Islamist Wave 2014 - News & Discussion

10 posts

Angocachi
Brookes: Islamist threat on the rise

Syria ground zero for global threat
Since the national conversation of late has been riveted on terrorism spurred on by the controversy swirling around the Taliban prisoner swap, it’s a good time to take stock of the state of Islamist militancy.

Bottom line? The threat is getting worse.

For instance, for the year 2013, the State Department estimated that terrorist attacks jumped more than 40 percent globally while RAND’s Seth Jones asserted in The Wall Street Journal that the number of jihadists worldwide hovered around 100,000.

Those figures from last year are jaw-dropping — but from the looks of it, the situation isn’t getting any better this year.

Let’s start with Syria. What began as part of the peaceful “Arab Spring” movement against the dictator in Damascus, Bashar Assad, a few years ago has morphed into a violent “Islamist Spring” campaign that has set the country aflame.

The three-plus year civil war has emerged as an magnet for Islamist extremists from across the globe bent on joining the latest militant jihad.

Indeed, there may be some 12,000 foreign fighters from 80 countries in Syria, some of whom have joined up with al Qaeda-associated groups like the al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, according to Bloomberg.

In addition to the bloodshed that has taken the lives of more than 150,000 people so far and displaced millions more, these foreign fighters are being schooled in the terrorist “dark arts” on the Syrian battlefield.

But it’d be a mistake to think the threat is simply “over there.”

The director of National Intelligence has told Congress that al Qaeda terror groups in Syria have built camps to train “recruits” to return to their native lands and conduct attacks.

Bloomberg reports that 70 Americans and 3,000 Europeans have gone to Syria, presumably to fight alongside the extremists. The dread is that these fighters will come home undetected to carry out acts of terror.

That concern is justified.

Recently a young American reportedly participated in a truck bombing in Syria; possibly the first suicide attack by an American in that conflict.

Plus, recent European news accounts write of arrests related to Syria involving travel to Syria (Britain), recruiting foreign fighters for the conflict (Spain) or an attack by a Syrian jihad veteran (France/Belgium).

Besides the Americans who’ve traveled to Syria, many Europeans can come here without a visa, raising concerns terrorists might strike the homeland if they slip in undetected.

While Syria — which has the potential to become the next pre-9/11 Afghanistan — is arguably the biggest terror problem due to sheer numbers of violent extremists, we shouldn’t overlook the carnage elsewhere.

Countries like Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia and their neighbors are also paying a big price in blood and treasure due to the spread of al Qaeda and other militant groups bent on imposing their will on others.

Assuming that these far-flung Islamist terror groups don’t or won’t put America, Americans or American interests in their crosshairs is a deeply dangerous mistake. Many already do — and more possibly will.

Peter Brookes is a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2014/06/brookes_islamist_threat_on_the_rise
Angocachi
Saudi king hails 'historic' Sisi win of Egypt presidency

Riyadh (AFP) - Saudi King Abdullah Tuesday hailed the election of Egypt's ex-army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to the presidency as an "historic day," calling for a donors conference to help Egypt through its economic troubles.

The king, whose oil-rich nation is a strong ally of Egypt, said Sisi's sweeping win with 96.9 percent of the vote represents a "historic day and a new stage for Egypt," in a telegram published by Saudi state news agency SPA.

"To the brothers and friends of Egypt ... I invite all to a donors conference ... to help it overcome its economic crisis," he said.

Riyadh pledged billions of dollars in aid to Egypt's new authorities after the overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi last July.

Saudi Arabia had long seen Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood as a threat. After his ouster, it quickly pledged $5 billion (3.7 billion euros) in aid to Cairo, with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates offering a combined $7 billion.

King Abdullah also urged "brothers and friends to avoid meddling in Egypt's internal affairs," warning that harming Egypt would amount to "harming Islam, Arabism and Saudi Arabia."

The king appeared to be referring to Qatar, the only Gulf country to back Morsi, and whose relations with Saudi Arabia and most of its other neighbours in the region have been strained.

He also urged Sisi to open up to the opposition, encouraging him to "accept the other opinion through a national dialogue with all parties whose hands have not been stained by the blood of the innocents."

The UAE also swiftly congratulated Sisi over his landslide win.

"We congratulate you for this precious vote of confidence given to you by Egyptians amid the challenges that they face," UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan said in a message published by WAM state news agency.

https://news.yahoo.com/saudi-king-hails-historic-sisi-win-egypt-presidency-180954580.html
Angocachi
The Revolt in China’s Uighur Autonomous Region

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the far west of the People’s Republic of China is more than 1.6 million square kilometres in area.

An arid region that historically was called East Turkestan, it is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. In recent decades, though, Han Chinese moved in and took the better jobs and housing.

