Tag Archives: Terrorism

Turkey joining the fight against ISIS

WASHINGTON – For the first time since the Islamic State – also known as ISIS – began to spread across Iraq and Syria, neighboring Turkey has launched air strikes against positions of the jihadist organization in Syria.

Air Forces commanded from Ankara responded to the attacks launched by ISIS last month in the Turkish location of Suruç and the bordering city of Kilis. With this new development, the conflict takes on a new profile, perhaps one that many were expecting from a NATO ally, to slow down and undermine the progress and consolidation capabilities of the Islamic State.

For Ayça Alemdaroglu, Associate Director at the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, this decision is related to Turkey’s domestic policy situation. “The governing party is making a clear effort to maintain its power in times of decreasing electoral support. A way to balance this is to look for support in the international community – especially the U.S. – and so, their current fight with the Kurds is not seen.”

If the Islamist militias were aiming at a military escalation, they are indeed succeeding. So far Turkey, which borders to the south with Syria and Iraq, had maintained a poorly defined defensive posture towards the advancement of ISIS. This, even though ISIS’ assault to Kobanî in October last year came dangerously close to the Turkish border.

Turkey, let’s not forget, has also been a haven for sympathizers of jihadism. Many of them are in the Kurdish southern provinces that have chosen to provide support to ISIS given the lack of prospects offered by the Turkish government for their cause.

Alemdaroglu, who has worked as a post-doctoral scholar at the Anthropology Department at Stanford and earned her doctorate in sociology at Cambridge, highlights the fact that several reports indicate that the Turkish government has been indirectly supporting ISIS. “Central intelligence agencies from Turkey have been transporting trucks across the boarder loaded with ammunitions, including anti-aircraft rockets that end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda,” she says.

Turkey is also the gateway to the territories controlled by ISIS for youths coming from all over Europe and the rest of the world to join the Islamist militia. And if that isn’t enough, there are more than a million and a half Syrian refugees living on Turkish soil.

Ankara had wanted to maintain its own agenda on the issue and on more than one occasion refused to provide facilities to the U.S. military. However, in this new stage, the Turkish government has yielded to Washington’s request to use the Incirlik Air Base and although the details of the agreement are unknown, it appears that the U.S. activity in the area will require greater Turkish cooperation.

The U.S. has made their conditions very known to Turkey in order for this cooperation to succeed. Among them is to fully respect the Kurds, who have become key allies to America in the area, and which they have armed to the teeth to avoid having a single boot on the ground.

So far Turkish Presidente Erdoğan has found it difficult to agree, mainly because he doesn’t like the Kurds to be armed by the U.S. and gaining international recognition for their work to eradicate extreme jihadism in the area.

This agreement and the new attitude of the Turkish government will mark a profound change in the management of the crisis by both Washington and Ankara. Before this, it was unacceptable that Turkey, a country that belongs to NATO, had turned a blind eye to the jihadist activity in its own territory.

Furthermore, it was strategically ineffective for the U.S. to combat ISIS militarily from bases and aircraft carriers located more than a thousand miles away.

This turning point, however, will not come without risks and the crisis could spill over to neighboring countries and even deepen the less known violence happening in Turkey right now.

“If you think about national security in a much broader sense, the security of human beings for example, what Turkey is doing right now is not strengthening national security at all. I just came back from Turkey on August 10 and there were two attacks in Istanbul. I think around 10 people died. This could be unrelated to the main ISIS issue but it shows that Turks are not safe at this moment,” says Alemdaroglu.

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Afghan-Americans to Pakistan: stop supporting terrorism

On August 14, almost 50 Afghan-Americans gathered outside the Pakistani embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest what they say is Pakistan’s ongoing support of terrorist organizations operating in Afghanistan. The protesters called for the United States Congress to stop funding the Pakistani government and for the Pakistani government to stop supporting terrorism networks operating in Afghanistan.

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Should the U.S. government negotiate with terrorists?

