New Govt. Report on Terrorist Travel, Recruitment, and Encrypted Communication

More than 250 Americans are going overseas to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other terrorist groups and the United States has largely failed to stop most of them, in part, because it lacks a national strategy, the House Homeland Security Committee said in a new bipartisan report released Sept. 29.

"Of the hundreds of Americans who have sought to travel to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq, authorities have only interdicted a fraction of them," the report (pdf) said. "Several dozen have also managed to make it back into America."

The report listed a number of findings that lawmakers have warned about previously such as the tactic of "broken travel" in which foreign fighters travel to the Middle East through different routes rather than directly flying there. Lawmakers also have lamented about the lack of information sharing from other countries, especially in Europe, regarding terrorist suspects.

Foreign fighters have become a worldwide issue with the Islamic State's rise to power. The report said more than 25,000 foreign fighters, including 4,500 Westerners, from more than 100 countries have traveled or attempted to travel to the battlefields in Syria and Iraq where the terrorist group, also known as ISIS, has declared the establishment of a caliphate. The report said these foreign fighters pose a serious threat to the U.S. and others.

"Even if they do not return home to plot attacks, foreign fighters have taken the lead in recruiting a new generation of terrorists and are seeking to radicalize Westerners online to spread terror back home," the report noted.

Appointed by House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), an eight-member task force issued 32 key findings, in all, with accompanying recommendations in the report about countering foreign fighters and jihadist recruiters.

One of the report's major findings was that the federal government lacks a national strategy to address terrorist travel. More specifically, it said that a 2006 strategy developed as a result of 9/11 Commission recommendation is "woefully outdated."

"While [the 2006 strategy] provided a thorough overview of U.S. efforts to keep extremists from crossing borders, some of those programs have changed or are now defunct, and new ones have been created," the committee report said. "The evolving threat environment has also made the document obsolete. For instance, the strategy makes no mention of foreign fighters or the challenges associated with extremists' social media recruiting."

Task force members also said they were repeatedly told about the "unprecedented speed" of Americans being radicalized – from "the time between an individual's first encounter with extremist propaganda to when they are prepared to act on it." The scope and magnitude of this terrorist recruitment effort, the report said, is straining law enforcement worldwide, but also here in the United States.

"While the circumstance are not quite as dire here, the threat environment certainly has put strain on U.S. authorities, especially at the FBI. The FBI director now says the agency is investigating ISIS supporters in all 50 states," the report said.

It recommended that federal authorities rely more on state and local agencies to help them manage the increasing amount of counterterrorism cases.

Another problem that the report highlighted was the use of secure websites and apps that jihadist recruiters use to securely communicate with Americans, making it more difficult for authorities to disrupt plots. U.S. officials and terrorist experts have said that the Islamic State has deftly used social media like Twitter and other electronic means to create and disperse messages that are especially attractive to younger individuals.
The report said it was "especially concerning" that terrorists use freely available encrypted messaging tools to hide illegal activities and hatch plots to kill Americans.

It also said some companies can't even comply with lawful warrants to access communications because of built-in security and encryption, an allusion to Apple and Google that have said their smartphones, by default, would be encrypted and could only be unlocked by their owners. FBI Director James Comey has been vocal that this encryption would severely hamper investigations into criminal and terrorist activities.

"We are not satisfied these challenges have been discussed as thoroughly and openly as they should be," the report said. "Law enforcement and technology companies seem to be talking past each other, and no sustained dialogue has been established on the subject between key parties, including Congress, law enforcement, and private industry."

Several other points raised by the report include developing initiatives across the country to raise the awareness of foreign-fighter recruitment and implementing community strategies to help spot and prevent individuals from becoming radicalized.

http://www.fiercehomelandsecurity.com/story/new-report-recommends-us-strategy-prevent-americans-traveling-overseas-figh/2015-10-01?utm_campaign=SocialMedia

Leading Iraqi cleric urges wider war against Islamic State

Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite cleric called for a global war against Islamic State on Friday, a day after the prime minister said he would welcome Russian air strikes against the group on Iraqi soil.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has a huge following and can often influence government thinking, was speaking through an aide after nationally televised Friday prayers.
"Battle with Daesh is destined for all Iraqis," said Sistani, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
"But it's not their battle alone but the whole world, because terrorists target with their dark ideology all humanity, its culture and morals."