Today it is estimated that Uighurs make up only about 45 per cent of its 22 million people. Most of Xinjiang's Uighurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, in the Tarim Basin.

The influx of Chinese settlers has sparked resentment and calls for an independent Uighur state. But the Uighur struggle to assert a right to national self-determination is a difficult one. Unlike most formerly colonized peoples around the world, the Uighurs have never benefited from the fruits of de-colonization, since they were absorbed by a non-western neighbouring state, China.

Beijing refuses to acknowledge that it acts as a colonial power in the region; after all, it considers itself as having also been historically a victim of imperialism.

A Uighur Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria from 745 to 840, but it fragmented into smaller kingdoms and eventually came under Mongol control. Originally Buddhists, the Uighurs were converted to Islam by the beginning of the 16th century.

Xinjiang was conquered by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in the mid-18th century and the Uighurs became subjects of the Chinese emperors.

Since then, there have been periodic uprisings against Chinese domination. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs temporarily gained their independence from Nationalist China, backed by the Soviet Union.

The second East Turkistan Republic lasted from 1944 to 1949.

In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang was classified as an autonomous region.

There are ideological divisions among the Uighur nationalists. Some Uighurs call for an Islamic state, while others support a more ethnically independent and self-governing East Turkestan.

In July 2009, ethnic tension between the Han Chinese and Uighurs led to severe riots in the capital city of Urumqi. According to Chinese state media, almost 200 people were killed, and more than 800 injured.

There has been an upsurge in violence since then. In June 2012, six ethnic Uighur men tried to hijack an aircraft heading to Urumqi, but failed after passengers and crew resisted and restrained the hijackers. A year later, 27 people were killed in disturbances in the township of Lukqun; 17 of them were killed by rioters, while the other 10 were alleged assailants who were shot dead by police.

At least 29 people were killed in early March in an attack at a railway station in the Chinese city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It was an organized, premeditated assault by knife-wielding Uighur assailants, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency.

In late May, attackers in two cars ploughed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in Urumqi, killing 39 people. The Xinjiang regional government, which is Chinese-controlled, said in a statement that it was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”

In response, China’s president Xi Jinping has called for moving more Uighurs to inland areas of China in order “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them.”

All told, at least 180 people have been killed in attacks across China over the past year. But the anti-colonial goals that motivate Uighur nationalists to work to construct a modern Uighur nation remain unfulfilled. The plight of the Uighurs should command more attention.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

http://www.journalpioneer.com/Opini...t-in-China’s-Uighur-Autonomous-Region/1
Angocachi
Battle to establish Islamic state across Iraq and Syria

Islamic fundamentalists have opened new fronts in their battle to establish an Islamic state across Iraq and Syria as they launch attacks in cities which were previously under the control of the Baghdad government.

A multi-pronged assault across central and northern Iraq in the past four days shows that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) has taken over from the al-Qa’ida organisation founded by Osama bin Laden as the most powerful and effective extreme jihadi group in the world.

Isis now controls or can operate with impunity in a great stretch of territory in western Iraq and eastern Syria, making it militarily the most successful jihadi movement ever.

Led since 2010 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu Dua, it has proved itself even more violent and sectarian than what US officials call the “core” al-Qa’ida, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is based in Pakistan. Isis is highly fanatical, killing Shia Muslims and Christians whenever possible, as well as militarily efficient and under tight direction by top leaders.

In Iraq in the past four days, it has fought its way into the northern capital of Mosul, sent a column of its fighters into the central city of Samarra and taken over Iraq’s largest university at Ramadi, in the west of the country. In addition, it launched devastating bombings targeting Shia civilians in Baghdad that killed at least 52 people.

The creation of a sort of proto-Caliphate by extreme jihadis in northern Syria and Iraq is provoking fears in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey that they will become targets of battle-hardened Sunni fighters.

The well-coordinated attacks appear designed to keep the Iraqi security forces off balance, uncertain where the next attack will come. They started on Thursday when Isis fighters in trucks with heavy machine guns stormed into the city of Samarra, which is mostly Sunni but contains the golden-domed al-Askari shrine sacred to Shia. Destruction of this shrine by al-Qa’ida bombers in 2006 led to wholesale massacres of Sunni by Shia.

The Isis tactic is to make a surprise attack, inflict maximum casualties and spread fear before withdrawing without suffering heavy losses. On Friday, they attacked in Mosul, where their power is already strong enough to tax local businesses, from family groceries to mobile phone and construction companies. Some 200 people were killed in the fighting, according to local hospitals, though the government gives a figure of 59 dead, 21 of them policemen and 38 insurgents.