The safety of Americans abroad is a top priority for the U.S. government. Whether working in a U.S. embassy or on an aid mission, all American lives are valued. When these lives are taken hostage by terrorists, their rescue becomes extremely complex.

Chris Voss, CEO and founder of the Black Swan Group, said kidnappings of American hostages makes him angry.

Chris Voss is the founder and CEO of the Black Swan Group. “There are few people that have worked for the [U.S.] government that know as much about international kidnapping as I do,” he said. (Photo courtesy of the Black Swan Group)

Chris Voss is the founder and CEO of the Black Swan Group. “There are few people that have worked for the [U.S.] government that know as much about international kidnapping as I do,” he said. (Photo courtesy of the Black Swan Group)

“[It’s] a horrifying experience from our perspective, but for them it’s a means to an end. Usually they want to trade for money, for weapons, for political favors, or for publicity,” Voss said.

The Black Swan Group prepares its clients to handle the unpredictable. Voss has 24 years of FBI experience and was their lead international kidnapping negotiator.

He said that he has been involved with about 150 successful rescuing cases worldwide, some involving children, in countries like Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

In 2011, al-Qaida militants in Pakistan kidnapped an American named Warren Weinstein. He was accidently killed by a U.S. drone in January.

During his captivity the White House said it would not negotiate with terrorists for his release.

Elaine Weinstein released a statement after learning about her husband’s fatality: “We hope that my husband’s death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families.”

A bipartisan amendment to the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, headed by Democratic Rep. John Delaney of Maryland and California Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican, called for the creation of a “hostage czar.” Weinstein was Rep. Delaney’s constituent.

The legislation, approved by the House of Representatives, includes an Interagency Hostage Recovery Coordinator. Some of the coordinator’s tasks would include engaging in rescue missions alongside all levels of the federal government and keeping families up-to-date with hostage-related developments.

The amendment, however, does not permit negotiations with terrorists.

Voss said he has not negotiated with terrorists in his career, but rather has been involved with “third-party intermediaries” or “proxies.”

Journalists like James Foley and Steve Sotloff, who were kidnapped and then killed by Islamic State militants, led many to question whether government bodies should negotiate with terrorists to secure the release of hostages.

If government agencies were to interact with terror groups, would their arrangements be honored? Would the terrorists demand more? Would everyday people be encouraged to kidnap Americans, knowing they could engage in extortion?

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, about $165 million has been paid to terror organizations in the form of ransom money, primarily funded by European governments.

The U.S. government has secretly negotiated with terrorists, but not through publicized monetary means. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was kidnapped for five years by Taliban sympathizers in Afghanistan, was swapped for five Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Trading prisoners of war is not unique to the United States. In 2006, Israel Defense Forces solider Gilad Shalit, held captive by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas for five years, was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

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The West’s forgotten war

WASHINGTON — As ISIS captures land and headlines and President Barack  Obama pivots toward the Pacific, it can seem understandable that the backwater state of Somalia has received less press than in years past.

As if to remind the United States —and the world— of the serious crisis still unfolding in the Horn of Africa, gunmen linked to the Islamist extremist al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab stormed a university in neighboring Kenya in early April, killing 147, after systematically determining which among the students were Christians.

It is the deadliest attack inside Kenya since the 1998 US embassy bombing carried out on the orders of Osama bin Laden, and one that has many analysts worrying about the power of Islamic extremists in this impoverished corner of the world.

Somalia has been considered a failed state since the early 1990s. Armed opposition to the rule of longtime Marxist strongman Mohamed Siad Barre eventually exploded into civil war in 1986; the situation was exacerbated by food and fuel shortages and famine, which killed hundreds of thousands. The presence of UN and African Union peacekeepers has been largely unable to quell the ongoing violence between various warlords and armed factions.

The failed nation has proved to be fertile ground for hardline Islamist groups like the Islamic Courts Union —which briefly controlled southern Somalia before being driven out by Ethiopian troops— and al-Shabaab (“The Youth”), a jihadist group founded by Soviet-Afghan War veteran Aden Hashi Farah in 2006.

