The next target for Britain’s military action could be Libya as fears heighten over Islamic State militants and that it could be used as a gateway for Europe.

The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence have said that they are worried about the rise of extremist groups in the region and fear they could target Europe next.

On Friday, December 11, Manuel Valls, the French prime minister called for international events to stop Isil extending into the north African country.

express.co.uk

Egypt has received its first Type-209/1400 attack submarines manufactured in Germany, military spokesperson Ahmed Samir announced in his Facebook page Thursday.

The inauguration of the new submarine was attended by Egyptian Navy Commander in Chief Rear Admiral Osama Rabie and the German Navy Vice Admiral Rainer Brinkmann, according to Samir.

“The new submarine is a technological addition to the Egyptian navy and a further boost to its ability to maintain Egyptian national security at our borders and coasts,” said Rabie.

In 2011, Egypt signed a deal with Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) to buy two German-made submarines then ordered two more in 2014, said Rabie during the graduation ceremony of the 66th batch of the maritime college in June, Youm7 reported.

The Type-209/1400 attack submarines were built by Germany in the 1960s and are used in many navies around the world including Turkey, Greece, Argentina, Brazil and Indonesia, according to Youm7.

In July,  Egypt received three French Rafale fighters; the first of 24 warplanes acquired by Cairo in a 5.2 billion euro ($5.6 billion) deal signed in February.

thecairopost.com

Fears are mounting that Islamic State terrorists could destroy an ancient Roman site in Libya which they have seized in their march towards the capital Tripoli.

ISIS fanatics travelling in 30 pick-up trucks stormed the coastal city of Sabratha on Wednesday night after three of their men were captured by a rival militia.

Black-clad militants overpowered residents and set up checkpoints in the city, which is just 50 miles from Tripoli, before successfully retrieving the three men.

In the northern heart of Libya sits the town of Sirte. It is the hometown of Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed there by local militiamen after a NATO missile stopped his convoy on their behalf.

A militia group from the western town of Misrata had taken control of the town, much to the annoyance of the local population. Local officials and elders complained about their fate. They had been delivered to what many saw as an occupying force.

Older sympathies for Gaddafi went underground. Loyalty to Gaddafi had been declared a crime. That section of society muted itself for the time being.

This year, in late summer, the Islamic State group appeared in Sirte and now flies its black flag from Sirte’s tall buildings. Not 400 miles south of Europe sits this branch of the caliphate. It is not to be easily dislodged.

How did IS seize Sirte? The answer lies somewhere between the general political chaos in Libya, the fight over oil and the disgruntlement of the old Gaddafi guard.

All around this is the question of oil. The new report from the International Crisis Group – The Prize: Fighting for Libya’s Energy Wealth (December 3) – has elements of the answer. It points a finger at the battle over oil installations on the doorstep of Sirte.

The Tripoli government’s Petroleum Defense Guards – led by Ibrahim Jadran – was to maintain order in the oil installations. But Jadran fell out with the groups in Tripoli and decided to operate on his own. He has secessionist tendencies, wanting Libya’s east to break away.

Conflict between Jadran’s forces and the militia from Misrata – Fajr Libya, also known as Libya Dawn – broke out in December 2014. The battlefield comprised the oil installations along the Gulf of Sidra.

Aerial bombing by Libya’s second government, based in Tobruk-Bayda, against the Misrata forces turned the tide, but did not give anyone the advantage. This has been the classic impasse in Libya. No-one has been able to seize the day.

Warfare in that area has curtailed oil production. An already desperate population hunkered down, jobless and uncertain. Caught between two governments, the militias fought to control the oil fields and oil installations. They destroyed as much as they won. Libya’s vast oil and natural gas wealth is the prize.

Over the Tunisian border and via the eastern provinces of Libya came fighters from outside the country, as well as veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Shariah.

Chaos allowed them to settle in Sirte. They were drawn to IS by its audacity. Their own groups seemed petty in comparison to its grand designs. In Dernah, to the east, entrenched extremism would have to be uprooted for IS to establish itself.

Even in Sirte, authority figures – such as the Salafi cleric Khaled Ferjani – had to be killed before an IS branch could be set up. An uprising of Ferjani’s followers was crushed in a few days. His mosque was renamed to honour Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq – the ancestor of IS.

It provided IS with an excuse to remove all those who opposed it within the city. It also allowed former Gaddafi followers to sign up – not because they ascribe to the ideology of “the caliphate”, but because they saw it (as a source told me) as a way out from their isolation.

It has been convenient to say that IS in Sirte is made up of foreigners. This is not entirely the case.

One of its most outspoken leaders is Hassan al-Karami, who comes from Benghazi and was involved there with Ansar al-Sharia.

Thus far, IS in Libya has no access to the kinds of oil fields that it holds in Iraq and Syria. It is not far from crucial oil infrastructure, but does not control it.

