Fighting between armed factions allied to Libya’s competing governments broke out on Sunday near the country’s main border crossing to Tunisia, Libyan and Tunisian officials said.

Yemeni troops on Saturday shot dead five al-Qaeda suspects disguised as women who fired at a soldier during a checkpoint inspection of their Saudi-bound bus, officials said.

Another suspect was wounded along with the driver in the shooting in Harad, a town 15 kilometers (nine miles) from the Saudi border, the officials said, adding two of those killed were Saudis.

“As one of the soldiers climbed on board the bus for an inspection, one of the suspects opened fire and wounded him, prompting shooting from other soldiers at the checkpoint,” said a government official who gave the casualty toll.

All six had been dressed in black robes and wore the niqab, a face-covering veil commonly worn by women in Yemen, the official in Harad told AFP.

A suicide belt and arms were also found on board the bus, and the wounded suspect and driver were being questioned, said the security official.

“The men are suspected of affiliation with al-Qaeda and were heading north towards Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia,” he told AFP.

Security forces in Yemen rarely carry out inspections of vehicles carrying women in the conservative, deeply tribal country.

In July, six Saudi al-Qaeda suspects attacked a post on the border with Yemen, killing five security officers.
Saudi Arabia, which launched a huge crackdown on al-Qaeda following a spate of deadly attacks in 2003-2006, is building a three-meter (10-foot) high fence along its southern frontier with Yemen to counter illegal crossings and arms smuggling.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) took advantage of a collapse of central authority in the wake of the 2011 uprising to seize swathes of southern and eastern Yemen.

Yemen, a key ally of the United States, has been allowing Washington to carry out a longstanding drone war on its territory against AQAP. Many civilians unaffiliated with al-Qaeda have been killed by US drones in Yemen.

In recent years, AQAP has carried out a growing number of abductions, with several hostages still in captivity.

The militants remain active in southern and eastern regions of Yemen despite several military campaigns by government forces.

They have allied with tribesmen in southern Yemen to halt the advance of Houthi fighters who seized Sanaa unopposed in September, and who have since extended their control to coastal areas and regions south of the capital.

Several Houthi militiamen were killed and 10 tribesmen were wounded in fighting on Friday in Arhab, 35 kilometers (20 miles) from the capital Sanaa, according to sources on both sides.

Arhab is close to Sanaa International Airport and is a stronghold of the Islamist al-Islah Party.

Source:  al-akhbar.com

Hundreds of British soldiers are to be sent to Iraq to help the fight against Islamic State, Sky News understands.

They will make up a training mission to assist the Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga.

The soldiers – expected to number a few hundred – will go to the region “within weeks” senior military sources have said.

The National Security Council is expected to rubber-stamp the mission when it meets on Tuesday.

Although small groups of British troops have conducted similar missions over the past few months, this will be much greater in size and on a more permanent basis.

Source:  iraqinews.com

Islamist militias of Libya Dawn on Saturday launched a military operation in the oil crescent region and clashed violently with oil installations guards stationed in the Al-Wadi Al-Ahmar and Bin Jawad region, 500 km east of the capital Tripoli, according to a source of Libya Dawn.

A field commander of Libya Dawn forces, stationed near Al-Wadi Al-Ahmar, east of the city of Sirte, said the militias launched a surprise attack to liberate the oil crescent region from the grip of the “defense force of Cyrenaica.”

“The attack is a warning to this armed group that claims to be the guard of oil installations, but they are gangs of outlaws,” the commander told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Protests led by Ibrahim Jathran, a senior commander of the rebels in eastern Libya and a federal advocate of the eastern region of “Cyrenaica”, forcefully closed a number of oil fields and ports in eastern Libya for nine months, causing losses of up to 30 billion U.S. dollars.

Jathran formed a military force called “Defense Force of Cyrenaica,” and deployed his troops outside the oil crescent region, a move observers said was aimed to constantly control the oil fields and ports.

Libya has been witnessing a frayed political process after the 2011 turmoil which toppled its leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The country is now juggling two rival parliaments and governments. Now Jathran’s forces are known to be loyal to Libya’s elected government based in the eastern city of Tobruk, while Libya Dawn supports the Islamist government in Tripoli.

 
I duri e sanguinosi scontri che stanno avvenendo da mesi fra le varie milizie in Libia, dove è presente anche lo Stato Islamico (ISIS), minaccia di inghiottire i paesi africani del Mediterraneo e del Sahel e deve essere rapidamente messo sotto controllo, ha avvertito un inviato delle Nazioni Unite.

Ethiopian diplomat Hiroute Guebre Sellassie told the Security Council that the humanitarian and security crises in the band of semi-arid land south of the Sahara desert were worsening, pointing to turmoil in Libya as a key factor.

“If the situation in Libya is not quickly brought under control, many states in the region could be destabilized in the near future,” said the UN envoy for the Sahel.

Libya has been sliding deeper into crisis, torn by rival governments and parliaments battling powerful militias, despite UN efforts to broker talks on ending the violence.