Though Farah was killed by a US airstrike in 2008 —a fate shared by many of al-Shabaab’s “emirs”— the movement continues on. While no longer at the height of its power, the group continues to control wide swaths of the countryside in Somalia’s south. Recent operations —including the Westgate shopping center attack in Nairobi in 2013— indicate that even a weakened al-Shabaab is extremely dangerous.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution’s Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, sees in al-Shabaab an increasingly dangerous and insidious threat.

“Compared to 2009, yes, Shabaab is weaker. But when I look at the issues in terms of security, it’s stagnating and at worst deteriorating,” she said.

Even though al-Shabaab no longer controls many major cities, Felbab-Brown said, the group’s influence is still widely felt. They control many small villages and roads and raise money by extorting travelers. Assassinations continue daily as al-Shabaab seeks to undermine confidence in the weak central government.

Asked about any potential links or similarities between a resurgent al-Shabaab and the more visible Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Felbab-Brown is quick to highlight their differences. While al-Shabaab and ISIS may share some superficial similarities, she says, the Somali group has more in common with the Taliban than the Islamic State. Afghanistan, like Somalia, is a deeply tribal society, and tribal affiliations give al-Shabaab the resources it needs to thrive. And like the Taliban, al-Shabaab practices a “politics of exclusion” meant to disempower certain clans and religious minorities, a practice that suggests a preoccupation with local politics, not global jihad.

While both al-Shabaab and ISIS operate like Islamic armies, their aims and ideologies are different. According to Felbab-Brown, al-Shabaab seems to limit its horizons to Somalia specifically. Unlike the Nigerian Boko Haram, the Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiyah and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf, al-Shabaab has not pledged allegiance to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and shows little enthusiasm for a unified caliphate in their propaganda videos.

“They are struggling with the relationship they have with ISIS and al-Qaeda,” Felbab-Brown said.

Though there is some fear that foreign fighters trained by al-Shabaab may launch attacks in the West, such instances are few and far between, with most international jihadis flocking to ISIS. The real danger of al-Shabaab, Felbab-Brown said, is the possibility that the group will extend its reach. From bases inside Somalia, the jihadi group has ready access to East African countries —many of them US allies— that have so far been spared from the scourge of Islamist violence. Western embassies might also find themselves targeted.

As al-Shabaab regroups, the international community seeking to rebuild Somalia faces new challenges. Beside Islamic extremists, the UN and AU must contend with widespread corruption, an unpopular leadership, militant separatist groups, Ethiopian and Kenyan proxy forces and an unstable economy. For its part, the US has limited its involvement in Somalia as of late. Though the United States occasionally conducts drone strikes against al-Shabaab, fear of upsetting the delicate peace process and killing civilians means that drones are used less liberally there than in Yemen and Pakistan.

Experts like Felbab-Brown are urging the international community to take a new approach: hold Somalia accountable for governmental failures, even if that means confronting allies. Such steps are needed, they say, if ordinary Somalis are to see the government as a legitimate alternative to al-Shabaab.

“They [al-Shabaab] are not good governors. But Somalis often choose between the lesser of two evils,” Felbab-Brown said.

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Iraqi Christians forgotten as ISIS threat grows

WASHINGTON—Amid the furor currently surrounding the Islamic State group, the US has remained more or less on the sidelines. There are no coalition boots on the ground, Western, Gulf Arab or otherwise. Barrel bombs and chlorine gas have been used to call President Barack Obama’s “red line” bluff. Perhaps, as some American officials have argued, this is an Arab war, to be fought and won by Arabs. It must be this way, they say, lest ISIS and its extremist brethren use American soldiers on Arab ground as a recruiting tool.

And while all of this rhetoric plays well with non-interventionists and probably is the wisest policy route, that doesn’t mean that the decision to stand by is easy, especially when one considers the probable fate of one of the region’s oldest peoples, the Christians. Also known as Assyrians or, in some contexts, Chaldeans, many of them have been expelled from their homes in Mosul and northern Iraq.