Over the final months of 2015, IS has attempted to destroy oil pumping stations and other installations in Mabruk, Dahra, Ghani, Bahi and elsewhere. The point, as the ICG report notes, is not “to seize the fields but to damage the country’s economic lifeline in order to weaken the state and allegedly to weaken as well European countries heavily reliant on Libyan oil”.

Most of Libya’s oil last year went to Europe, with Italy being the main beneficiary. This is what IS would like to target.

For Libya to wake from this nightmare seems impossible. Last Sunday, the two governments in Tripoli and in Tobruk-Bayda agreed to hold elections within two years and to create a political process for the interim period.

They have agreed to create a government of national reconciliation. There are, however, forces within each of the camps that are opposed to this idea of unity.

One of the most dangerous errors would be if the Tobruk government persists in creating its own central bank and oil ministry, duplicating those in Tripoli. Once these are established, the divides will remain open. The feeling is that the UN forced this resolution through – a UN dented by allegations that its previous envoy had accepted favours from the United Arab Emirates to favour Libya’s UAE proxies.

It is as likely as not that this reconciliation will be short-lived.

Human rights violations are routine. A Human Rights Watch report – The Endless Wait: Long-term Arbitrary Detentions and Torture in Western Libya (December 2) – points out that thousands of political prisoners remain behind bars since 2011. They have never been charged.

This provides no assurance to Gaddafi loyalists that they will not meet a similar fate. IS, for them, is a far more secure investment.

counterpunch.org

But they’re now faced with a new and terrible reality — the worst kind of neighbors have moved in.

“My sons refuse to move from this place because this is their father’s land,” said Zahara Ghorballi. “If we move from here the terrorists will take it.” The terrorists she speaks of have already done their worst to her.

In November, her youngest son was snatched. The 16-year-old shepherd was grazing his flock of sheep on the side of the mountain that looms over their lonely home in the sparsely populated valley below.

As if their lives weren’t difficult enough, ISIS militants now roam the hills — and seemed to come out of nowhere that fateful day. They asked her son to hand over his flock. It’s the family’s main source of livelihood and so he refused. ISIS retaliated.

His mother had no idea what was happening until her son, Braik, did not return home with his cousin one day. His cousin had the family’s sheep and was holding a plastic bag.

“I said ‘What is in the plastic bag?’ He told me there is a dead sheep in it. I asked him to give it to me. And he refused. He ran away with it,” Zahara said.

The reason was sinister and horrifying.

Inside the plastic bag was Braik’s severed head. ISIS militants had beheaded him.

Zahara’s remaining sons put their brother’s head in a refrigerator until they could get the body down from the mountain for a proper burial.

“They beheaded him and the sheep at the same time,” she said, “He was everything to me.”

Braik helped her do everything in the house because her eyesight is failing. Now he’s gone. The night it happened she spent pacing, wailing and hitting herself in the head, consumed by grief.

Before they killed him, the militants made Braik spew propaganda in a video. Their chilling message: This is what happens to spies who tell police where ISIS is hiding.

But his family says the reality is the militants are no better than common thieves and just wanted his sheep.

“I want to get rid of all of them. Look for them one by one. Because they hurt me so deeply,” Zahara said.

But that’s easier said than done.

cnn.com

The army killed nine al-Nusra Front militants in shelling on the Wadi al-Khail on the outskirts of the northeastern town of Arsal, the National News Agency said on Wednesday.

The army shelled positions and vehicles of the Front in Wadi al-Khail inflicting direct damage among their ranks and killing one of its officials, Abou Firas al-Jebbeh, together with his three companions, NNA added.

At least five other militants were also killed while they were attempting to drag away the bodies of their associates.

Arsal lies along Lebanon’s border with Syria. It hosts many Syrian refugees as well as rebel fighters in the surrounding countryside.

The town was the scene of fierce fighting in August 2014 between Lebanese security forces and jihadists of al-Qaida’s Syria affiliate Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State group.

naharnet.com

Over the past days American drones or spy planes have been making low passes over Sirte, the local headquarters of Islamic State. There include the squat, white Lockheed P-3 Orions, and other dark drones.

With the intensification of bombing of the terror group in Syria, Libya’s sky watchers think airstrikes are imminent.

Speculation about airstrikes heightened last week when the UN reported what intelligence agencies have been saying for months – that Libya has become Isis’s fallback position.

More than 800 fighters sent from Libya to battle in Syria and Iraq have now made the journey the other way, as Isis expands its Libyan caliphate.

Last week France flew its first reconnaissance missions over Sirte, joining the drones and spy planes of the United States. This small town on Libya’s central coast was the birthplace of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi – and the scene of his brutal execution.

