ISIS militants have released yet another threatening video via their media service this time threatening to take over Tunisia.

The six-minute video which also shows a string of world leaders also displays bomb making equipment, fire and sickening footage of a man who is about to be beheaded wearing an orange jump suit.

This latest video then goes on to show two terrorists wearing face coverings walking along what appears to be a leafy area stroking daggers – before then showing the disgusting murder of a number of men in a ditch.

And it seems that the film makers have been using computer-generated imagery in order to facilitate their shocking propaganda.

While the footage which has a voice over of a man speaking in Arabic is undated – it once again references their attempts to take over the world.

It calls on Muslims to attack both states and oust their ‘apostate’ democratic governments showing pictures of US secretary of state John Kerry and President Obama as well as a plethora of others.

Tunisia experienced its fourth deadliest attack of the year this week in which more than 50 people were killed.

Many in the country has become increasingly concerned both about the fate of its revolution and the violence.

Ten members of the security forces were killed in the fighting in the border town of Ben Guerdane, which Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi condemned as an ‘unprecedented’ jihadist attack aimed at ‘establishing a new Islamic State emirate’

Armed groups have expanded in Libya, taking advantage of the chaos there to set up training camps, and move into the unstable country.

mirror.co.uk

naharnet.com

Italy’s foreign minister told parliament in Rome on Wednesday that Daesh has around 5,000 fighters in Libya with the capabilities of carrying out attacks in neighboring countries, AFP reported.

The estimated number of Daesh fighters in Libya put forth by Italy is at the high end of other recent estimates. Other Western leaders have already expressed alarm over the increased presence of the militant group in Libya.

“According to our analyses, there are today around 5,000 Daesh fighters in Libya,” Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said.

“They are concentrated particularly in the area of (the city of) Sirte but from there they have the capacity to carry out dangerous incursions (into neighboring states),” he added.

Several deadly militant attacks have been carried out in Tunisia, including an attack on Monday on an army barracks and guard posts in border towns.

Tunisian security forces say they have killed 43 suspected militants in clashes since the recent attack.

Last week Italy deployed 50 special forces members to join US, British, and French forces already involved in intelligence and reconnaissance operations in Libya.

Rome also recently authorized the US to launch drone strikes into the north African country from Sicily, in a move hinting at greater military involvement in Libya.

However, Gentiloni cautioned against a widespread military intervention, saying Italy would not go beyond having peacekeeping troops on the ground.

“Military interventions are not the solution,” Gentiloni added, recalling that “Libya is six times the size of Italy and has 200,000 armed men between the militias and the army.”

albawaba.com

alalam.ir

An Italian-led, 5,000-strong international force is ready to deploy in Libya as concern grows over the threat posed by extremist groups operating in the country, with at least 45 people killed in clashes in neighbouring Tunisia on Monday.

Tunisian security forces fought off an attack near the Libyan border on Monday – the second such clash in a week. At least 45 people were killed, the interior and defence ministries said in a statement: 28 “terrorists”, seven civilians and 10 members of Tunisia’s security forces.

The group responsible for the attack was not identified, though the US and European governments are increasingly worried by the spread of Islamic State in Libya.

The Italian government is working on a plan to send a force, including British troops, to help mentor and train a new Libyan army if the Libyan parliament formally votes to support a new unity government. After that vote, the Libyan government would then have to invite the Italian-led force to deploy.

Deployment would take at least a month. Training would take place near the capital.

Monday’s attack in the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdane, close to the Libyan border, started at dawn and saw gunmen target a police station and military targets. Soldiers and helicopters were sent to the area to help hunt down the attackers as residents were told to remain inside.

Associated Press reported a hospital official Abdelkrim Sakroud saying on state radio that the civilian dead included a 12-year-old girl.

In separate incident five jihadis and a civilian were reportedly killed outside the town on Wednesday.

The increased activity along the Libya-Tunisia border follows a US airstrike on an Isis training camp in Libya last month.

