The United States and Argentina held a workshop this week on countering Hezbollah’s terror activities in the Western Hemisphere, a month before the 25th anniversary of the AMIA bombings, like reported by jpost.com.

The workshop, held in Buenos Aires on June 11-12, saw law enforcement personnel and financial practitioners attended Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru, as did representatives from Ameripol.

Officials from the U.S. Departments of State, Justice, and the Treasury, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Counterterrorism Center, and Drug Enforcement Administration also participated in the meeting.

The summit was held ahead of Western Hemisphere Ministerial that the Government of Argentina will host commemorating the 25th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the Argentine capital on July 18 1994 which killed 85 people and injured over 300 others.

According to a statement released by the US State Department, the workshop focused on Hezbollah’s global modus operandi and its terrorist and criminal infrastructure and activities in the Americas. 

“Participants discussed various techniques to constrain and counter the group’s illicit activities, including the financial and law enforcement tools available to identify, investigate, and prosecute Hezbollah’s global support and facilitation networks. Participants also discussed Hizballah attempts to continue and expand fundraising in the Western Hemisphere, especially in light of the current financial pressure on Hezbollah,” the statement said.

The finances of the Lebanese Shiite militant group, designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by dozens of countries across the globe, has been hit hard due in large part to years of sanctions by the United States which has also passed the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act threatening sanctions against anyone who finances the group in any significant way.

But the designation does not affect Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, which continues to provide financial and military support.

Hezbollah also receives significant financial aid by supporters who live abroad as well as through charities and a wide variety of criminal activities such as fraud, the drug, arms, and blood diamond trade.

This network of criminal and narcotic rings, are not based in Lebanon, but are global network based primarily out of Africa as well as both North and South America. The group also runs a large network of criminal and narcotic rings, based primarily out of Africa as well as both North and South America.

Hezbollah operatives also rely on legitimate business enterprises that in truth are shell companies which raise, launder and transferring large sums of money to the group.

A major Iranian-backed terrorist group is using drug trafficking operations in Venezuela to fund operations in the Middle East, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday according to washingtonexaminer.com.

“It is mostly a money-making enterprise,” Pompeo said of Hezbollah’s Venezuela operations during a Senate panel Tuesday afternoon. “That is, it is designed to generate revenues for Hezbollah and its activities, which are largely conducted in the Middle East — to help them make payroll throughout the Middle East.”

Pompeo’s assessment served to highlight the Iranian presence in South America while tempering the nature of the worry over terrorist operations there. Pompeo provided that perspective to the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, but Venezuela was a recurring theme of the wide-ranging discussion.

“The Venezuelan state — most senior officials, state-run enterprises, police and security forces, etc. — is complicit directly in transnational organized crime,” retired Ambassador Roger Noriega, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said in testimony prepared for the second panel of the hearing. “No domestic Venezuelan force is willing or able to confront this pervasive criminality, making international investigations, sanctions, and prosecutions indispensable to dismantling this narcostate.”

Pompeo, speaking earlier in the hearing, allowed that Hezbollah’s agents aren’t “at the top of the list in terms of bad actors” by volume of drugs trafficked into the United States, but the operations they do run are “very difficult” to thwart.

“That doesn’t mean we’re giving up. We’re certainly working on it,” he said. “We have folks working on the border between Venezuela and Colombia, the Brazilian border, all the places we can touch and reach, but it is the case that we no longer even have an embassy in Venezuela, so it is difficult for us to do that.”

Pompeo withdrew U.S. diplomats from Caracas in March, due to concern that strongman Nicolás Maduro — whom President Trump denounced as an illegitimate leader before backing a top opposition lawmaker as the interim president of the country — would no longer guarantee their safety.

“So we monitor, collect intelligence, and attempt to identify networks and work on them in places that surround Venezuela,” Pompeo said.

Brain scans on fanatical Islamists show they have a reduced capacity for rational thought, new research suggests, like reported by dailymail.co.uk.

Members of a radical Islamist group were asked how willing they were to ‘fight and die’ for their ideas.

Their brains were then scanned during the process.

The results showed that when questioned, the part of the brain that engages in evaluating costs and consequences showed reduced activity.

The research highlights the difficulties of trying to ‘deradicalise’ someone.

This is because the region of the brain that is engaged is resistant to argument.

But what did alter the views of the radical group was peer pressure.

If the participants were told that the overall opinion of other members of the community – Pakistani Muslims living in Barcelona – was less supportive of their position they would alter their views, being less likely to want to ‘fight and die.’

The researchers say that their findings fit in with ideas that radicals do not often abandon their core ‘sacred values’.

But they can become less willing to fight and die to uphold them.