This assault was followed by an early-morning attack on Saturday on the University of Anbar at Ramadi that has 10,000 students. Ahmed al-Mehamdi, a student who was taken hostage, told a news agency that he was woken up by the sound of shots, looked out the window and saw armed men dressed in black running across the campus. They entered his dormitory, said they belonged to Isis, told everybody to stay in their rooms but took others away.

One leader told female students: “We will teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.” They turned the science building into their headquarters, but may later have retreated. On the same day, seven bombs exploded in an hour in Baghdad, killing at least 52 people.

Isis specialises in using militarily untrained foreign volunteers as suicide bombers either moving on foot wearing suicide vests, or driving vehicles packed with explosives. Often more than one suicide bomber is used, as happened yesterday when a vehicle exploded at the headquarters of a Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the town of Jalawla in the divided and much fought-over province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad. In the confusion caused by the blast, a second bomber on foot slipped into the office and blew himself up, killing some 18 people, including a senior police officer.

The swift rise of Isis since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became its leader has come because the uprising of the Sunni in Syria in 2011 led the Iraqi Sunni to protest about their political and economic marginalisation since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Peaceful demonstrations from the end of 2012 won few concessions, with Iraq’s Shia-dominated government convinced that the protesters wanted not reform but a revolution returning their community to power. The five or six million Iraqi Sunni became more alienated and sympathetic towards armed action by Isis.

Isis launched a well-planned campaign last year including a successful assault on Abu Ghraib prison last summer to free leaders and experienced fighters. This January, they took over Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, and have held it ever since in the face of artillery and air attack. The military sophistication of Isis in Iraq is much greater than al-Qa’ida, the organisation out of which it grew, which reached the peak of its success in 2006-07 before the Americans turned many of the Sunni tribes against it.

Isis has the great advantage of being able to operate on both sides of the Syrian-Iraq border, though in Syria it is engaged in an intra-jihadi civil war with Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and other groups. But Isis controls Raqqa, the only provincial capital taken by the opposition, and much of eastern Syria outside enclaves held by the Kurds close to the Turkish border.

Isis is today a little more circumspect in killing all who work for the government including rubbish collectors, something that alienated the Sunni population previously. But horrifically violent, though professionally made propaganda videos show Isis forcing families with sons in the Iraqi army to dig their own graves before they are shot. The message is that their enemies can expect no mercy.

The violence continued yesterday as at least 18 people were killed in two explosions at the headquarters of a Kurdish political party in Iraq’s ethnically mixed province of Diyala. Isis claimed responsibility.

Most of the victims of Sunday’s attack were members of the Kurdish security forces who were guarding the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party in the town of Jalawla.
The explosions were the latest in a show of strength by militants who in recent days have overrun parts of two major cities, occupied a university campus in western Iraq and set off a dozen car bombs in Baghdad.

Jalawla lies in disputed territory, and is one of several towns where Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga regional guards have previously faced off, asserting their claims over the area. Both are a target for Sunni Islamist insurgents.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...amic-state-across-iraq-and-syria-9510044.html
Angocachi

Iraq's second largest city and entire province in ISIL's administration, over 3.2 million people and a territory greater than Taiwan. This is not counting the vast territory and numerous cities the ISIL governs throughout the rest of Sunni inhabited Iraq and Syria. We are living in the time of the revived Sunni Islamic State.

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The Iraqi prime minister has called for a national state of emergency after the city of Mosul and the northern province of Nineveh fell to al-Qaeda-inspired fighters.

Nouri al-Maliki said on Tuesday that he would ask parliament to declare the emergency after the overnight takeover by fighters from groups including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

"We will not allow Mosul to be under the banner of terrorism, We call on all international organisations to support Iraq and its stance in fighting terrorism, and resume their responsibility to secure international security," Maliki said.

"The entire world will suffer if terrorism spreads."

The fighters are reported to have freed up to 3,000 people from prisons in the region.

"The city of Mosul is outside the control of the state and at the mercy of the militants," an official at Iraq's interior ministry told the AFP news agency.

Fighters have in recent days launched major operations in Nineveh and four other provinces, killing scores of people.

Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from Baghdad, said: "The intelligence estimates Iraq has released suggests it's not just Iraqi fighters. There are foreign fighters who have come to fight for ISIL."

Mosul is Iraq's second largest city, and the second city to be captured by fighters this year after Fallujah.

Control of prisons

Before Mosul fell, ISIL fighters took control of the governor's headquarters, prisons and television stations, reports said.

The AP news agency reported that the group freed about 1,400 prisoners held in the city's jails.

A pro-ISIL Twitter feed said the group had released about 3,000 people from three prisons.

Describing the assault, Ali Mahmoud, a media official for Nineveh, said fighters stormed the provincial headquarters building in Mosul late on Monday night.

He confirmed accounts by Mosul residents that many of the police and army forces had disappeared by Tuesday.