There has been speculation since then that fighters have crossed into Tunisia to seek sanctuary. Tunisian members of Isis have also been reported crossing the border to take the fight to Tunisia after being trained in Libya.

Chaos has engulfed Libya since the Nato-backed ousting of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Rival administrations which have vied for power since mid-2014 are being urged to sign up to a UN-brokered national unity government to help restore stability and tackle a growing jihadi presence. Isis and other extremist organisations have exploited the power vacuum to seize significant territory along the coast around the central city of Sirte, as well as around Sabratha, between Tripoli and the Tunisian border.

The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, said on Sunday that the conditions were not yet in place for a military intervention. “As long as I am prime minister, Italy will not go to Libya for an invasion with 5,000 men,” Renzi told Canale 5 television.

The Italian government has repeatedly stressed that such troops would be used only in an advisory and training role and not in direct combat with Isis.

His comments followed those of the US ambassador to Italy, John Phillips, who was quoted in Corriere della Sera on Friday as saying that Italy could send up to 5,000 troops. “We need to make Tripoli safe and ensure that Isis is no longer free to strike,” Phillips said.

A host of countries have volunteered to contribute to the Italian-led force, including the UK, the US, Germany, France and Arab countries.

The US is already engaged in airstrikes against Isis targets in Libya. French and other special forces are also on the ground. The UK ministry of defence, asked about the presence of British special forces, said it never comments on the movements of special forces.

The MoD announced last week it was sending 50 troops to Tunisia to help train its forces.

In a phone call on Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin told his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that the fight against terrorism had to involve Libya and Yemen, not just Syria.

theguardian.com

At least 26 people have been killed in clashes between Tunisian police and unidentified gunmen near the Libyan border.

Tunisia’s interior and defence ministries said the dead included 21 attackers, one Tunisian soldier and four civilians.

A 12-year-old girl was among the civilians who were killed.

Interior ministry spokesman Yasser Mosbah earlier told The Associated Press the gunmen targeted a police station and military facilities at dawn on Monday in the border town of Ben Guerdane in eastern Tunisia.

The violence comes amid increasing international concern about Islamic State extremists in Libya. Tunisia’s fledgling democratic government is especially worried after dozens of tourists were killed in extremist attacks in Tunisia last year.

The Tunisian military sent reinforcements and helicopters to the area around Ben Guerdane and authorities are hunting several attackers still at large. The ministry urged residents to stay indoors.

Last week, Tunisian security forces killed five heavily-armed men in an hours-long gunfight after they crossed into the country from Libya with a larger group.

Tunisian security forces had been placed on alert based on “precise information” of possible border infiltrations following the February 19 US raid on an IS camp near the Libyan town of Sabratha, not far from the Tunisian border, the statement said.

Defence minister Farhat Horchani said last week that German and American security experts were expected in Tunis on Monday to help Tunisia devise a new electronic video-surveillance system of its border with Libya.

Tunisia was targeted last year by three attacks that left 70 people dead and were claimed by IS. According to Tunisian authorities, the attackers had been trained in Libya.

independent.ie

Chaos has engulfed Libya since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and rival administrations are being urged to sign up to a UN-brokered national unity government.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the future of Libya, and the stability of the whole Sahel region, is at stake as it faces the “terrifying threat” of Islamic State (IS).

But he warned international powers not to “stoke the fires of conflict” in the country.

Ban left Mauritania on Saturday and headed to Algeria as part of a tour of West and North Africa.

While meeting Mauritanian leaders, including President Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz and Prime Minister Yahya Ould Hademine, in the capital Nouakchott on Friday he said he was “deeply concerned about the situation in Libya”.

Chaos has engulfed Libya since the 2011 Nato-backed ouster of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and rival administrations are being urged to sign up to a UN-brokered national unity government to help restore stability.

The internationally recognised government is based in the far east of the North African country.