Assyrians are a Semitic Christian people whose ancient homeland reaches from Turkey to Iran. Their mother tongue is Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. Because their presence in the Near East predates the Arab settlement of the region, most Assyrians will, with irrepressible pride, tell you that they are the indigenous people of ancient Mesopotamia.

“It goes back a very long time. Assyrians were at the very center of the cradle of civilization,” said Peter Bityou, director of the Assyrian Aid Society of America.

Bityou was born in Iraq and left for the United States in 1982 to look for work as an engineer. Many of his relatives —including his brother— remain in Iraq to this day and have been displaced by ISIS’s ongoing campaign. Since early 2014, Bityou and the AASA have been instrumental in delivering food, water, kerosene, clothing, medicine, gas stoves, generators, mattresses, blankets and other essentials to the refugees struggling to rebuild their lives.

The AASA and other aid groups must help, Bityou said, because no one else will. Assyrians in Iraq have been abandoned by the central Iraqi government and, in general, are not treated well by the Kurdish Regional Government in the north, he said. While the Kurdish peshmerga, or military force, allows Assyrian refugees to cross into their territory, those fleeing violence are not provided with food or other essentials.

“No one is looking out for the Assyrians. That’s why we have to do for ourselves,” Bityou said.

Martin Youmaran, an executive director of the Assyrian American National Federation, sees ISIS’s persecution of Assyrians as part of a larger pattern of racist oppression and disenfranchisement that goes back many hundreds of years.

“In Iraq, the Assyrian people have faced continuous persecution,” Youmaran said.

Historical fact largely supports that narrative. While Assyrians have peacefully coexisted with their Muslim Arab neighbors for centuries, to say that they were treated well would be a conceptual stretch. Under the Seljuqs and the Ottomans, Assyrians were given three options: convert to Sunni Islam, pay a tax (known as jizia) or face expulsion and possible death. Ottoman discrimination against Christians became so severe that, during World War I, the nationalist government killed 1.5 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians —all Christian subjects of the empire.

The treatment of Assyrians during the 1960s and 1970s under the Iraqi Ba’ath Party varied widely. Ba’athist ideology stressed secularism and sought to brush aside religious differences in the service of national unity; Islamic extremism was largely kept at bay. Many Assyrians ascended to high levels of power within the Iraqi government, including Tariq Aziz, a former deputy prime minister who was also one of Saddam Hussein’s closest advisors.

Assyrian expressions of ethnic pride however, met with severe repression.

“People will say that under Saddam, Assyrians were not persecuted. But Saddam hanged three Assyrian nationalists,” said Bityou, referring to the executions of Youbert Shlimon, Youkhana Esho Jajo and Yousip Hermis, who were put to death without trials in 1985.

“What can you call that other than persecution?” Bityou asked.

Saddam’s relationship with Iraq’s many ethnic and religious minorities worsened in the late 1980s, when Kurdish peshmerga forces rebelled against the government. Faced with a secession campaign, the government used conventional weapons alongside unidentified chemical agents —most likely the nerve gas sarin mixed with mustard gas— to eradicate entire villages; according to Human Rights Watch, nearly 2,000 Assyrians perished from gas alone.

Iraqi Assyrians fared even worse after the 2003 American invasion. By 2004, Islamic terrorist groups like Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaeda in Iraq were blowing up Assyrian churches and enforcing hardline sharia law on Assyrian Christian communities. Many Assyrians sought refuge in Turkey, Europe, Syria and the United States.

“In 2003, there were 1.2 million Assyrians in Iraq. Today, less than 300,000,” Bityou said.

ISIS has continued the violence instigated by its predecessors, expelling and in some cases kidnapping Assyrians along the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Due to the escalating violence, Youmaran and the AANF are more insistent than ever. Among their most pressing concerns: military intervention against ISIS.

“We want intervention not only from the US but from the UN under Chapter Seven,” Youmaran said, referring to the section of the United Nations Charter that gives the UN Security Council the power to intervene to stop crimes against humanity.

Beyond a foreign offensive against ISIS, Assyrian groups have renewed calls for an autonomous Christian homeland in Iraq’s Nineveh Governorate, known as Nīnwē to the Assyrians.