He added: "It's essential to join together all efforts and expand the parameters of countering this movement"

The United States has led air strikes against Islamic State in Iraq, as well as in Syria, for more than a year, but Baghdad has repeatedly called for engagement and air support for Iraqi forces trying to regain territory against the ultra-hardline Sunni group.

Russia began bombing raids in Syria on Wednesday against groups fighting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, which include Islamic State.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Thursday his government would welcome Russian air strikes against IS in Iraq, and was receiving information from both Syria and Russia on the group.

Abadi, asked by France 24 television whether he had discussed air strikes with Russia in his country, said: ""Not yet". He added: "It is a possibility. If we get the offer we will consider it and I would welcome it."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Moscow was not planning to expand its air strikes to Iraq.

Iraq's military joint operations command said on Sept. 27 its officials were cooperating on intelligence and security in Baghdad with Russia, Iran and Syria to counter the threat from Islamic State.

Iraqi officials have suggested this cooperation would focus on countering the threat from Islamic State in Syria.

Iraqi officials said the agreement to share intelligence with Russia did not mean the United States would lose influence with the Baghdad government.

But diplomats and officials said Abadi may use the growing Russian presence as leverage to secure greater American cooperation, including weapons from Washington.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/leading-iraqi-cleric-urge/2165796.html

Syria conflict: Russia defends air strikes

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has defended his country's air strikes in Syria, saying they were targeting the same "terrorist" groups as the US-led coalition.

He rejected suggestions that Russian action was to bolster Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Russian jets carried out a second day of air strikes in Syria on Thursday.

But a US official said Russia had been isolated by its "indiscriminate" strikes against the Syrian opposition.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that if Russia was genuinely focused on fighting Islamic State (IS) it would contribute to the US-led coalition.

The strikes risk drawing Russia more deeply into the conflict, he added.

The Russian defence ministry said five sites were attacked on Thursday and an IS command post at Jisr al-Shughour was destroyed.

The Kremlin says it is acting on the request of the Syrian government to help combat IS militants - who have seized parts of Syria and Iraq - and other designated terrorist groups.

But the US and its allies fear the strikes have mainly targeted opponents of Russia's ally, President Assad.

Mr Lavrov, speaking at the UN in New York, said Russia would fight IS and other terrorist groups including the al-Nusra Front - an al-Qaeda affiliate.

He said this position was the same as the US-led coalition which has been carrying out air strikes in Iraq and Syria for several months.

"We are not supporting anyone against their own people. We fight terrorism," he said.

"As far as I understand it, the [US-led] coalition announced Isil (IS) and other associated groups as the enemy. And the coalition does the same as Russia does."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34416978

Bahrain unearths huge weapons and explosives haul

Bahrain has suffered several years of simmering unrest

Bahrain says it has uncovered one of the biggest finds of explosives and weapons since violence erupted there in 2011. 

Police say 1.4 tonnes of high-grade explosives were found in an underground vault south of the capital Manama along with rifles and hand grenades.

Bahrain has been coping with low-level unrest since the Arab Spring protests.

The government has been accused of human rights abuses but insurgents have recently launched attacks on police.


The interior ministry said the material had been seized in the Nuwaidrat district and matched explosive traces found at a series of recent attacks in the Gulf state.

"The facility had been adapted to accommodate an elaborate network of hidden underground bunkers and an above-ground manufacturing operation," the statement said.

Police said they had made "a number" of arrests without giving details.

Police chief Maj Gen Tarik Al-Hassan told the BBC that a workshop was also discovered with machinery for making mines and other bombs and that a large amount of digital evidence had been taken away for analysis.

He said the perpetrators were linked to elements in Iran and Iraq and that the facility would have taken months to build.

Iran has denied any involvement in violence in Bahrain.

Bahrain's majority Shia Muslim population has long demanded greater political representation from the ruling Sunni monarchy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34405303
 

Saudi Arabia demands Russia end Syria raids, criticises Iran

Saudi Arabia, a leading foe of President Bashar al-Assad, demanded his ally Russia end its raids on Syria, saying the strikes had caused civilian casualties while failing to target the hardline Islamic State militants Moscow says it opposes.