To carry out the research, 146 members of a ‘radical Islamist group’ Lashkar et Taibar were recruited for the experiment in Barcelona.

The group were selected in a survey by expressing willingness to use violence against civilians, to join a terror group or to engage in violent protest.

Other religious causes they were asked to consider where over issues such as Western military forces beng expelled from Muslim lands, and for strict veiling of women in public.

Scott Atran of the University of Michigan and colleagues writing in a Royal Society journal said: ‘We found that sacred value choices involved less activation of brain regions previously associated with cognitive control and cost–benefit calculations.

‘In addition, we also found that willingness to fight and die ratings were influenced by peers’ opinions.’

They add that their research shows ‘it might be possible to induce flexibility in the way people defend their sacred values’ and that the findings could be used to better understand the motivations of violent conflict.

A New York imam and Iraqi refugee, Yassin Aref, is being deported back to his home country after serving more than 13 years in prison for a terrorism conviction, like reported by dailycaller.com.

“If everything goes smoothly, he should be back in his home country as a free man tomorrow,” Salah Muhiddin, Aref’s son, said to the Times Union. Aref, according to his son, was told by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Sunday to gather his belongings and get ready to leave the U.S. shortly.

However, an ICE spokesman informed The Daily Caller News Foundation on Monday afternoon that Aref was still in their custody. The agency would not confirm when exactly he would be leaving the country.

Aref’s deportation process marks the end of a chapter that began 15 years ago.

Aref arrived in the U.S. as a Kurdish refugee from Iraq and became a prominent imam at the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany, New York in the early 2000s. However, his mosque was raided and he was arrested in August 2004 for his involvement in a fake scheme to kill a Pakistani diplomat.

A man approached Mohammed Hossain, a Bangladeshi pizza shop owner, in 2003 about a $50,000 loan for renovations to his store. The man — who in reality was an FBI informant — told Hossain that the money came from the sale of a shoulder-fired rocket launcher that would be used to kill the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in New York.

Hossain asked Aref to attend a meeting with the undercover FBI informant and act as a witness to the loan, a request that made Aref culpable in the sting. That same year, the U.S. government discovered Aref’s name and telephone number among papers belonging to suspected terrorists in Iraq.

Both Aref and Hossain were convicted of money laundering and conspiring to provide material support to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed. Aref ultimately spent 13-and-a-half years in a federal prison and then another eight months in an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania.

Aref maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal, arguing that he was the victim of government entrapment and anti-Muslim bigotry.

“I swear to God, I had no intention to harm anyone in this country. I don’t know why I am guilty,” Aref said during court proceedings in 2007. His attorney filed several appeals, but none were successful. (RELATED: Chip Roy Gives Ocasio-Cortez A Legal Lesson On Domestic Terrorism)

Aref’s wife and two daughters are already waiting in Iraq for his return, according to a 2018 report from the Daily Gazette.

“We’re looking forward to him leaving prison,” Aref’s son told the Gazette at the time. “We’re glad it’s all done and we get to move on and put it behind us.”

An ISIS defector has claimed that the terror group plotted an attack on the U.S. by sending operatives from Syria through the southern border with Mexico, like reported by dailymail.co.uk.

The astonishing revelation was shared in a report by researchers for the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE), who interviewed the former ISIS fighter on May 12.

Going by the pseudonym ‘Abu Henricki al Canadi’, the Canadian fighter with dual Trinidadian citizenship spoke to the researchers while in custody of a militia in Rojava, Syria.

At the end of the lengthy interview, as the researchers were about to leave, Abu Henricki opened up about a sickening ISIS plot he said he was recruited for in 2016, after traveling to Syria to join the group.

Abu Henricki said that he and other Trinidadian citizens were recruited to infiltrate the U.S. through the southern border with Mexico.

He said that the mastermind of the plot was an individual in New Jersey, but that he wasn’t certain of the targets, and refused to participate in the plan.

‘What they wanted to do, basically is they wanted to do financial attacks. Financial attacks to cripple the [U.S.] economy,’ Abu Henricki explained.

‘Apparently, they have the contacts or whatever papers they can get to a false ID, false passports,’ he said. ‘They have their system of doing it. So that’s maybe the way that I could have gone out with other individuals. It wasn’t me alone.’

‘That information, the plan came from someone from the New Jersey state from America. I was going to take a boat into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in,’ Abu Henricki said.

‘I don’t know where I’d end up. Please be advised, I was not willing to do it. But this is one of their wicked, one of the plans that they had, and which I would like to think I foiled the plan by not being part of it,’ he said.

Abu Henricki said that when he refused to participate in the plot, he was imprisoned and tortured by ISIS.

Earlier in the interview, he had told of how ISIS had imprisoned him and his Canadian wife in late 2016 and early 2017, but had been vague about the reason.