“We need an internationally protected homeland,” Youmaran said. “We demand that the international community preserve it [the Assyrian homeland in Nineveh], because the Iraqi government cannot.”

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ISIS’ media plan: Kill one, win one thousand

Journalists are on the front lines covering terrorism. We are unarmed and unprotected. We work mostly alone. We not only work in hostile areas but now we are also the targets of terrorism.

It wasn’t always this way. Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, noted at a panel discussion on reporting from the frontline at the University of Chicago in May that journalists used to enjoy some protection in hostile environments.

“The rebel groups didn’t like you,” said Engel. “But back then they knew they needed me because I was there to do a story about them and what I said had some sort of impact.”

But the code of conduct has changed. A reporter no longer serves as the messenger. Terrorists can cut out the journalist and go directly to the Internet to deliver their message. Engel believes the change occured because terrorists find journalists frustrating to deal with since they often edited interviews, taking rebels’ words out of context.

We are all familiar with the fate of James Foley as Medill students. He was one of our own, part of our extended family by education and trade. He was abducted while covering the Syrian civil war by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2012 and very publicly beheaded in a video that went viral in 2014.

Certainly journalists who cover terrorism on the front line face risks. There is no doubt that an assignment could end up with the story being published about the writer’s death. Yet, journalists can’t allow fear to stop the stories. I’m not advocating anyone put their life in danger for death defeats a journalist’s purpose: To get the story out to others who have the power and resources to make change happen. But we must continue reporting, taking calculated risks, so the world can have a fair and unbiased report of what is truly happening, rather than accept the propaganda terrorists push out as the truth.

Some experts believe that targeting Western journalists as part of an ISIS terrorism campaign is a critical part of its marketing plan to instill fear in journalists and the public.

“Terrorism works in a similar fashion as good advertising and marketing work,” said Angi English, executive director of the Texas Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities, a part of the state’s emergency management division.

English recently graduated from the Masters program at the Naval Postgraduate School and Homeland Security where she studied national security issues. She recently wrote “The Social Influence of the ISIS Beheadings.”

Ken Aucremanne agrees. He formerly worked with the military and is a graduate researcher in social media at American University in Washington D.C. He said killing journalists is ISIS’ way of controlling its message. English adds that beheading journalists and putting the videos on social media can instill fear into the thousands of Americans that ISIS can’t reach directly because it gives them the message that their government can’t protect them.

“Kill one, win a thousand,” said English. “It’s a Chinese proverb. If it is so horrific that it jars our consciousness, our whole psyche, when you do it to one person, people get the message.”

ISIS is both symbolically and physically cutting off information to the West by cutting off journalists’ heads.

ISIS also has gotten extremely sophisticated in the way it uses video and social media. Terrorist groups used to put out shaky, grainy video but no more. ISIS has stolen video techniques from independent filmmakers and the journalists they kill.

“Terrorist organizations, for the most part, they don’t have critical infrastructure and resources to attack other nations,” said English.

Niccole_Blog_Screenshot1Optimized

Screenshot of ISIS video on how it produces video.

Instead, they use video and social media as their tools of terror. ISIS creates and shares cinematic videos that people are drawn to, giving the terrorist group an air of credibility.

“Ten or 15 years ago if you wanted to get the whole world to see your vision, you had to send someone to flight school and target the World Trade Center, but today all you need to do is go to film school,” said Aucremanne.

Aucremanne believes ISIS is using video because cameras and equipment are inexpensive and unrestricted in ways that weapons are not. The second video in this Daily Mail article shows ISIS’ behind the scenes video production techniques. Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for the New Yorker, said during the frontline reporting panel at the University of Chicago rebels now need fewer tools to be terrorists.

Screenshot of ISIS video on how it produces video.

Screenshot of ISIS video on how it produces video.

“All that is needed to be a terrorist or commit global terrorism is an iPhone, knife and a victim, with that you have your battlefield,” he said. “You have tens of millions of people who are going to see that and be terrorized by it.”