The Islamic State group and other extremist organisations have exploited the power vacuum, making gains along the oil-rich coastal regions and triggering concern among Western nations over jihadists controlling territory just 300km from Europe.

“There are alarming reports of widespread human rights violations, including serious abuses that may amount to war crimes,” Ban said on Friday. “All those with influence must use it to calm the situation and stop the fighting. It is utterly irresponsible for any outside player to stoke the fires.”

Ban said that his special representative Martin Kobler “is facilitating talks on a national unity government” as “we face the terrifying scourge of Daesh [IS] expanding in Libya and beyond its borders”.

Delays would only worsen the dire humanitarian needs, he warned, adding that “Libya’s future is at stake” and “the reverberations echo far”.

Success in stabilising Libya would also benefit the whole Sahel region and “our world” in general, he added.

The UN chief also called for Mauritania’s help in a territorial dispute between Morocco and a Western Sahara separatist group that has displaced tens of thousands in decades of fighting.

“Making progress on the situation in Western Sahara is also of importance here too,” he said, referring to Mauritania. “Numerous refugees share the same culture and family ties with Mauritanians.”

The United Nations has been trying to oversee an independence referendum for Western Sahara since 1992 after a ceasefire was reached to end a war that broke out when Morocco sent its forces to the former Spanish territory in 1975.

Before visiting Mauritania, Ban held talks in Burkina Faso. He will spend Saturday and Sunday in Algeria.

scmp.com

Pieces of the jigsaw that is the planned intervention in Libya are slowly coming together.

Planning is at an advanced stage, special forces are already on the ground and air power assets are being moved within range: a new Western military intervention in Libya is edging ever closer.

But a long-anticipated move against offshoots of the Islamic State group remains on hold as long as Libya has not formed a unified government with the authority to ask for help to stem the extremist group’s growth.

The legitimacy of any intervention is a delicate issue and key for Italy, which has agreed to lead a UN-mandated international stabilisation force into its troubled former colony provided it also has credible cover from a national authority.

Hence the hasty reaction from Italian officials when Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, the commander of US special-operations forces in Africa, let slip this week that a “coalition coordination centre” was already up and running in Rome with a view to eliminating the IS threat in Libya.

Domenico Rossi, number two in the Italian defence ministry, was quick to fire off a terse rebuttal. “We are awaiting the formation of a Libyan government, there is no ‘war room'” Rossi tweeted.

Handfuls of US, British and French special forces have already been spotted in Libya.

And a contingent of around 50 Italians is about to join them, Il Corriere della Sera reported Thursday, citing a classified order signed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi last month.

The secret services have been tasked with evaluating the balance of forces on the ground, providing intelligence and perhaps weapons and communications tools to potential allies against IS.

– Action needed urgently –

The group controls significant territory around the central city of Sirte and also has forces in the eastern city of Benghazi and, to the west of Tripoli, around Sabratha, where a US air strike aimed at an alleged IS training camp left some 50 people dead on February 19.

That attack was carried out with the use of British airbases. The US has since secured agreement from Italy that a base in Sicily can be used for drone strikes against IS in Libya and French aircraft carrier the Charles de Gaulle has been redeployed from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, officially for training exercises with Egypt.

In Sabratha, the commander of a group loyal to the Fajr Libya (Libyan Dawn) coalition, told AFP that British forces had been been in touch with local militias and that he anticipated a campaign against IS starting soon.

IS’s presence in Libya has become an increasing source of concern to Western governments wary of a repeat of Paris-style attacks on their soil.

The group is estimated to have between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters in the Sirte region, including Tunisian, Sudanese, Yemeni and Nigerian nationals.

“It is urgent to act,” said Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni, a prominent critic of the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya which led to the current chaos in the country.

“We have already seen how illusory can be the benefits of intervention without a medium to long-term perspective. We have to avoid repeating the errors of the past by acting precipitately.”

