I knew from our digital parlays that, if he were telling the truth, he had extraordinary, granular information about the way ISIS operates: who is really in charge, how they come and go, what divisions there are in the ranks of the fighters and the population. Abu Khaled saw firsthand, he said, what amounted to the colonial arrogance of Iraqi and other foreign elites in the ISIS leadership occupying large swaths of his Syrian homeland. He was in a position to explain the banality of the bureaucracy in a would-be state, and the extraordinary savagery of the multiple security services ISIS has created to watch the people, and to watch each other. He could also tell me why so many remain beholden to a totalitarian cult which, far from shrinking from its atrocities and acts of ultra-violence, glories in them.

An injured man hugs an injured woman after an explosion during a peace march in Ankara, Turkey, October 10, 2015.

Abu Khaled had worked with hundreds of foreign recruits to the ISIS banner, some of whom had already traveled back to their home countries as part of the group’s effort to sow clandestine agents among its enemies.

But Abu Khaled didn’t want to leave his wife and an apartment he’d just acquired in the suburbs of embattled Aleppo. He didn’t want to risk the long journey to this Turkish port city. Since he’d bailed out of ISIS, he said, he’d been busy building his own 78-man katiba, or battalion, to fight his former jihadist comrades.

All very interesting, I answered, but still we would have to meet face to face, even if that meant both of us taking calculated risks.

The worst terrorist bombing in modern Turkish history had just been carried out by ISIS operatives in the streets of Ankara, killing over 100 people in a NATO country, reinforcing yet again one of the core ideological conceits of the putative caliphate: Borders are obsolete, and ISIS can get to you anywhere, as it wants everyone to know. There was at least a possibility Abu Khaled was still a spy for ISIS, and that he was part of an operation to collect new hostages.

A fighter seen in front of a burning vehicle in Raqqa.
Hamid Khatib/Reuters

For Abu Khaled, assuming he was telling me the truth, the risks were much greater. ISIS might track him all the way into the “Land of Unbelief” and deal with him there. Indeed, it did just that with two Syrian activists from Raqqa, who were beheaded in Sanliurfa at the end of October. And there were agents Abu Khaled had trained himself who had left Syria and Iraq for work “behind enemy lines.”

“When you’re in the secret service, everything is controlled,” he told me. “You can’t just leave Islamic State territory.” It would be especially hard for him because all the border was controlled by the state security apparatus he had served. “I trained these guys! Most of them knew me.”

“I can’t go, Mike,” he said more than once as we spoke for hours, long-distance. “I’m kafir now,” an infidel, a non-believer in the view of the caliphate. “I was Muslim and now I’m kafir. You can’t go back, from Muslim to kafir, back to Muslim again.” The price you pay is death.

Given the circumstances, it seemed possible, even preferable, that he leave Syria for good, and bring his wife to Istanbul, so they could make their way eventually to Europe. But he refused even to consider such a thing. Abu Khaled told me he was prepared to die in Syria. “You have to die somewhere,” he said. “People die in bed more than people who die in wars. What if something like this happened to your country? Are you willing to die for your country, the next generation, or do you run away?”

All this sounded persuasive, but to get at what Abu Khaled knew with any confidence, I had to have the chance to question him again and again. He had to be asked about any contradictions in his account. I had to see his body language, his twitches, his tells. And that could only be done in person.

Militant Islamist fighters ride horses as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Raqqa.
Reuters

***

I asked Abu Khaled: Did you warn anyone about these two Frenchmen? “Yes,” he responded.

Abu Khaled eventually relented. He borrowed about $1,000 to make the long, 750-mile journey by car and bus from Aleppo to Istanbul, and then back again. We met at the end of October. And so for three long days, in the cafés, restaurants, and boulevards of a cosmopolis, on the fault line between Europe and the Middle East, I watched him through the haze of smoke as he lit one cigarette after another, and sipped his bitter Turkish coffee, and looked me in the eye. And Abu Khaled sang.

“All my life, OK, I’m Muslim, but I’m not into Sharia or very religious,” he said early in our conversation. “One day, I looked in the mirror at my face. I had a long beard. I didn’t recognize myself. It was like Pink Floyd. ‘There’s somebody in my head but it’s not me.’”

Not many recovering jihadists have a word-perfect recall for “Brain Damage.” But Abu Khaled is not a fresh young fanatic anxious for martyrdom, he is a well-educated multilingual Syrian national of middle age whose talents, including his past military training, the ISIS leadership had found useful.

In his novel Money, Martin Amis describes a character’s face as having “areas of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and boneshadow you’re bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century.” Abu Khaled’s face, now shorn of the long beard he’d been made to grow, bore all the signs of someone who’d already hung out too long in the 21st. He looked haggard and beaten.

Like many of his compatriots, he’d spent a large part of a war that has gone on for half a decade based in southern Turkey. He joined ISIS on Oct. 19, 2014, he said, about a month after the U.S.-led coalition’s Operation Inherent Resolve expanded its aerial bombardment campaign to Raqqa, the eastern province where ISIS keeps its “capital.”

Reuters

Abu Khaled felt compelled to sign up because he believed America was an accomplice to global conspiracy, led by Iran and Russia, to keep the tyrant Bashar al-Assad in power. How else could it be explained that the U.S. was waging war only against Sunnis, and leaving an Alawite-run regime guilty of mass murder by almost every means and its Iranian Shia armies untouched?

“The most important thing,” Abu Khaled said, “is that they are trying to make sleeper cells all over the world.”

Also, Abu Khaled was curious. “I went there practically as an adventure,” he said. “I wanted to see what kind of people were there. Honestly, I don’t regret it. I wanted to know them. Now they are my enemy—and I know them very well.”