The West focuses on the gruesome and graphic beheading videos, but those are only a small portion of the videos ISIS is releasing. Aucremanne said there are plenty of other videos designed to show ISIS fighters as heroes and instill Pan-Arabic pride that are being distributed through private social media channels.

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Al Qaida a bigger threat than ISIS, ex-CIA honcho warns

Michael Morell (on left) says al Qaida is a greater threat than ISIS. (Tanni Deb/MEDILL NSJI)

Michael Morell (on left) says al Qaida is a greater threat than ISIS. (Tanni Deb/MEDILL NSJI)

WASHINGTON — The Islamic State group has attracted foreign recruits for its war in Iraq and Syria because the extremist network has what it sees as a compelling story to share with them, according to the CIA’s former deputy director.

“Their narrative is that the West, the United States, the modern world is a significant threat to their religion [and] that they have an answer to that threat to their religion, which is the establishment of this caliphate,” said Michael Morell, who held the post from 2010 to 2013. They say “they are being attacked by the United States … and because they are being attacked as they try to set up this caliphate to protect their religion, they need support.”

Morell is the author of “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, From al Qa’ida to ISIS,” published this month. Indeed, ISIS presents a clear threat, he said Monday at the National Press Club in Washington. But it’s al Qaida, which perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and continues to have widespread influence abroad, that remains a greater danger, he added.

“The most significant threat to the homeland today,” Morell said, “still comes from al Qaida.”

ISIS seeks support in two ways, he said. It wants fighters to carry out its war in the Middle East, and it urges people to attack Americans and other coalition nations in their homelands.

The U.S., on the other hand, doesn’t really have a strong counter narrative, he said.

“Not because we’re not doing our job, but because it’s really hard to have a counter narrative in a conversation about a religion where we have absolutely no credibility,” he said.

Morell was an intelligence analyst who delivered daily briefings to then-President George W. Bush in 2001. He also assisted with planning the 2011 raid in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. His new book includes his assessment of the CIA’s counterterrorism successes and failures of the past two decades, and highlights growing threats from terrorist groups that could impact the U.S.

Three al Qaida groups in particular pose the greatest threat to the U.S., he said.

Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, remains the most dangerous, Morell said. The international terrorist organization was responsible for the last three attempted attacks against the U.S.: the would-be Christmas Day underwear bomber in 2009, the printer cartridge plot in 2010 and the nonmetallic bomb plot on an airliner in 2012.

“They have the capability to bring down an airline in the United States of America tomorrow,” Morell said.

The second most dangerous, he said, is the Khorasan Group, which has operatives from Pakistan. It was formed to assist the jihadist organization Jabhat al-Nusra in its fight against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with the goal of using Syria as a base of operations to attack the West.

Finally, the third group is al Qaida’s senior leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said.

But Morell did not downplay the ISIS threat — either on the battlefield or in its attempts to radicalize young men and young women around the world.

“The first and probably the most important right now is the stability of the entire Middle East. ISIS threatens the territorial integrity of Syria, the territorial integrity of Iraq and the potential for spillover to the rest of the region,” Morell said.

ISIS killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians and security forces and caused thousands to flee their homes as it captured the city of Ramadi in central Iraq on Sunday, according to multiple news reports.

Morell said that Islamic educators are needed to inform people who may consider joining terrorist groups.

“We really need the leaders of Muslim countries, we need leading Muslim clerics [and] we need Muslim teachers to have this dialogue in those countries themselves.”

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Supporters of imprisoned ‘Lady al Qaida’ want proof she’s alive

A national civil right group is requesting an independent medical investigation for a political prisoner Aafia Siddiqui. (Andersen Xia/Medill)

A national civil right group is requesting an independent medical investigation for a political prisoner Aafia Siddiqui. (Andersen Xia/Medill)

WASHINGTON — The lawyer for a Pakistani woman who was the first female terrorist suspect after the 9/11 attacks is demanding evidence that she is still alive at a federal prison in Texas, despite prison officials’ assertion that she is.