— ‘A viable partner on the ground’ —

US officials said the currently-stalled attempts to establish a sole Libyan authority would have to be completed before any action could be contemplated.

“There has to be a viable partner on the ground to work with,” a US defence source said.

“I don’t think there is an interest in attacking blindly without a viable partner.”

As things stand, the internationally recognised government based at Tobruk in eastern Libya has said it must have a veto on any intervention while its Islamist-influenced rival in Tripoli says it would regard military action as tantamount to an invasion.

With the stabilisation force envisaged at around 6,000 troops maximum, it seems likely any anti-IS campaign would be largely conducted from the air and designed to back up local groups seeking to oust the Islamist group from Libya.

“A military occupation would be absurd, has never been considered and certainly remains ruled out,” insisted Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti.

But there was also a word of warning from a close Libya watcher. “Experience elsewhere has clearly shown air strikes are not enough. Without ground forces, national or international, they will not work,” warned Alshiabani Abuhamoud.

middle-east-online.com

Alleged members of an Isis cell arrested in Morocco in February were plotting a biological weapons attack, authorities said.

“Some of the seized substances (from the suspects) are classified by international organizations which specialize in health issues as falling within the category of biological weapons dangerous for their capacity to paralyse and destroy the nervous system and cause death,” the interior ministry said.

“Members of the terrorist cell had prepared these deadly substances with a view to using them in their terrorist projects inside the kingdom,” it said in a statement, AFP reported.

The 10 member cell, which included a French national, was arrested by Moroccan authorities on February 18. Members were arrested in several towns in Morocco. Their identities have not been revealed by authorities.

Several thousand Moroccans are believed to have travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight for Isis, with Moroccan authorities claiming to have busted 31 Isis cells planning attacks in the country in the last three years. In January, the group released a video urging followers to commit a ‘Paris style’ attack in Morocco, which welcomes millions of tourists annually.

ibtimes.co.uk

Nearly 700 ISIL fighters have returned to Tunisia but there is no formal strategy to deal with them, analysts say.

Lamia pulls out her mobile phone and scrolls through a series of pictures on a messaging app. There is her eldest son, Bilal, smiling jauntily in a black beret bearing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group logo and a gun in his hand.

There he is posing on a bombed-out street with a friend, or standing in front of a colour-coded map of Syria. “I just kept telling him I wanted him to come back,” said Lamia, who did not give Al Jazeera her last name, from her home in Ksibet el Mediouni, a small village near the coastal city of Monastir in Tunisia.

In July 2013, Bilal, then 20, told his parents he was going to the beach.

Instead, he went to fight with ISIL in Syria.

In late March 2014, Bilal stopped calling his parents. A fellow fighter contacted the family to say Bilal had died, though the family still holds out hope he might be alive.

According to recent United Nations statistics, 5,500 Tunisians have gone to join ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

As the wars have dragged on, thousands, like Bilal, have been killed; hundreds more have been jailed in Syria. But for other fighters, home beckons.To date, nearly 700 fighters have returned to Tunisia, according to a spokesman for the interior ministry.

Most fighters return after becoming disenchanted by the war, being cajoled by their distraught families, or hoping to recruit their fellow countrymen.

“They don’t realise that when they come back, it will be another challenge. They are really going to be hassled,” said Mohammed Iqbel Ben Rejeb, the president and founder of the Rescue Association of Tunisians Trapped Abroad (RATTA), a civil society group founded in 2013 to work with families of children caught in conflicts around the world.

The issue hits close to home for Ben Rejeb: His younger brother went to Syria in March 2013 and celebrated his 24th birthday at an al-Nusra Front training camp.

He spent only 10 days in Syria, during which time his family bombarded him with phone calls and messages pleading with him to come home, before returning to Tunisia.

But Ben Rejeb’s brother’s case is unique. His brother has muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair, which made it difficult for him to perform any duties in the al-Nusra Front camp.