Now the town’s giant concrete Ouagadougou conference centre is bedecked with black flags. The grounds outside are bloody execution sites for the terrorists who have brought Raqqa-style horror to north Africa. Recent escapees tell of a litany of horrific acts, including crucifixions and townsfolk hanged from mechanical diggers and lampposts, some accused of being apostates, some of being spies.

Barbers are banned from shaving off beards and women are forced to wear dark robes, while zealots ensure that music is banned from radio stations. “People live for one thing, which is to get out,” said one resident, newly arrived in Tripoli, the capital far to the west.

Sirte’s airbase, the biggest in Libya, is being readied by Isis to take suicide planes, while 85 of the town’s children have been paraded as “suicide cubs”, ready to detonate themselves for the cause.

Sirte is the true prize, offering an airport, seaport and something Isis wanted more than anything else: oil. South of the town is the massive Sirte Basin, the centre of Libya’s oil industry. In a few months its units conquered the town and pushed south into the Sirte Basin, taking a 100-mile stretch of coastline. In January, it killed 22 Christians, 21 of them Egyptians, on the Sirte shore, triggering Egyptian airstrikes.

Many Ansar al-Sharia units defected to Isis, gifting it a base at Sabratha, 60 miles east of Tunisia’s border. Tunisia says Seifeddine Rezgui Yacoubi, the gunman who killed 38 tourists, 30 of them British, at Sousse, was trained at Sabratha, as were the gunmen who attacked tourists in the capital’s Bardo museum last March.

Last week, Isis launched its most audacious attack so far, striking at Ajdabiya, 70 miles east of Sirte, and threatening Libya’s four key oil ports.

In fact, alarm bells about Isis expansion in Libya have been ringing all year. In the summer, the European Union high representative, Federica Mogherini, warned: “In Libya, there is the perfect mix ready to explode and in case it explodes, it will explode just at the gates of Europe.”

In October, Wolfgang Pusztai, Austria’s former Libya defence attaché, told the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee: “The more Islamic State is put under pressure in the Middle East, the more active it will be in Libya.”

Loudest of all has been France’s defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, issuing periodic warnings that Libya has become the “hub” for Isis to supply terrorists and weapons to affiliated groups in Algeria and Mali and to Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Officials from the American military’s African Command, Africom, based in Stuttgart, have been visiting the region, the Guardian said, and, should the political decision be made, western forces are already deployed in strength around Libya’s borders.

Along with drones and spy planes, the US has bombers and Marine helicopter-borne units stationed in Spain and Italy. More US drones operate from two bases in Niger, guiding a 3,000-strong force of French paratroopers, Operation Barkhane, on the southern Libyan border against jihadi convoys passing out of the country.

RAF Tornados and Typhoons, newly arrived in Cyprus, are within strike range of Libya, as are jets on the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. And a dozen European warships are off the Libyan coast, currently tasked with an ineffective mission to intercept the country’s people smugglers.

independent.com.mt

The early hours of the morning of Nov. 24 began with a boom. The Israeli Air Force was hitting targets here in the Gaza Strip, shattering the pre-dawn quiet of this besieged coastal enclave.

Someone had shot a rocket over the Israeli separation barrier. Was it Hamas? Or Islamic Jihad? Was this the beginning of a new war?

Nope. Although no one claimed responsibility, the culprits almost certainly were from a small group calling itself the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade (SOHB), the affiliate in Gaza of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.

Though some, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may want you to believe Hamas and ISIS are buddies and would work together, this isn’t the case.

“We condemn any actions, especially the murder of innocent women and children, that al-Qaeda or [ISIS] use,” says Ahmed Yousef, a senior Hamas figure who, in 1968, became the pupil of Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He told The Daily Beast that in his view, the destruction of historical monuments in Iraq and Syria, as well as November’s attack on Paris that killed 130, are “barbaric.”

Before the question could even be asked, Yousef explained that “the last suicide bombing used by Hamas was in 2004,” saying that the technique of indiscriminate killing was harming the movement.

Yousef said that the Salafist movement, a super-fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam that strives to emulate the Prophet Muhammed and his early followers and serves as the foundation for radical groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, has a long history in Gaza.

“For years, they were ‘quiet,’ they didn’t get involved in politics,” Yousef said. Then, “When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, some of them decided to involve themselves.”

The Salafis began by setting up the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque, named for an Islamic scholar active in the 13th and 14th centuries whose strict interpretation of Islamic doctrine is often cited as a main inspiration for armed Salafist groups, in the conservative city of Rafah in southern Gaza next to the Egyptian Sinai. They hoped to have a space where “they controlled what was preached, without oversight,” according to Yousef.

The man who preached at the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque was Dr. Abdel-Latif Moussa, a Salafist who, Yousef says, had links to al-Qaeda. On August 14, 2009, Moussa declared an Islamic emirate from Rafah, directly challenging Hamas rule.