Last month, the Security Council added the Libyan group Ansar al-Sharia to its terror list over its links to al-Qaeda and for running training camps for ISIS militants sent to Syria and Iraq.

Guebre Sellassie said terrorist and criminal networks in Libya were developing closer ties to Mali and northern Nigeria, dealing in arms sales and drug trafficking among other illegal trade.

Close to 20,000 arms have poured into the Sahel from Libya and most of the 18 tonnes of cocaine, worth $1.25 billion, sent to West Africa transits through the region, she said.

Human trafficking is rife, with children making up 60 percent of the victims.

Moreover, acute malnutrition is on the rise, with 6.4 million people now suffering from food shortages, up from five million at the beginning of the year.

The number of people driven from their homes has doubled from 1.6 million in January to 3.3 million.

“We need to put a lot more effort to resolve the Libyan crisis that is threatening to destabilize the entire region,” the envoy told reporters after her meeting with the 15-member council.

“The longer the wait, the greater the chances are that we will have many more Mali-like crises,” she added.

Guebre Sellassie called for greater coordination from regional players in addressing security threats, including from Boko Haram, which has extended its operations from northern Nigeria to Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

“This has now become a regional concern,” she said.

Guebre Sellassie’s warnings come a day after the International Committee of the Red Cross said that fighting in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi and in the west of the country has displaced tens of thousands since the summer and disrupted medical and health services.

Three years after a NATO-backed war ended Muammar Gaddafi’s one-man rule in 2011, Libya is struggling with instability as two rival administrations compete for power and warring armed factions skirmish for control of territory across the North African state.

Libya has had two governments and parliaments competing for legitimacy since an Islamist group called Fajr Libya (Libyan Dawn) seized Tripoli in August, installing its cabinet and forcing the recognized Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thani to the east.

Conflict forced tens of thousands to leave Benghazi and also caused frequent fuel, power and water shortages, increased food prices and damaged infrastructure.

Fierce clashes persist in second city Benghazi and west of the capital Tripoli between forces loyal to Thani’s government and the Islamist militias.

Source: al-akhbar

The most influential Twitter account of the Iraqi militant group Islamic State (IS), has been found to be operated by an Indian executive working out of Bengaluru, a report revealed by UK’s Channel 4 has claimed.

This was revealed by the TV channel on Wednesday night, which identified the person as ‘Mehdi’ an executive working with an “Indian conglomerate” out of Bengaluru. The channel also claimed that Mehdi used to run the Twitter account @ShamiWitness with  over 17,000 followers, “two-thirds of whom are foreign fighters” fighting for the IS in Iraq and Syria. His tweets were seen over 2 million times making him the “most influential twitter account” for the IS.

In thousands of tweets sent out regularly he was “acting as the leading conduit of information between jihadis, supporters and recruits”.

The channel says the man’s full name has not been disclosed as his life would be in danger.

The report quotes Mehdi as saying he would have joined Islamic State, but his family was financially dependent on him. “If I had a chance to leave everything and join them I might have.. my family needs me here,” he is quoted as saying.

Mehdi, the channel reported, is also on Facebook and regularly shares “jokes, funny images, talks about super hero movies, posting pictures of pizza dinners with friends and Hawaiian parties at work.” There are also indications of his “Islamist ideology” in conversations about “Libyan and Egyptian uprisings.”

Mehdi would post thousands of tweets from his Twitter account, using his mobile every month and also tweeted the video of the beheading of US aid worker Peter Kassig “within minutes of it being uploaded to the internet.”

He also tweeted in November that “May Allah guide, protect, strengthen and expand the Islamic State…Islamic State brought peace, autonomy, zero corruption, low crime rate”. The channel also reported how the Twitter account would express happiness at the “deaths and rapes of Kurdish fighters” on Twitter, but later said that these were “taken out of context”.

Mehdi shut down his account after being contacted by Channel 4 News.
Senior Indian intelligence officials Hindustan Times spoke to said that they were unaware about Mehdi and his Twitter account. On being alerted they have contacted their British counterparts to get more details about the account.

Intelligence sources also told HT that most of the radicalised youth from India have been found to be using social media and “influenced by similar accounts” posted by groups like the IS. One of the youths who left to join the IS, Arif Majeed from Kalyan, near Mumbai returned to India recently.

They are also planning to speak to Twitter, India to get the details of the person who was running the account.

Incidentally, a study conducted by researchers in the University of Milan has found that there are more social media followers sympathetic to the IS in Europe and the US than in states like Iraq and Syria. Another study conducted by Brookings Institute claimed that the IS use social media actively to spread and legitimise its activities.

Source:  hindustantimes.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the civil wars in Libya and Syria, besides the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and the emergence of Daesh (ISIS), illustrate the increasing importance of hard power over soft power when dealing with the resolution of the main issues on the security agenda.