Aafia Siddiqui, a U.S.-trained scientist known as “Lady al Qaida,” is serving 86 years in a Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison for shooting at U.S. Army officers and FBI agents who were interrogating her in 2010 in Pakistan for her alleged involvement in terrorist efforts against the U.S. A New York jury in 2010 found her guilty of attempted murder and assault.

“We believe only by having an independent medical evaluation can the world be assured that she is alive and well,” Siddiqui lawyer Stephen Downs said this week at a news conference in Washington.

Downs, executive director of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, said Siddiqui has not been seen or heard from by her family or friends in more than a year. Pakistani consulate staff who tried to visit her at the Federal Medical Center Carswell were only shown the back of a woman, which made it impossible to identify whether it was Siddiqui, the lawyer said.

The organization demanded that Siddiqui be examined by a medical team that would include her sister, a Harvard-trained neurologist living in Pakistan.

Federal Medical Center Carswell spokeswoman Patricia Comstock said Wednesday that Siddiqui is alive, and she has seen her recently. However, Comstock declined to reveal Siddiqui’s medical condition.

The FBI in 2003 declared Siddiqui the world’s most wanted woman until she was captured five years later in Ghazni, Afghanistan. Upon her arrest, she was found to be in possession of numerous documents describing the making of chemical weapons, dirty bombs and instructions to attack landmarks in the U.S.

During her American interrogation in Pakistan, Siddiqui allegedly picked up an unsecured M-4 rifleand fired twice, missing both. She was subdued after the officers returned fire with a pistol and hit her in the torso.

The U.S. government said Siddiqui was a jihadist who married a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, even though Siddiqui’s family denied the marriage. Both the Islamic State, known by various acronyms – including ISIS – and the Taliban had reportedly tried to swap American captives for her.

“ISIS is trying to get in on the popularity of Aafia,” Downs said. “She has nothing to do with ISIS. She was locked up before ISIS even got going.”

A petition was filed in July on whitehouse.gov with more than 100,000 signatures demanding Siddiqui’s repatriation to Pakistan. Supporters held a protest three weeks ago in front of the Federal Bureau of Prisons calling for her release.

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Experts: Terrorism groups find new revenue sources

From left, witnesses Seth G. Jones, Jonathan Schanzer and Juan C. Zarate testify before the Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing, part of the House Committee on Financial Services. (Tobias Burns/MEDILL)

From left, witnesses Seth G. Jones, Jonathan Schanzer and Juan C. Zarate testify before the Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing, part of the House Committee on Financial Services. (Tobias Burns/MEDILL)

As the number of terrorist groups around the world increases, so do the ways in which they’re raising money to fund their activities, experts say.

“The funding is more global and more diversified than ever before, and it’s interacting less with the financial system,” said Juan C. Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who spoke Wednesday at the first meeting of Congress’ Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing.

Funding for groups like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the Houthi in Yemen traditionally has come from wealthy donors and charitable organizations based in the Persian Gulf. U.S. counterterrorism officials within law enforcement and the Treasury Department have long had safeguards in place to identify those paper trails and trace their sources.

But with groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria openly controlling large swaths of land, counterterrorism efforts in the U.S. now must account for a host of new revenue streams that are augmenting the more entrenched sources.

These include the oil trade, farming, taxation and antiquities smuggling in addition to the more established illicit trades of drug trafficking, bank robbery, and kidnapping and ransom.

As a result, counterterrorism experts are looking to the military for strategic and operational assistance in choking off terrorist funding.

“The military and counterterrorism are closer than ever before,” Zarate told the panel of about 20 members of the House Financial Services Committee. “These groups have grown more local in their ability to raise funds, so we have to dislodge them from territory if we want to starve them of funds.”

Also casting doubt on some of traditional U.S. allies within the region is the involvement of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in the oil trade, which accounts for around 30 percent of the militant group’s estimated $2 billion net worth.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., said there are “trust issues” with Turkey in particular, which is thought to be one of the main consumers of the Islamic State’s stolen oil.