The former ISIS fighter also shocked the interviewers by claiming he had met ISIS fighters in Syria who were American citizens.

‘There was a Bengali American. Abu Adam,’ he said, trying to recall the names of the American fighters.

‘Two cousins. They were from New York. One was American, but Turkish—Abu Ilias. He was from Texas,’ he continued.

ISIS has been decimated in Syria, but there remain fears that remnants of the group will launch revenge attacks on Western countries.

The ICSVE researchers say that one tactic is for the group to declare certain foreign fighters dead, allowing them to slip back into their home countries under assumed identities.

The revelation comes amid a massive influx of illegal crossings into the U.S through the southern border.

Last month, apprehensions of illegal migrants on the southern border exceeded 140,000, the highest in 13 years.

The Trump administration has claimed that the influx represents a national security crisis, in part due to the threat of foreign terrorists slipping through the border amid the chaos.

Democrats have sneered at those claims and insisted that the situation at the border is not a security crisis or emergency.

‘Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump’s heightened rhetoric about the U.S.- Mexico border and his many claims that it is vulnerable to terrorists, ISIS apparently also thought so,’ the ICSVE researchers wrote. 

The researchers cautioned that their report was ‘not published here as a warning bulletin for an imminent attack against our country, nor is it a fear mongering attempt to suggest that a wave of ISIS terrorists are waiting to cross our southern border, but a reminder to diligently consider leads and sources that confirm terrorists’ intentions to exploit one of the weakest links in our national security—our borders.’ 

English-speaking Islamic State supporters are refusing to give up on the terror group’s ability to remain a force in Syria and Iraq, according to a new study that examined their behavior on the Telegram instant messaging service, like reported by voanews.com.

The report, “Encrypted Extremism: Inside the English-Speaking Islamic State Ecosystem on Telegram,” released Thursday by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, looked at 636 pro-Islamic State channels and groups in the 16 months from June 2017 through October 2018.

It found that even as the terror group was losing ground in Syria and Iraq to U.S.-backed forces, and even as IS leadership was encouraging followers to start looking to progress in IS provinces elsewhere, English-speaking supporters turned to Telegram to reinforce their faith in the caliphate.

“These are supporters that like to fight uphill battles,” report co-author Bennet Clifford told VOA. “What supporters are trying to do when they’re engaging with this conversation is attempt to shift the narrative away from loss and provide justifications for it.”

At the same time, these English-speaking supporters sought to amplify their beliefs, supplementing official IS propaganda with user-generated content while also increasing the distribution of instructional material on how to carry out attacks.

“I think it’s part of an attempt in some cases to spin the narrative their way,” Clifford added.

Attraction of Telegram

IS supporters first started flocking to Telegram, an instant messaging service that promises speed and encryption for private communications, in 2015 as social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook began a crackdown aimed at Islamic State’s often violent and gory propaganda.

Since then, IS has been hooked by Telegram’s promise that it will not disclose user data to government officials and by the service’s ability to let supporters organize and share large files, including video.

“No other platforms appear to have developed the same balance of features, user-friendliness, and basic security that could warrant a new switch,” the report said.

That ease of use has long worried counterterrorism officials, who have watched as IS has used the online ecosystem to help plan and carry out the November 2015 attacks in Paris, attacks on a Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016 and the attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul just weeks later.

English-speaking facilitators

In those cases, the attackers appear to have been given instructions from IS officials in Syria and Iraq. But Telegram has given rise to several key English-speaking facilitators who have been operating on the periphery.

One of them, according to Clifford and co-author Helen Powell, was 36-year-old Karen Aizha Hamidon, who helped mobilize sympathizers from the United States to Singapore to join the terror group or its affiliates.

Hamidon, who was arrested by Philippine authorities in October 2017, has also been linked to efforts to establish an IS province in India.

Another key player, 34-year-old Ashraf al-Safoo, took a different approach before being arrested last October by the FBI in Chicago.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, al-Safoo was a key member of the Khattab Media Foundation, which used hacked social media accounts on platforms like Twitter to disseminate IS propaganda.

“Much of the propaganda created and distributed by Khattab promotes violent jihad on behalf of ISIS and ISIS’s media office,” the Justice Department said in a statement using a different acronym for the militant group.

While both Hamidon and al-Safoo are now in custody, showing the ability of law enforcement to penetrate their Telegram operations, others are likely to replace them because of the ongoing need of Islamic State’s English-speaking supporters to communicate and find larger audiences.

“While there are a number of disadvantages for Islamic State supporters in the use of Telegram from a security perspective they’ll continue to do it because their balance of outreach and operational security,” Clifford said. “There’s not another alternative at this point in time.”

