The attack bore all the traits of Islamic State in Iraq. A small unit of militants, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and suicide belts, hit the Tripoli prison just before sunrise.

Blasting though a wall, four fighters worked their way through the heavily guarded compound before firing a rocket-propelled grenade to breach the cells inside.

Their target, security sources say, was a jailed Libyan Islamic State militant. Clashes erupted. Two of the attackers, a Moroccan and a Sudanese, detonated suicide belts and shortly afterwards all four, and the militant, were dead.

The prison break failed. But it was another illustration of the tactics employed by an Islamic State front determined to emulate the success of the group’s founders in Iraq and Syria.

“When we see them fighting, they are well trained. There were only four, but they destabilised the whole base,” said Muaad Khalil, a spokesman for forces at the Maitiga base. “Who would have thought to attack this base, but they did.”

Four years after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is locked in a conflict between two rival governments — an official one in the east, and a self-declared one controlling Tripoli — and the many armed factions that back them.

Far from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State has steadily grown in Libya’s chaos, controlling the city of Sirte, and worrying Western governments who fear it can only become stronger in the post-revolution mess.

They have left their mark on the North African state. They have massacred Christian Egyptians on a Libyan beach, publicly flogged criminals in Sirte, stormed oilfields, and attacked a five-star Tripoli hotel.

But while Libya’s turmoil and history of jihadism offered fertile ground, Islamic State has run up against the heavily armed factions and rival Islamists already in place.

Even as they lay claim to Sirte, Libya’s Islamic State followers have been ousted from Derna city by local fighters, and have shown they cannot hold ground or muster the finances and oil resources they benefit from in Iraq.

“They clearly want to expand from Sirte,” one Western diplomat said. “They continue to maintain the ability to carry out one-offs outside their main area, but they are still small.”

JIHADIST HISTORY

Libya has a long history of jihadism. Men from the Libya Islamic Fighting Group fought in Afghanistan. Later, Libyan al Qaeda militants were accused in the U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.

After the fall of Gaddafi, and with the steady fracturing of Libya between rival brigades of former rebels, the Islamist militants among them found room to grow.

One group, Ansar al Sharia in Benghazi, was blamed for the 2012 attack that killed the U.S. ambassador there.

As in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State draws recruits from local groups, security sources and local residents say. But Derna also showed their limits.

Even after Islamic State leaders arrived to recruit in July, fighting erupted as Derna Islamists and citizens fed up with foreign jihadists drove Islamic State out.

But in Sirte, security sources and residents say, they found a more suitable base by tapping into frustrations in Gaddafi’s home town, where many felt sidelined after the revolution.

“Daesh saw Sirte as the perfect place. Some Gaddafi followers are now Daesh members,” said local military commander Ismail Al-Mjaree, using an Arabic name for the group. “In Derna, they didn’t have that environment.”

Targeted assassinations of rivals and security officials began last year, and Islamic State forces moved in force on Sirte in February and March, taking a radio station and other important buildings.

Forces from Misrata – a port city that is home to one of the country’s more powerful military factions – arrived to take back Sirte. But fearing large-scale casualties and blaming a lack of support from Tripoli, they retreated, although hostilities may be resumed at some point.

HIT-AND-RUN

Security sources in Tripoli and Misrata estimate Islamic State has at least 500 fighters inside Sirte, and numbers are growing thanks to the arrival of foreign recruits.

Most of Islamic State’s leaders are Libyan, some who spent time in Abu Salim prison during the Gaddafi era or had ties to Ansar al Sharia. One top leader, security sources said, is Hassan al-Karami, a Benghazi native once jailed for Islamist militancy.

The SITE jihadi monitoring service, citing Libyan media sources, reported that Abu Ali al-Anbari, believed to be Islamic State governor for Syria directly under Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had arrived in Sirte by sea.

“They control the whole city and the suburbs. No one can fight back there now,” one Libyan security source said. “They are Sudanese, Egyptians and Tunisians in large numbers.”

Tunisian gunmen who attacked foreign tourists at a hotel in Sousse and the Bardo museum in Tunis this year were trained at camps in Libya. Islamic State claimed both attacks, though they may have been tied to another group.

So far, Islamic State has carried out mostly hit-and-run strikes or high-profile attacks such as the Tripoli prison assault or the attack on the Corinthia hotel in the capital, which killed nine people including a French national and an American.

The group has also targeted the oil industry. It attempted to breach the defences of the Es Sider oil port, but failed. Its fighters overran oilfields south of Sirte, kidnapping several foreigners, but without taking control of the fields.