The peculiar nature of the case garnered media attention in the Arab world, as did a public plea by Ben Rejeb. In the end, he was given authorisation to leave and re-enter Tunisia without hassle.

For most returning fighters, jail and state surveillance are common. But that is only if they are able to return to Tunisia at all.

Jounedi Ayed’s son went to Syria in 2012, leaving behind an education, a stable job, and his family.

At the family’s home near Monastir, Ayed, who did not want his son’s name made public, recounted his son’s journey from partying teenager to pious Muslim to member of ISIL. Ayed told Al Jazeera from his home near Monastir that his son “realised his mistake” after witnessing abuses of power in Syria.

But since sneaking out of Syria into Turkey, his son has been stuck in Istanbul without a passport. According to the RATTA, dozens of Tunisians are caught in limbo in Turkey.

Disillusioned fighters usually try to return to Tunisia one of three ways.

The most common route is to fly directly from Turkey to Tunisia, but that involves a high probability that would-be returnees will be arrested at the airport.

According to Ben Rejeb, returnees may also try flying from Turkey to Tunisia with a stop in Morocco, where they are known to burn their passports and go to the Tunisian embassy to get new ones. Upon receiving a new passport, they then proceed to Tunisia.

Finally, some fighters attempt to cross the border with Libya, either undetected or by presenting themselves to border guards at the Ras Ajdir checkpoint. The RATTA estimates that 400-500 fighters have re-entered Tunisia undetected.

Many former fighters have repented, but don’t have the opportunity to demonstrate this to the Tunisian authorities, Ben Rejeb said.

In November 2015, then Foreign Minister Taieb Baccouche staunchly declared that Tunisia “would not accept a pardon for these Tunisians just on the basis of a declaration of repentance without legal accountability.”

Ayed said he believes his son has changed. But though he wants to return home, Ayed said he is worried that his son’s future will be spent in a Tunisian prison cell.

The EU-wide Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) notes that an effective policy for rehabilitating returning fighters includes “dialogue and engagement with a wide range of actors from the micro to macro level, such as families (both immediate and wider), community members and leaders, religious scholars, teachers, local authorities, police, and intelligence services.”

But Tunisia has not established a formal strategy to deal with returning fighters, though the government uses powers accorded through a new anti-terrorism law to contain them.

President Beji Caid Essebsi signed the law in July 2015, following two ISIL-claimed attacks on the Bardo museum and a Sousse beach resort. It is designed to give the government sweeping powers to combat terrorism, and most returning fighters are immediately placed in jail following a trial, or kept under surveillance.

“Ninety-five percent of them [returning fighters] were arrested and interrogated by police upon their return, while the others remained under surveillance,” Walid Elweikene, spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior said last December, according to the Saudi paper Asharq al Awsat.

The government has emphasised addressing immediate security objectives through surveillance and imprisonment. European countries such as France and the UK are also following such hardline measures, while other countries are pursuing softer strategies, such as rehabilitation.

“So far there is too little evidence to suggest that one approach is better than the other. The rehabilitation programmes that exist are small and have had few ‘graduates’. It will take time to measure their long-term effect,” writes Richard Barrett, senior vice president of the Soufan Group, in an email to Al Jazeera.

According to Charles Lister, a research fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, around 11 percent of fighters pose a credible threat upon returning home.

The three large-scale attacks in 2015 were claimed by ISIL, with all the attackers being trained in Libya before returning to Tunisia. To this extent, the possibility that a returning fighter could orchestrate an attack should be taken into account – in this case, around 70 fighters – but neither should it be exaggerated.

Ben Rejeb said while returnees convicted of committing crimes in Syria, or who pose a proven threat to Tunisian security, can be imprisoned, it is not a blanket solution.

Tunisia’s overcrowded and under-served prisons are well-known breeding grounds for recruitment and the dissemination of radical ideas, he added.

“In the short term you’ve won, but in the long term it’s a flaw,” Ben Rejeb said.

aljazeera.com