Speaking of a recent trip to the region, Lynch said, “When we confronted senior members of the Turkish government with aerial and satellite imagery of trucks crossing the border and selling oil in Turkey, there was serious denial.”

While oil and other territory-based revenue streams pose serious tactical questions for both lawmakers and the military, the task force acknowledged that they actually may be an indication of progress in the fight against terrorism.

“To an extent, we’re a victim of our own success,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the task force. “We’ve been so effective at driving these groups out of the financial sector that they’re working more local and more underground.”

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Could non-violent counterterrorism tactics have prevented IS gain in Iraq?

WASHINGTON – The Islamic State, also known as IS, is working to carve out a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, or an Islamic state led by a religious leader.

According to an article on vox.com, IS split from al-Qaida in early February of this year. Now, looking back at the way IS was able to gain strength in Iraq, it is easy to see where America’s counterterrorism strategy only gave IS an opportunity to expand. An article from The Hill says Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pointed out how President Obama’s inaction in Syria led to further gains by ISIS in Iraq. His comments came just before reports of ISIS gaining control of a major military base in Syria, The Hill reported.

Washington’s failure to intervene in the humanitarian crisis in Syria under President Bashar al-Assad’s regime created a destabilized area, a perfect breeding ground for IS to gain support.

Peter Knoope, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague, Netherlands, explained that using non-violent counterterrorism tactics can actually be more beneficial than the way the U.S. looks to diminish the strength of terrorist groups. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, which is funded through the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a partnership of three institutions, focuses on preventing and countering violent extremism.

“Trying to understand why people feel attracted to violent extremist narratives and violent political action is an important strategic approach to counterterrorism,” Knoope said.

He explained that preventing the organization from gaining new members can reduce the size of the organization.

Knoope, a career diplomat who was posted as the head of mission to Afghanistan, said terrorist organizations can be looked at as a triangle, with the tip of the triangle being the main leadership. The “baseline” is where new people join, and by focusing counterterrorism efforts on understanding why young people join terrorist organizations, Knoope said, you can effectively shrink the triangle.

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For example, the death of Osama bin-Laden in 2011 did not lead to the end of al-Qaida. Instead, it only provided the opportunity for a top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to rise up and take his place.

“In some cases decapitation of the triangle will only bring new leadership that is more aggressive, more military focused and more violent focused than the former leadership,” Knoope said.

He explained that we can see something similar happening in Nigeria with the Islamic group, Boko Haram. The death of leader, Mohammed Yusuf, only led to the rise of his more aggressive counterpart, Abubakar Shekau. With Shekau’s leadership, more Nigerians have been attracted to the organization.

IS growth in Iraq

In his book, “Globalization & Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares,” Jamal Nassar explained terrorism is often a reaction to injustice. Nassar, a political science professor at Illinois State University and authority on the Middle East, further explained that, “the terrorist often feels deprived of some rights or maltreated…”

Iraq was controlled on and off by a Sunni regime until Saddam Hussein’s government fell in 2003. In 2006, Nouri al-Maliki was appointed as prime minister – meaning a formerly Sunni-led state transitioned to a Shiite-led state.

A 2011 Pew Research poll found 51 percent of Iraqi Muslims identify as Shia and 42 percent identify as Sunni.

The transition left many Sunnis dissatisfied with the central government in Baghdad. In June, Iraqi pollster, Munqith al-Dagher, said IS is benefiting from Sunni dissatisfaction because they see the government depriving them of their rights and aligning too closely with the Shia-led state of Iran.

This goes along with Knoope’s explanation of why people join terrorist groups:

• Feeling like an outsider
• Being unaccepted in their environment
• A collective search for identity
• Lack of political influence

“Somebody comes along and tells that person you can be a somebody and have an important impact on a very important environment,” by joining a terrorist group, Knoope said.

Non-violent counter terrorism strategies, Knoope said, begin with knowing what’s going on in the community and who’s framing the dialogue to attract new members in religious or political terms.

From there, states can respond by helping to offer solutions for meeting those needs.

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