“The Islamic State in Libya doesn’t have comparable revenue streams – no oil sales, no sizeable population to tax and extort,” said Geoff Porter, a North Africa expert at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.

“In Libya, there is a superabundance of armed groups. For the most part they are busy fighting each other, but they could potentially be harnessed to eliminate Islamic State.”

SHARIA LAW

Events in Sirte are hard to verify. But as in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State appears to be slowly imposing its vision on the city, carrying out punishments such as crucifixions and public floggings, residents say.

Taking over city institutions and banks, Islamic State forces merchants and shopkeepers to pay a tax that would normally go to the state, and an Islamic court is in place.

Barbers are banned from shaving off beards and smoking Shisha pipes in cafes has been stopped. Female students have been forced to wear one-piece robes.

A former bank employee and other residents said the local Islamic State organisation appeared to be struggling to manage the city financially. Prices of local goods are rising and other products are disappearing.

“Life in Sirte is almost non-existent,” one resident said. “People do not have enough money to flee the city.”

Twice in the last month, though, residents in Sirte say they saw unidentified warplanes attacking districts controlled by Islamic State.

Neither of Libya’s two governments acknowledged responsibility though both they and foreign countries, including the United States, have carried out such raids in the past.

“We don’t have night vision for those kind of strikes,” said one security source in Misrata. “But you know, the whole world is against Islamic State now.”

 

 

trust.org

 

Israeli officials have raised their estimate of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal to 150,000, an increase of 50% from May of this year, Avi Issacharoff reported for The Times of Israel on Thursday.

The revised valuation on rockets suggests Hezbollah is ramping up efforts to acquire weapons whose purpose is to attack Israel, despite its deep involvement in the Syrian civil war.

Hezbollah forces have been operating in Syrian territory for over three and a half years. Thousands of the organization’s fighters are thought to be on Syrian soil and hundreds, some say thousands, have been killed there, including at least one senior officer.

The organization has simultaneously continued to amass short- and medium-range rockets from Syria while also increasing its cache of Iranian-made long-range missiles.

Issacharoff added that Hezbollah assembled a fleet of drones that can be used for intelligence gathering and combat. The Iranian-backed terror group has also been looking to acquire “SA-17 and SA-22 ground-to-air missiles as well as P-800 Oniks air-to-sea missiles.” Despite the concern over Hezbollah’s improved capabilities, Issacharoff wrote that the terror group is reportedly “not interested in a confrontation” at this time.

Arms transfers to Hezbollah violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and the terror group. When Israel called attention to Hezbollah’s continued stockpiling of weapons and violations of the resolution in January, the Security Council refused to act.

Israel has threatened to destroy any game-changing weapons sent to Hezbollah. Reported explosions at Damascus airport on Wednesday were thought to have been the result of Israeli air strikes, though no evidence exists to attribute the explosions to the Israeli Air Force.

An Israeli defense official told The New York Times in May that the buildup of Hezbollah’s terror infrastructure in southern Lebanese villages meant that “civilians are living in a military compound,” and that their lives were at risk. A few days later, a newspaper linked to Hezbollah confirmed the Israeli assessment.

In a conversation with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah this past August, Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that “the nuclear agreement between Tehran and the world powers created a historic opportunity to [sic] for regional cooperation to fight extremism and face threats posed by the Zionist entity.” A month later, it was reported that Iran had boosted its funding of Hezbollah and Hamas in anticipation of the billions it would receive due to sanctions relief.

In Don’t Be Fooled, Hezbollah is Bigger and Badder Than Ever, which was published in the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, Shai Oseran and Stéphane Cohen wrote:

One should not be surprised, then, to hear commentators asserting that Hezbollah has been severely weakened by the events of the last year. But has it?

Many Israeli military strategists don’t think so. To the contrary, they point to a number of alarming indicators suggesting that Hezbollah may be stronger than it has ever been. And that has them worried. The massive arsenal of advanced weaponry Hezbollah has amassed since it last faced off with Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the technological advances it has made, and the battlefield experience it has gained in Syria, have all helped turn Hezbollah into what could be Israel’s most dangerous enemy in a generation.

 

thetower.org

 

Islamic state group claimed responsibility for Thursday’s double attack on a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut which killed at least 37 people.

The group said in a statement posted on Twitter by its supporters, that its members blew up a bike loaded with explosives in a street in the Borj al-Barajneh area and when people gathered, a suicide bomber blew himself up among them causing more casualties and killing 40 people.

The Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah group has sent fighters to Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s struggle against rebel groups and Islamic State militants.