In remarks at the United Nations in New York, a senior Saudi diplomat suggested both Russia and Assad's other main ally Iran could not claim to fight Islamic State "terrorism" at the same time as supporting the "terrorism" of the Syrian authorities.

Saudi ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi expressed "profound concern regarding the military operations which Russian forces have carried out in Homs and Hama today, places where ISIS forces are not present. These attacks led to a number of innocent victims. We demand it stop immediately and not recur."

"As for those countries that have claimed recently to join in the fight against ISIS terrorism, they can’t do that at the same time as they support the terrorism of the Syrian regime and its terrorist foreign allies like Hezbollah and the Quds Force and other terrorist sectarian groups," he added in comments broadcast by Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television.

ISIS is a common acronym for Islamic State, also known as ISIL. Lebanon's Hezbollah Shi'ite militia openly fights on behalf of Assad's government, and the Quds Force, part of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, is also widely believed to be aiding Damascus.

Russia on Wednesday launched its first air strikes in Syria since the country's civil war began in 2011, giving an hour's notice to the United States, which has led a coalition of Western allies and regional states flying missions for a year.

Russia's move looks likely to chill a tentative detente begun this year between Russia and Saudi Arabia despite their backing for opposing sides in Syria's conflict and their differences over the issue of Iran's nuclear programme.

In June, the atmosphere appeared to improve when Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman led a delegation of Saudi officials to Moscow and signed military and energy agreements.

The trip raised speculation about closer ties between the two countries. But that prospect now appears in question.

In an interview with al-Hayat newspaper published on Thursday, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said the two countries had many common interests on which to develop ties, but he noted continuing "lack of agreement" on Syria.

"I visited Russia, as did other Gulf officials. You know of the (positive) atmosphere that prevailed two months ago," Jubeir was quoted as saying. "But all of a sudden Russia stepped up its military role in Syria and announced its political position backing Assad."

Riyadh is still smarting over a Russian-Chinese veto in February 2012 of a U.N. Security Resolution drafted by the Saudis and backed by the West that Assad should step down.

It remains unclear whether Gulf Arab states would want the Syrian rebels they fund to engage Russian forces in battle - a prospect that would further upset the regional balance of power.

"The solution (in Syria) does not depend on Russia,” Jubeir told al-Hayat. “The principle is, firstly, that there is no role for Bashar al-Assad in Syria's future. The second principle is to maintain the civil and military institutions in Syria in order to avoid chaos."

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/saudi-arabia-demands-russ/2163278.html

A third point was to form a transitional council of all Syrians to help Syria move to a new stage, he said.

Tunisia seizes arms, papers with Islamic State symbol near Libyan border

Tunisian troops seized arms and documents bearing the symbol of Islamic State from two cars near the Libyan border, as security tightened following two major attacks this year, officials said on Thursday.

"Troops seized 10 Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades, explosives, Libyan telephones cards and documents" in Wednesday's incident, an official in Tunisia's Interior Ministry told Reuters.

The vehicles themselves were rigged as car bombs. The cars were dismantled, the official said.
In March, Islamist gunmen killed 21 tourists in an attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and 38 foreigners were killed in an assault on a Sousse beach hotel in June. Islamic state claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Last month, Tunisian authorities warned of possible car bombings in Tunis and banned traffic in parts of the city after getting intelligence reports about potential attacks in the capital.

Tunisia's government last July also started building a wall along its border with Libya to stop Islamist militants slipping across the frontier from training camps in Libya, where Islamic State has gained ground in the country's chaos.

Four years after its uprising ousted autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and inspired the "Arab Spring" protests, Tunisia has a new constitution, free elections and a coalition government with secular and Islamist parties.

But more than 3,000 Tunisians have left to fight for Islamist militant groups in Syria, Iraq and neighboring Libya. Some of those jihadists have threatened to return home and carry out attacks on Tunisian soil.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/tunisia-seizes-arms-pape/2163008.html

Russia’s First Strikes in Syria Hit U.S. Ally, Not Islamic State

Barack Obama’s administration said Wednesday that it doesn’t know whom Russia is bombing inside Syria. Rebel leaders on the ground there say they know precisely whom Moscow is targeting — and it isn’t the Islamic State.

