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August 14th, 2021 Breaking News

The Taliban dragged accused thieves through the streets with nooses around their necks and faces painted black

BUSINESS INSIDER — The Taliban were seen dragging men accused of theft through the streets of the newly-captured city of Herat in Afghanistan on Friday.

Photos taken by journalist Bilal Sarwary show men tarred in black with nooses around their necks being paraded through the streets as armed militants flank them. Some of the militants are pictured pulling at the nooses.

“Taliban accused these men of theft, their faces were colored with black color, to embarrass them and were paraded in Herat city after the Friday prayers,” Sarwary wrote alongside the pictures.

Another video shows a crowd of people following the men.

The images come one day after the Taliban seized control of Herat, which is the country’s third-largest city.

“The city looks like a frontline, a ghost town,” provincial council member Ghulam Habib Hashimi told Reuters. “Families have either left or are hiding in their homes.”

Taliban insurgents also seized Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar, on Friday.

A US defense official has since said there is mounting concern that the militant could make a move on Kabul, the country’s capital, within days.

“Kabul is not right now in an imminent threat environment, but clearly … if you just look at what the Taliban has been doing, you can see that they are trying to isolate Kabul,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, according to Reuters.

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August 14th, 2021 Breaking News

Afghanistan: Taliban close in on Kabul as last government stronghold in north falls – live updates

THE GUARDIAN — What are we expecting to happen in coming days?

The Taliban have said they will not stop fighting until the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, resigns. Ghani held urgent talks with local leaders and international partners on Saturday, but gave no sign of responding to the Taliban’s demand, saying “reintegration of the security and defense forces is our priority, and serious measures are being taken in this regard”.

Ghani’s resignation would help to avoid many, many deaths in a battle for Kabul, which is why he is facing international pressure to do so.

Activists have however warned of targeted killings in areas that fell under Taliban control in recent weeks.

There have also been restrictions brought in on women’s rights, which have raised fears the country is returning to the harsh restrictions of Taliban rule in the 1990s, even though the group’s envoys have promised they respect women’s rights under Islam. In Kandahar women were ordered from banking jobs at gunpoint, and told that male relatives could take their place, Reuters reported. And after Herat fell to the Taliban, rights activists said that women have been barred from the university, where they make up over half of students.

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October 18th, 2018 Breaking News

Islamic State returning to insurgent roots as caliphate disappears

(CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR) — After being nearly defeated on the battlefields of its would-be caliphate, the Islamic State group has reverted to what it was before its spectacular conquests in 2014, analysts say – a shadowy insurgent network that targets civilian populations with guerrilla-style attacks and exploits state weaknesses to incite sectarian strife.

In Iraq and Syria, hardly a week goes by without the group staging an attack on a town or village, keeping its opponents on edge even as it fights US-backed forces advancing on the last remaining slice of territory under its control near the countries’ shared border.

Hisham al-Hashimi, an IS expert who advises the Iraqi government, said the group now operates like it did in 2010, before its rise in Iraq, which culminated four years later with the militants seizing one of Iraq’s biggest cities, Mosul, and also claiming the city of Raqqa in Syria and declaring an Islamic caliphate across large areas of both countries.

Mr. Al-Hashimi said the world’s most dangerous insurgent group is trying to prove that despite losing its territorial hold, “it still has long arms to strike.”

While it fends off attacks on its remaining pockets in Syria, a recent surge in false claims of responsibility for attacks also signals that the group is struggling to stay relevant after losing its proto-state and its dominance on the international news agenda. The main figures behind the group’s once sleek propaganda machine have mostly been killed. Raqqa fell a year ago this month, and the group has lost all but 2 percent of the territory it held in Iraq and Syria.

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October 8th, 2018 Breaking News

With boundaries blurring between criminals and terrorists, international cooperation’s vital, UN highlights

(UN NEWS) — Terror groups are getting increasingly-involved in “lucrative” criminal activities such as trading in natural resources and human trafficking, Michèle Coninsx, the Executive Director of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), told the Security Council briefing on the issue.

Similarly, criminal groups join hands with terrorists, and are providing services such as counterfeiting, arms dealing, and helping to smuggle terrorists from one country to another, she said.

“We know that terrorist groups recruit individuals with criminal background or criminal skills, and petty crimes are committed to finance terrorist activities, including travel of foreign terrorist fighters,” explained Ms. Coninsx, noting that conflicts and instability further entrench such deal-making.

The head of CTED said her office and other parts of the UN counter-terror effort, such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), were working together to address the scourge.

She also highlighted the Executive Directorate’s work with UN Member States, identifying good practices, including joint investigative units and effective prosecution mechanisms, to handle organized crime and terrorism.

Looking ahead, Ms. Coninsx urged the international community to strengthen cooperation in the fight against terrorism and its support structures, especially to identify new terrorist trends, map linkages between terrorists and criminal groups, and share information more effectively.
Links between organized crime and terrorism ‘not new’

At the briefing, Gustavo Meza-Cuadra Velásquez, the Chair of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC), said that the links between terrorism and international crime syndicates is not new and has been high on the agenda of the Security Council as well as the General Assembly, for a long time.[READ MORE]

October 7th, 2018 Breaking News

‘TREATED LIKE ANIMALS’ ISIS sex slave reveals harrowing details of abuse suffered at hands of jihadi thugs as women screamed and vomited in terror

(THE SUN) — A YOUNG woman who has just won the Noble Peace prize has revealed horrifying details of being forced into sexual slavery by ISIS.

Nadia Murad, 25, spoke of how she and other Yazidi women screamed and vomited in sheer fear when jihadis kidnapped them.

At age 19, ISIS soldiers attacked the Yazidi community in her village, killing 600 people including six of her brothers and stepbrothers.