Gunmen killed eight civilians, including a child, in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula where the army is battling a jihadist insurgency, medical and security sources said Thursday. Unidentified armed men shot and killed seven men and a four-year-old child in their home in El-Arish in North Sinai on Wednesday night, a security official said.

The source said the victims, who were from the Palestinian town of Rafah on the border with the Gaza Strip and lived near a police station, had been killed for cooperating with the security forces. The eight bodies were taken Thursday morning to a hospital in El-Arish, an official there said.

Egypt’s affiliate of the Islamic State jihadist group has previously claimed to have executed several Sinai inhabitants that it accused of being informants for the security forces. The jihadist group also claimed to have downed the Russian Metrojet A-321 plane over the Sinai on October 31, killing all 224 people on board.

Cairo says militants have killed hundreds of police and soldiers since 2013, when the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. The army has regularly announced the death or capture of jihadists since it launched an offensive against them in 2012, but its figures cannot be independently verified.

 

middle-east-online.com

Senior politicians in Morocco and Algeria have ruled out concerns that the mounting tension between the two countries could escalate into war over the situation in Western Sahara. They have called instead for political initiatives to solve the dispute.

According to Morocco’s former Minister of State, Mohamed El-Yazghi, war is unacceptable. “Those who start it will defy the UN, which has safeguarded the ceasefire since 1971,” he told Quds Press. War would not, in any case, change the facts on the ground, he insisted. “Morocco has fortified itself and no one can remove it from the Sahara, so I do not think that anyone can change that.”

Asked about the possibility of an initiative to end the dispute between the two countries he explained that Morocco has proposed autonomy with broad powers in the southern provinces. “However, any initiative should start with convincing the separatists in the Polisario and Algeria that this is the right way and Morocco has nothing to offer.”

Yazghi regretted that Algeria did not develop its position towards the Western Sahara. “Morocco presented a political solution to the dispute with the Polisario after the proposal for a referendum failed and called for dialogue between the parties concerned in order to reach a political solution,” he added.

 

middleeastmonitor.com

Daesh released a new video threatening to attack Israel, but did not reveal when it would take place.

“The video is focused on the war against the Egyptian military. The threat to Israel comes at the end, where he says that they will reach the Jews,” Rafael Green, director of the Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor of MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.

The speaker expressed the terrorist group’s desire to attack Israel at an unspecified time, he said, quoting the well-known hadith:

“Judgment Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and trees will call: O Muslim, o servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him – except for the gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.”

Therefore, this video should be taken seriously, but needs to be put into proportion, said Green.

The 14 minute video titled “And Then They Will Be Vanquished,” is a response to the Egyptian army’s recently launched Operation Martyr’s Right, noted the MEMRI report.

The speaker is a masked gunman who urges Egyptian soldiers to repent or be killed for attacking extremists in Sinai. He claimed that the army is trying to push out the local population in order to defend Israel.

The speaker warns Israel, saying that the extremists have not forgotten it in spite of their current focus on the war against the Egyptian government. He vows that his group will resume its attacks on Israel “soon.”

He also vows that Daesh will lead the caliphate which will “rise up and uproot you [the Jews].”

“He warns them that the mujahideen will penetrate deep into the territory of the ‘tyrants’ hinting at planned operations within Egypt itself, rather than in the Sinai Peninsula,” notes the report.

“Indeed, this apostate army has failed to carry out the mission it was tasked with, and was embarrassed in front of the public and in front of its masters,” he declares.

These messages were spoken as footage of civilians allegedly killed by the Egyptian army and blown up tanks and dead Egyptian soldier were shown.

The speaker vows that his group will raise its flag over the Cairo Tower, a famous Cairo landmark.

 

albawaba.com

The bombing last month of a Russian passenger jet that has been attributed to ISIS in Sinai will likely result in the group getting funds from ISIS Central, to pay for more smuggled advanced weaponry, which the organization can use to target both Egypt and Israel.

Wilayat Al-Sinai, previously Ansar Beit Al-Makdes, has been buying arms trafficked into Sinai from Libya using them to launch a series of deadly attacks on Egyptian security forces.

Its ability to plant a bomb on board a civilian airliner that took off from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport represents a step up in its terrorist capabilities. The bombing might be rewarded by ISIS Central, in the form of funds sent to Wilayat Al-Sinai to further enhance the group’s capabilities.

Following its bombing attack on the Russian airliner, which murdered 224 civilians, the status of Wilayat Al-Sinai can be expected to rise in the eyes of ISIS Central in Syria and Iraq.