Instead, Russia’s first airstrikes in Syria — which dominated the final day of the United Nations General Assembly session — appear to have struck a rebel group that likely was vetted by the CIA, uses U.S.-made weapons, and has publicly backed the international coalition fighting the Islamic State. The group is also part of the ad hoc alliance of militias battling the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which means that the early phase of Moscow’s military intervention will strengthen Assad at least as much as it will weaken the Islamic State.

Jamil al-Saleh, a defected Syrian army officer who is now the leader of the rebel group Tajammu al-Aaza, told AlSouria.net that the Russian airstrikes targeted his group’s base in al-Lataminah, a town in the western Syrian governorate of Hama. That area represents one of the farthest southern points of the rebel advance from the north and is therefore a crucial front line in the war. An alliance of Syrian rebel factions, including both the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front and groups considered by Washington to be more moderate, successfully drove Assad regime forces out of the northern governorate of Idlib and are now pushing south into Hama. 

Tajammu al-Aaza released a video of the airstrike and its aftermath before Saleh’s statement. Syrian security sources also confirmed that a Russian airstrike took place in al-Lataminah. The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, released a video of what it said was one of the strikes.

U.S. officials were quick to criticize the strikes, which they said had hit targets that didn’t appear to be linked to the Islamic State. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said at the Pentagon that the strikes were in areas “where there probably were not ISIL forces,” using an alternate acronym for the group. White House spokesman Josh Earnest, for his part, told reporters that it was “too early for me to say exactly what targets they were aiming at and what targets were actually hit.”

The strikes come amid a flurry of diplomatic maneuvering at the United Nations, where Moscow and Washington have traded potshots about who is to blame for the rise of the Islamic State and who should take the lead in fighting the group.

In public comments at the United Nations, Russian officials have said that the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State isn’t working and instead have called for working more closely with Assad and Iran to defeat the group. But rather than spurring cooperation over the shared threat posed by the Islamic State, Moscow’s moves threaten to usher in a new era of conflict with Washington by weakening groups devoted to the fight against Assad while bolstering Tehran’s influence in the region.

Tajammu al-Aaza, for instance, has posted several videos of its fighters deploying U.S.-made anti-tank missiles against Syrian regime forces. One video shows fighters launching a missile at a Syrian army tank stationed at a checkpoint in the Hama countryside. 

Experts say those videos show that the group is clearly receiving American weaponry. According to N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of specialist technical intelligence consultancy Armament Research Services, or ARES, the video of the attack on the Syrian tank shows a U.S.-made AN/TSQ-136 missile guidance set, consistent with other U.S.-made TOW missile systems that ARES has documented being used in Syria.
According to Jenzen-Jones, the missiles “offer a noteworthy increase in anti-armor capability when compared to the majority of systems which are employed by the Syrian Arab Army and various rebel groups.”

U.S.-made military equipment, most prominently anti-tank missiles, have been distributed to rebels through an operations center, called the Military Operations Command (MOC), that’s organized by countries arming the anti-Assad opposition, which allows them to vet the groups receiving support. The operations center reportedly includes U.S. intelligence officers, which suggests that the United States authorized the distribution of weapons to Tajammu al-Aaza. 

“Tajammu al-Aaza is widely reputed to receive support from the MOC, and the fact that the group has documented its use of U.S.-made anti-tank missiles over a period of several months strongly suggests this is the case,” said Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst for the Middle East at the International Crisis Group. “They seem to have passed MOC vetting, which suggests the U.S. and other state backers view them as mainstream rather than extremist, and relatively reliable.”

One reason the United States may have allowed arms to flow to Tajammu al-Aaza is because rather than being an ally of the Islamic State, it has actually endorsed the U.S.-led air campaign against the jihadist movement. The group signed a statement that referred to the Islamic State as a “threat to the Syrian revolution” and that called on the U.S.-led international coalition to expand its air campaign to strike the Assad regime.

Earlier Wednesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement that a Russian official had informed the United States that Russia would begin flying missions over Syria shortly before the strikes began. It’s not clear whether Moscow also told the United States that the first group it would bomb would be one that had received arms from Washington.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/30/russias-first-strikes-in-syria-hit-u-s-ally-not-islamic-state/