If we look at the current regional situation, there is a growing sense of insecurity due to the spread of these transnational threats that are affecting the traditional nation-state actors both inside and outside the region. However, the present dilemma of insecurity at a regional level is an unwanted – but expected – outcome of the expeditionary U.S. presence (and then, hurried return), in Iraq, and the reversion of the popular demands of the Arab Spring.

The U.S. military invasion in Iraq broke the foundations of the Iraqi nation-state. If it is true that Saddam Hussein was a proven autocrat, there were no challenges in the domestic arena until the arrival of the U.S. and its allies. After the invasion, the Iraqi resistance movement, including the Shiite and Sunnis, attempted to make the occupiers uncomfortable. Nonetheless, part of the Sunni resistance movement decided to ally themselves with Al-Qaida, and adopted the jihadi ideology. Before the invasion, there was no “Islamic terrorism” in Iraq but following the invasion, it expanded considerably.

On the other hand, the failure of the Arab Spring’s institutionalization led to a severe repression of popular movements. For example, the harsh responses against the democratic demands in Libya and Syria generated civil wars that, in the case of Syria, has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths and 3 million Syrian refugees.

The civil war in Syria also affects the chronic problems of the political representation of minorities in Iraq and vice versa. The lack of recognition of democratic demands, plus the regional disorder is largely due to the U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy in the region, which has deepened existing ethnic, religious and geopolitical fracture lines in the region. ISIS, the main threat to the modern Middle East as traced by the Sykes-Picot Treaty, is a not an anticipated result, but a very real one.

ISIS reflects the transformation inside the “jihadi movement” which is moving away from the Al-Qaida core in terms of political ambitions and military actions. As an example, the kind of pretensions of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi presenting himself as caliph, and the control of large territorial areas is unimaginable in the organization founded by Bin Laden. ISIS’s actions include terrorist methodologies, but also a pragmatic organization and aims to become an international movement.

The ISIS menace has struck twice in the West. On the one hand, the perception of a radical Islamism threat has grown up not only in the governmental security agencies, but also in the media and public opinion. The immediate reaction has been the growth of Islamophobia, and the progressive rejection of everything that has to do with the Islam. A similar reaction was seen after the 9/11 attacks. These perspectives bring us closer to a Clash of Civilizations, not to the sought-after Alliance of Civilizations.

The second is not an “imagined” menace by the West, but a certain one – that is, the foreign fighters. Western radicalized Muslims – and the new “wrongly” converted – have been recruited to join ISIS, Al-Nusra and other “Islamist” militant organizations to fight in Iraq, Syria or Libya. There is no reliable statistics on this issue, but some estimations such as the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center calculates that more than 1,000 Europeans and 100 Americans have joined the estimated 15,000 foreign fighters in Syria alone. Now, the dilemma of insecurity is not just inside the Middle East, but also linked to Europe and the U.S. This is a negative, unintended consequence.

The horizon is grey, but there are some alternative answers to the traditional anti-terrorism approach based on force and military capabilities. This problem of terrorism will not be fixed only by force, but with a wider approach which dislocates the roots of terrorism. Secondly, the fight against terrorism is not eternal. At some point, there is a winner, and the asymmetrical relationship between the winner and the looser will enable it to embark on a peace process.

A commander with the Islamic State (IS) armed group has said his militia should target Lebanon, accusing its government of complicity with Shia-Muslim movement Hezbollah.

In an interview published on Wednesday, Anas Sharkas, also known as Ali Abu Al Shishani, accused the Lebanese government of being an accomplice to Hezbollah, which he said has “taken Iran as its god”.

The announcement was made public after weeks of fighting between the Lebanese army and jihadists on the border between Lebanon and Syria.

In an interview with the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, Sharkas called on jihadists from both the Islamic state and the al-Nusra Front groups to move their fight inside Lebanon.

Al-Akhbar stated that the interview took place two months ago on the outskirts of Arsal, where the two groups have held a number of Lebanese servicemen hostage.

The newspaper did not say why it was only published yesterday.

Sharkas told Al-Akhbar that the Beirut government is weak and subservient to Hezbollah, which is aligned with the government of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

He accused Hezbollah of massacring the jihadists’ men, women and children while the party and their supporters enjoy safety, adding that his supporters will only succeed by fighting them inside Lebanon.
Sharkas recently announced his defection from the Al-Qaeda-aligned Al-Nusra Front to IS in a video.

This was posted as a response to his wife Olga al-Oqaili’s detention by Lebanese security after she attempted to cross into the country on fake documents.

In the video Sharkaes threatened to attack Lebanon and expand kidnappings to women and children following his wife’s arrest.

The Al-Nusra Front executed one hostage, police officer Ali Bazzal, on Friday, after the news broke of Al-Oqaili’s arrest along with the former wife of the IS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Sharkas also called on the two jihadist groups to unite in battle, despite long-term rifts between them.
Al-Oqaili was recently transferred to Lebanon’s General Security Agency, raising hopes that she will be exchanged for the group of servicemen captured by both militias last August.