The terrorist financing could go towards purchasing anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, mortar launchers, assault rifles, and rockets.

On the flip side of the equation, the organization, mostly made up of local Sinai Beduin members mixed with some foreign volunteers, will now face an even more intense Egyptian military campaign to destroy it.

Egypt has over the past year carried out two major military assaults on ISIS in Sinai. On the ground, Egyptian commando units, armored vehicles, and special operations units have been battling the group, while in the air, Egypt has deployed F-16 fighter jets and Apache assault helicopters to launch air strikes on the organization.

A new assault by Egypt on Wilayat Al-Sinai now seems a matter of time, after the group caused enormous damage to Egyptian tourism and its economy.

ISIS continues to operate, on a far lower scale, in the Gaza Strip as well, with a small ISIS-affiliated group firing a rocket into southern Israel on Sunday night. According to Israeli intelligence assessments, the rocket was fired in the course of an ongoing dispute with Hamas, which salafist jihadis in Gaza have sought to undermine.

A radical jihadi-Salafi group calling itself the Omar Hadid Brigades is behind the rockets. The group is named after a key figure who helped Abu Musab al-Zarqawi set up and run al-Qaida in Iraq nearly a decade ago, planting the seed for the Islamic State in Iraq, which eventually turned into ISIS when it crossed into Syria.

Earlier this week, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that “Hamas is not happy about rocket and sniper fire from Gaza. It is working to stop this,” Ya’alon said.

On the other hand, Hamas has in the past been willing to cooperate with ISIS in Sinai, allowing it access to Gazan weapons and training when possible, in exchange for access to the Egyptian side of Rafah tunnels.

Egypt has however been highly successful in blocking off  the Gaza-Sinai smuggling tunnels.

 

jpost.com

The Republic of Lebanon said it has confirmed the acquisition of six A-29 Super Tucano turboprop aircraft from Embraer Defense & Security and Sierra Nevada Corporation.

The contract includes logistics support for aircraft operation as well as a complete training system for Lebanese Air Force pilots and mechanics. The sale was approved in June by the US State Department.

The aircraft sale is part of a larger, more comprehensive package, including infrastructure improvements, that will be fulfilled by other parties not involved in the Embraer/SNC partnership. The planes, which are currently in operation with 10 Air Forces around the world, will be built in the Jacksonville, Florida.

The A-29 Super Tucano is a durable, versatile and powerful turboprop aircraft capable of carrying out a wide range of light air support (LAS) missions, even operating from unimproved runways. Due to its original concept design, high speed and excellent maneuverability, the Super Tucano is the only aircraft in its class to present superb cockpit visibility, extremely high efficiency and low vulnerability in the close air support role. The blend of advanced, robust and redundant systems allows the aircraft to outmaneuver and outperform nearly any competitor in its class.

Leader in the aerospace and defense industry of Latin America, Embraer Defense & Security offers a complete line of integrated solutions such as C4I (Command, Control, Communication, Computers and Intelligence Center) applications, leading edge technologies in the production of radars, advanced information and communication systems, integrated systems for border monitoring and surveillance, as well as military and government transportation aircraft. With a growing presence on the global market, Embraer Defense & Security products are present in more than 60 countries.

 

financial-news.co.uk

An international air defence exercise is taking place in Tunis, in which the Algerian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Tunisian airforces are taking part.

The event is part of the “5+5 Dialogue” or Western Mediterranean Forum, which was set up in 2004 to foster cooperation in joint matters such as security and defence such as marine surveillance, training, civil protection, search and rescue and the surveillance and defence of the airspace.

A Tunisian military transport plane will be used to simulate a “renegade” civil plane, technical jargon for civil planes arriving or leaving national airspace that could constitute a security risk because of being traced to possible terrorist action.

The command, control and radar surveillance centres of the countries along the aircraft route, pilots and ground staff at the air bases will be expected to react swiftly and in a coordinated manner in order to intercept and escort the threat out of national airspace or force the plane to land at a designated airport, according to instructions from the ground following established protocols – which is what would happen in reality.

The aim of the exercise, which takes place on an annual basis, is to foster and consolidate the adoption of common procedures for managing events of this sort, where each nation has its own duty, but where taking coordinated action is essential, given the speed and complexity of potential intervention. The 2014 edition was led by Italy.

The leg of the exercise in the Italian airspace will be managed by the air operations command centre at Poggio Renatico, the air force command and control centre that carries out 24-hour surveillance of the national airspace, and which gives immediate orders for fighter interceptor planes to take off.

Several officers from the centre will be in Tunis, inside the cell selected by those managing the exercise.