She was taken into slavery and beaten, burned with cigarettes and raped when she tried to escape.

Writing in her autobiography featured in The Guardian, Nadia recalled one night at a slave market following her capture.

She said: “We could hear the commotion downstairs where militants were registering and organizing, and when the first man entered the room, all the girls started screaming.”

Nadia’s book, “The Last Girl,” tells of her captivity, the loss of her family and her eventual escape.

It featured, recalls in harrowing detail this examination process before she was sold like cattle.

She said: “The militants touched us anywhere they wanted, running their hands over our breasts and our legs, as if we were animals.”

But her ordeal worsened when she met a high-ranking militant named Salwan – whom she described as “looking like a monster”.

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October 4th, 2018 Breaking News, Related News

ISIS’s Second Resurgence

(Institute for the Study of War) — The Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) is reconstituting a capable insurgent force in Iraq and Syria despite efforts to prevent its recovery by the U.S. Anti-ISIS Coalition. The U.S. Department of Defense stated in August 2018 that ISIS retains nearly 30,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria and is “more capable” than Al-Qaeda in Iraq – ISIS’s predecessor – at its peak in 2006 – 2007. ISIS is waging an effective campaign to reestablish durable support zones while raising funds and rebuilding command-and-control over its remnant forces. On its current trajectory, ISIS could regain sufficient strength to mount a renewed insurgency that once again threatens to overmatch local security forces in both Iraq and Syria. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is issuing a map update depicting ISIS’s current operating areas based on an analysis of its activity from January 1, 2018 to October 1, 2018.

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May 15th, 2018 Breaking News

Turkey slams French figures demanding change in Quran

(HURRIYET DAILY NEWS) — Turkey’s EU Affairs Minister Ömer Çelik slammed a French manifesto proposing the removal of some verses from the Quran, saying those 300 prominent French figures demanding the changes were as “bigoted” as members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who infer violence from the holy book, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

“This is the most striking example of intellectual violence and barbarism. Whoever these people are and whatever they have been doing up till now, they will be written at the beginning of the history of bigotry,” Çelik said on Twitter.

“Barbarism is intellectually and politically centered in the modern world,” he added.

Çelik drew parallel between the “barbaric and immoral” proposal and the ideology of ISIL.

“They could not tell in a better way that they are the closest ideological relatives of Daesh. But this approach, which will be the subject of political psychiatry, reveals how barbarism has risen in the midst of Europe, and how this mentality, at least as dangerous as Daesh, keeps itself behind certain concepts,” he said, using the Arabic name for ISIL.

“These are the most dangerous ones; those who conceal themselves behind an intellectual and political image. This is the mentality of those who are so-called anti-violence, but in fact they worship the bigotry and violence. These 300 French figures are the same as Daesh which infers violence from the humanity’s guide Quran,” Çelik added.

On April 21, 300 prominent French figures, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls signed a manifesto published in the French daily Le Parisien and demanded some parts of the Quran, which they claimed have included violence and anti-Semitic references, be removed.

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May 5th, 2018 Breaking News

Former ISIS Fighter: Islamic State Will Return With More Rigid Ideology

(OANN) — A former ISIS fighter issues a warning to the U.S. the ideology of the Islamic State will not go away.

Thursday, a Belgian man claiming to be one of the first foreign members of ISIS, gave an interview from a terrorist prison in Syria.

He warned of continued plots and splinter groups that will arise from the now defeated Muslim caliphate in Syria.

He said fighters were already planning to organize break away terror groups before the fall of Raqqa.

Reports show, many displaced ISIS fighters from Syria and Iraq are now moving to areas of the Philippines, where one in five residents are Muslim.

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April 26th, 2018 Breaking News

House Panel Witnesses: Islamic State Remains ‘Potent’ Threat in Libya

(BREITBART) — by Edwin Mora

WASHINGTON, DC — The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) remains a “potent” menace in Libya more than a year after U.S.-backed local forces pushed the group out of former stronghold Sirte, experts told a House panel.

Soon after the Islamic State (IS) lost Sirte in December 2016, U.S. and Libyan officials began warning about a potential resurgence of the terrorist group, noting that the jihadists were regrouping elsewhere in Libya, namely the desert valleys and inland hills southeast of the country.

In written testimony prepared for a hearing Wednesday held by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and Africa, Christopher Blanchard, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), acknowledged:

Transnational terrorist groups and locally organized armed extremist groups, including supporters of the Islamic State organization and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), remain active in Libya. Some IS fighters appear to have regrouped in rural areas after fleeing Sirte in late 2016, and the group claimed a series of attacks on Libyan forces in 2017.

Robyn Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), predicted early this year that ISIS would “give priority to the restructuring of security forces and infrastructure, and to launch strikes, which may include targets in the Libyan oil crescent.”

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April 22nd, 2018 Breaking News

Kabul Bombing Kills 57 in Line for Voter ID Cards

(VOA) — A suicide bomber struck a distribution center for Afghan voters’ identification cards Sunday morning in Kabul, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 others.

Interior Ministry spokesman Najeeb Danish told VOA that people were waiting in line outside the center to get their Tazkira, or identification card, to be able to vote in the election when the bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body.

Hospital sources have described condition of a least ten wounded people as “highly critical”.

Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah has condemned the “terrorist” attack on the center set up in a Kabul school.

“I stand with those affected by this coward attack. Our resolve for fair and transparent election will continue and terrorists won’t win against the will of the Afghan people,” Abdullah wrote on his official Twitter account.

President Ashraf Ghani launched the voter registration process last week, allowing the Independent Election Commission to prepare voter lists for the October 20 parliamentary and district council elections. This will be the first time in Afghani history that elections will be held on the basis of formal voters lists.

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