The next day, Hamas security forces stormed the mosque, and Moussa died in subsequent clashes.

Since then, relations between Hamas and the Salafists in Gaza have been rough.

The armed followers of Moussa, Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Followers of God), and other Salafi offshoots sporadically attacked Hamas positions. They also murdered Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni in 2011, after attempting to force Hamas to release one of their leaders. Arrigoni’s killing was widely condemned. He was a beloved figure in Gaza.

SOHB, Gaza’s latest incarnation of Salafi radicalism, burst onto the scene on June 3 this year, when it fired its first rockets at Israel.

The rockets were easily dealt with by Israel’s advanced “Iron Dome” missile defense system, and the IAF quickly retaliated by bombing three sites—two belonging to Hamas and another to Islamic Jihad. Israel promises to hold Hamas responsible for any rockets. So, when SOHB bombs, Hamas pays the price.

The de-facto government of Gaza is attempting to keep calm and avoid confrontation, as the severe devastation wrought by the 2014 war with Israel still weighs heavily on the 1.8 million Gazans, more than 2,000 of whom were killed in the 51 days of carnage.

Waleed al-Modallal, associate professor of political science at Gaza’s Islamic University and expert on the religious nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told The Daily Beast that he can’t guarantee SOHB is “specifically linked to ISIS.” But perhaps the Salafis themselves can do so.

The letter SOHB used to claim responsibility for the June rocket launch was decked out in ISIS insignia, including the group’s menacing black flag.  Modallal says that their “methodology is very close to how the Islamic State acts in Iraq, Syria or even the Sinai.”

Interesting point. Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, the ISIS affiliate in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, has been terrorizing the area for the past several years.

In July 2015, it launched an attack in the northern Sinai that killed 64 Egyptian soldiers, making it the deadliest day for Egypt’s army since its last war with Israel in 1973.

The Daily Beast spoke to an Egypt-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, about Ansar Beit al-Maqdis. He said that the group has “advanced weaponry,” such as Grad rockets and modern assault rifles, much of which found its way into Egypt through the porous border with war-torn Libya.

“Ironically, the weapons ABM possesses were provided by Western governments, during their support for armed militias attempting to oust [former Libyan dictator Muammar] Gaddafi” during the armed uprising in Libya that rose out of the Arab Spring.

Although Egypt has recently enforced a strict crackdown on the smuggling tunnels between Sinai and Gaza, it’s possible some advanced weapons made it across before the subterranean passageways were drowned in sewage and seawater.

On Oct. 10, SOHB reportedly fired a Grad rocket at Israel, which is much more advanced than the previous homemade rockets they had used.

In return, Israel bombed a Hamas training camp, and killed a five-month pregnant woman and her three-year-old daughter in the process.

Hamas pay a price, but as usual, the people of Gaza pay even more. But the threat that ISIS will grow in Gaza is real.

Professor Modallal says that people in the strip are frustrated with their situation—the world’s highest unemployment, with more than 60 percent of youth without work, near-endless bombings, and no hope of escaping the blockaded enclave due to both Israel and Egypt initiating border closures and building separation barriers.

After watching years of Palestinian attempts at the establishment of an independent state founder, says Modallal, they “look to the model of ISIS, who has carved a state out of Iraq and Syria in spite of a global coalition against them, and see it as a way of achieving autonomy and ending the situation they’re in.”

“The things ISIS does are against our culture as Palestinians,” Modallal says. “However, frustration can lead people to make a decision too quickly.”

In point of fact, the aforementioned border closure, separation barrier and Iron Dome missile defense mean that this threat doesn’t have much chance of seriously affecting Israel. The population of Gaza is isolated and under near-total control as far as the Israelis are concerned. The threat of ISIS in the strip is to the Palestinians themselves, who face the prospect of an ever bloodier existence.

thedailybeast.com

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday, December 8, that Russia had for the first time struck Islamic State targets in Syria with missiles fired from a submarine in the Mediterranean, Reuters reports.

“The targets were two large terrorist positions in the territory of Raqqa,” Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin in a televised meeting, adding that the Calibre missiles had been fired from the submarine Rostov-on-Don.

“We can say with complete confidence that fairly serious damage was done to weapons stores and a factory for preparing mines and, naturally, oil infrastructure.”

Shoigu said Russia had informed Israel and the United States in advance of its plan to launch missiles from a submarine. He said that, over the previous three days, Russia’s air force had flown more than 300 sorties over Syria and struck more than 600 targets of various types.

Russian bombers flying over Syria were being accompanied by fighter jets, as Putin had ordered, he added.

Putin thanked Russian special services and Syrian government troops for recovering it, and said it would allow experts to determine where exactly the Russian plane was located when it was hit. He said it should be opened only in the presence of international experts, “to carefully document everything”.

panarmenian.net