The procedure that took him into ISIS ranks was thoroughly organized. He approached a checkpoint at the Turkish-Syrian border town of Tal Abyad when it was in ISIS’s hands. “They asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘Raqqa.’ They asked me why. I told them I wanted to join ISIS. They checked my luggage.”

Once in Raqqa he had to go to the “Homs embassy,” the name for the ISIS administrative building where all Syrians had to apply. He spent two days there, after which he was transferred to what was called the “Border Administration Department.” All this in his own country, which ISIS informed him no longer existed.

“They considered me an immigrant because I had been living outside the caliphate.” So Abu Khaled had to be “naturalized” first, and had to pass a citizenship interview conducted by an Iraqi named Abu Jaber.

“Why do you want to become a holy warrior?” he was asked. He said something perfunctory about fighting the crusader-infidels, he recalls. Apparently it passed Abu Jaber’s smell test.

A man holds up a knife as he rides on the back of a motorcycle touring the streets of Tabqa city with others in celebration after Islamic State militants took over Tabqa air base, in nearby Raqqa.
Reuters

The next stage was indoctrination: “I went to Sharia court for two weeks. You have to go take classes. They teach you how to hate people.” Abu Khaled laughed. He was taught the ISIS version of Islam—that non-Muslims have to be killed because they are the enemy of the Islamic community. “It’s brainwashing,” he said.

“They asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘Raqqa.’ They asked me why. I told them I wanted to join ISIS. They checked my luggage.”

The clerics responsible for this indoctrination were know-nothing striplings from foreign countries. “There was one guy I remember from Libya, maybe he was in his mid-twenties.” What kind of Islamic authority could someone so young have, Abu Khaled wondered. And where were all the Syrians?

***

In his first weeks with ISIS, Abu Khaled met Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Venezuelans, Trinidadians, Americans, and Russians—all freshly arrived to “remain and expand,” as the ISIS mantra goes, and to be custodians of the one true faith.

As might be expected, new additions to this jihadist internationale don’t have even conversational Arabic, so a polyglot volunteer, such as Abu Khaled, is particularly valued. He has fluent Arabic, English, and French, and was therefore seized upon right away as an interpreter. “I had two groups,” he said. “On the left I had the French and was translating from Arabic to French; on the right I had the Americans, translating from Arabic into English.”

As part of its agitprop, ISIS often shows its muhajireen, or foreign fighters, setting their passports ablaze in a ritual designed to demonstrate that there’s no going back. Whether from Bruges or Baton Rouge, they have all repudiated their nationality in Dar al-Harb, the land of war and depravity and godlessness, in order to become inhabitants of Dar al-Islam, the land of faith and peace (once it finishes fighting wars). But this is mostly for show. Previously, most new arrivals either kept their passports or “handed them over.” To whom? “Human Resources,” said Abu Khaled.

But that relatively relaxed personnel policy has changed in recent days. ISIS is increasingly restrictive and controlling as it has begun to lose battles, some of them at tremendous cost.

Smoke and flames rise following an explosion in the Syrian town of Kobani on October 20, 2014.
Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

Before the fight for the Kurdish town of Kobani last year, the caliphate had an aura of invincibility, and people from around the world were rushing to envelop themselves in the black flag of messianic victory. But in that battle, which lasted for months, Kurdish paramilitaries backed by U.S. airpower fought well, while ISIS—at least as far as Abu Khaled characterizes it—needlessly sent thousands to their slaughter, without any tactical, much less strategic, forethought. The jihadist army had lost between 4,000 and 5,000 fighters, most of them non-Syrians.

Confessions of an ISIS Spy

Part I: An Appointment in Istanbul
Part II: Spies Like ISIS
Part III: Coming Friday
Part IV: Coming Saturday

“Double this number are wounded and can’t fight anymore,” Abu Khaled told me. “They lost a leg or a hand.” Immigrants, then, are requisitioned as cannon fodder? He nodded. In September of last year, at the apogee of ISIS’s foreign recruitment surge, he says the influx of foreigners amazed even those welcoming them in. “We had like 3,000 foreign fighters who arrived every day to join ISIS. I mean, every day. And now we don’t have even like 50 or 60.”

This sudden shortfall has led to a careful rethinking by ISIS high command of how inhabitants outside of Syria and Iraq can best serve the cause. “The most important thing,” Abu Khaled said, “is that they are trying to make sleeper cells all over the world.” The ISIS leadership has “asked people to stay in their countries and fight there, kill citizens, blow up buildings, whatever they can do. You don’t have to come.”

Some of the jihadists under Abu Khaled’s tutelage have already left al-Dawla, the state, as he puts it, and gone back to their nations of origin. He mentioned two Frenchmen in their early 30s. What were their names? Abu Khaled claimed not to know. “We don’t ask these kinds of questions. We are all ‘Abu Something.’ Once you start asking about personal histories, this is the ultimate red flag.”

Following the Paris terrorist attacks on Nov. 13, which occurred almost a month after our meeting in Turkey, I contacted Abu Khaled. Now back in Aleppo, he told me that he was fairly certain that one or both of these French nationals were involved in some way in the coordinated assault, the worst atrocity to befall France since World War II, which has killed at least 132 and left almost as many critically wounded. He says he’s now waiting to see their photographs published in the international press.

In the meantime, he volunteered their physical descriptions. The first was a North African, possibly from Algeria or Morocco, bald, of average height and weight. The other was a short, blond-haired, blue-eyed Frenchman, very likely a convert to Islam, who had a wife and a 7-year-old son.

It seemed like the kind of information that those looking to counter ISIS would find useful. So I asked Abu Khaled: Did you warn anyone about these two? “Yes,” he responded, and left it at that.