Osama al-Nujaifi, the parliament speaker and brother of Atheel al-Nujaifi, the state governor, said he had asked the US ambassador in Baghdad for help in order to stop what he described as "a foreign
invasion by ISIL".

Nujaifi said he had also requested the help of the Kurdish peshmerga but received no response from the Kurdistan Regional Government, which controls the fighters.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middl...r-rebels-seize-mosul-2014610121410596821.html

They are expanding in Syria as well.

(Reuters) - A six-week offensive by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against rival Islamists in eastern Syria has killed 600 fighters and driven 130,000 people from their homes, a monitoring group said on Tuesday.

ISIL, which is battling to control a huge area of east Syria and western Iraq, has advanced along the Euphrates River in the oil producing Deir al-Zor province, driving back militants from al Qaeda's
Nusra Front and other Islamic brigades.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said ISIL now controls most of the northeast bank of the Euphrates from close to the border with Turkey down to the town of Busayra nearly 200 miles (320 km) to the southeast.

It aims to extend that control all the way to the town of Albukamal on the Iraqi border, strengthening links between its Syrian and Iraqi wings, the Observatory's Rami Abdelrahman said.

Across the border, ISIL has made stunning gains, overrunning the headquarters of the provincial government in Iraq's northern city of Mosul late on Monday.



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The group follows al Qaeda's jihadist ideology but its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has defied orders by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri to stop fighting in Syria and focus on Iraq.

Baghdadi fought first in Iraq before expanding into Syria when the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad was crushed by force and descended into civil war.

His enemies say ISIL has almost exclusively targeted rival rebels - including the Nusra Front which Baghdadi originally nurtured - rather than Assad's forces, as it exploits turmoil in Syria and insecurity in Iraq to carve out territory.

HUNDREDS KILLED

The UK-based Observatory said 241 fighters from ISIL and 354 from Nusra and other Islamic brigades had been killed in fighting since ISIL launched its offensive in Syria's Deir al-Zor province, seizing four oilfields from its rivals.

Another 39 civilians have been killed, including five children, said the Observatory, which relies on a network of medical and military sources and activists across the country to monitor the violence in Syria.

The internecine fighting among Assad's mainly Sunni Muslim opponents, who include foreign jihadi fighters, has prevented any coordinated rebel military campaign against him and helped his forces consolidate control in the center of the country.

Backed by the militant Lebanese Hezbollah movement and Shi'ite Iraqi fighters, his troops have pushed back rebels from the edge of Damascus and border areas with Lebanon - a vital supply line for rebels - as well as the city of Homs.

Syria's northern and eastern provinces remain largely beyond Assad's control, although his forces still hold part of Deir al-Zor's provincial capital and have been making advances around the disputed northern city of Aleppo.

Last week he won re-election in a vote held in government-controlled parts of the country. Opponents dismissed it as a charade in the midst of a conflict which started with protests against the president.

Authorities said it gave him a democratic mandate to rule for another seven years.

More than 160,000 people have been killed in Syria's civil war. Nearly three million refugees have sought sanctuary abroad and six million people have been displaced inside the country, the United Nations says.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/10/us-syria-crisis-rebels-idUSKBN0EL10R20140610


Controlling a territory larger than many countries populated by millions of people and having seized oil fields and vast munitions, ISIL seems to be proving to Zawahiri that he was fickle and cowardly to rule in Al Nusra's favor. Al Qaeda is being displaced
Angocachi
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Indonesia

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Tunisia

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Fallujah
Schmeisser

Mosul means that ISIS is here to stay. Tikrit has even just fallen as an afterthought. The scope of this victory is huge, and the strategy was brilliant, using a feint on Samarra. Weapons hauls are already moving to Syria to wipe out Abu Mariya al-Galaxy, Cuckold Abboud, and the Sahawat gangs.

Niccolo and Donkey
source

Gruppenführer Glitter

Now Tikrit has fallen: Source

Longface

Anbar Tribes and the ISIS
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Translation of the three points after congratulations:
1- Keep the purity of the revolution and stand by the ethics of true religion and the morals of the prophet Muhammed(phub) who advised his soldiers when he said"Don't hurt a child, an old man, a woman, or a the sick, and don't cut off trees..etc". In sum maintain the souls of all civilians, private and public property, and avoid schisms.

2-Pardon all the soldiers who were forced by Al-Maliki in a sectarian war, the goal of it instigating schism between the sons of the same nation. Don't kill security persons or hurt them, and stay away from the spirit of vengeance. Provide them with the means to go back to their families because they are the sons of your nation and tribes, and because these are the morals of your brothers of the Anbar since the start.

3- We advice you of not allowing terrorism in all its kinds, for it may petrubs the image of this bright revolution, and because Al-Maliki and his companions would like to display this revolution as a revolution of terror.