Paramilitary forces leader Qatary al-Samarmad announced killing the so-called Islamic State’s Emir of Wilayat al-Jazeera, along with six others in an air strike by the Iraqi Air Force, west of Anbar, like reported by iraqinews.com.

Samarmad said in a press statement that after receiving information about the presence of the terrorist Abdullah Farhan, a.k.a Abu Muaallam al-Iraqi, in the desert of Anbar, joint forces from the Iraqi army and al-Hashd al-Ashaeri pursued 4 IS members in Dulab area, in Heet District.

He added that the warplanes bombed the tunnel, where the militants hid, while security forces found seven bodies belonging to the Islamic State inside the tunnel, including the Emir of Wilayat al-Jazeera, Abu Musallam al-Iraqi.

The terrorist group used that tunnel as a hideout to plan for attacks and terrorist operations against security forces and civilians, he further explained.

The operation came as part of an intelligence effort between the forces from the army’s 7^th division and al-Hashd al-Ashaeri in the region, which facilitated the pursuit of terrorists and eliminating them.

The Army said yesterday that troops ambushed Boko Haram terrorists in northern Borno, killing scores of them, like reported by thenationonlineng.net.

Its spokesman, Col. Sagir Musa, said in a statement that the troops recovered arms and ammunition from the terrorists.

Col. Musa said: “Following credible information from good Samaritans of a planned terrorists attack on 114 Task Force Battalion, E Company location at Izge village, Gwoza Local Government Area of Borno State, troops of 143 Battalion laid an ambush on the terrorists’ withdrawal route along Kubu village on June 4, 2019.

“Consequently, the terrorists entered the ambush, which resulted in the death of unconfirmed number of the criminals and the following items were recovered: four AK 47 rifles, one 81 Millimeter Mortar, assorted ammunition, two Hilux Vehicles and one Pumping Machine. There was no casualty on the part of the national army.

“The Army, through the Theatre Command of Operation Lafiya Dole uses this medium to commend and encourages those who availed the troops the information that led to the success of the operation, and further enjoined members of the public to be more forthcoming to the security agencies with useful information about the terrorists and other criminals in Nigeria.”

Two women with ISIS ties and six children were repatriated to the United States from northeast Syria, Kurdish-led authorities said on Wednesday, according to alarabiya.net.

The Kurdish-led administration, which controls swathes of north and east Syria, said it helped return the citizens “at the request of the US government.”

A Bangladeshi national who stabbed her Melbourne homestay host in an effort to “become a martyr” has been jailed for 42 years, like reported by sbs.com.au.

Momena Shoma, 26, admitted to engaging in a terror act when she stabbed Roger Singaravelu as he napped with his five-year-old daughter at Mill Park on February 9, 2018.

Crying, “Allahu akbar”, Shoma plunged the knife with such force it embedded into Mr Singaravelu’s neck and the knife tip snapped off.

Justice Lesley Ann Taylor on Wednesday jailed Shoma for 42 years with a minimum 31-and-a-half years, calling the young woman an “insignificant criminal” with “repugnant logic”.

“Your actions sent waves of horror through the Australian community, but they do not make you a martyr … they make you a criminal,” she told the Victorian Supreme Court.

Justice Taylor said Shoma’s “sole purpose” of entering Australia was to commit a terrorist attack, with her enrolment to study a masters of linguistics at La Trobe University a ruse.

Shoma spent just eight days in Australia before the attack and told police she had practised by stabbing a pillow while staying with a different family.

She planned the attack by purchasing night vision goggles, Googling “how can you tell if someone is in deep sleep?” twice and singled out Mr Singaravelu as her victim because he was vulnerable.

Justice Taylor said Shoma has shown no remorse.

“Indeed the only regret you have uttered is you did not succeed … that sentence is despicable,” she said.

Her victim and his family, “generous enough to open their home to a stranger, now suffers physically, emotionally and financially”, Justice Taylor said.

Mr Singaravelu has previously told the court he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder since the attack, took a cocktail of medication and used alcohol to try to forget what happened to him.

“I relive the attack, the look on her face and the blood splattered on the wall,” Mr Singaravelu said in his victim impact statement.

His daughter also suffered from PTSD, flashbacks and nightmares.

Speaking outside court after the sentencing, Mr Singaravelu said he was blessed to have survived the attack.

“I should be in a wooden box or in a wheelchair,” he told reporters.

He implored the Australian government to better vet student visa applications.

The tiny terrorist – just 1.52 metres (five feet) tall and weighing 40 kilograms – becomes the first woman to be sentenced for directly carrying out a terrorist attack in Australia.

Dressed in a black Niqab showing only her eyes, Shoma did not stand for Justice Taylor.