https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcPyzEHu_cs

Lured by social media posts from people living in the Islamic State group’s self-declared capital, more than two dozen family members migrated to Syria. It didn’t take long before their dream was crushed.

Amer Sinan Alhaggagi is arrested and charged following FBI undercover investigation…

A 22-year-old high school graduate who plotted to kill thousands of people in order to “redefine terror” has been charged by US police, like reported by ibtimes.co.uk.

Amer Sinan Alhaggagi, of Yemeni descent, was arrested last November and charged with attempting to support the Isis terror group, which controls swathes of territories across the Middle East, and through allied groups, in Africa and Asia.

The man allegedly sent “services and personnel” to Isis between July and November 2016, NBC Bay Area said, quoting court documents.

Prosecutors said he also conspired to kill as many as 10,000 people across the Bay Area in northern California by planting bombs in university dormitories and setting fire to the Berkley Hills mountain range.

Alhaggagi is also being indicted on three other charges including aggravated identity theft. He faces up to 47 years in prison.

The charges came following an undercover investigation involving FBI agents posing as Isis sympathisers.

It is believed Alhaggagi told one of the undercover agents last December: “I live close to San Francisco, that’s like the gay capital of the world. I’m going to handle them right. LOL. I’m going to plant a bomb in a gay club. By god, I’m going to tear up the city. The whole Bay Area is going up in flames. My ideas are genius.”

His family reacted in shock following the charges, with some relatives saying the man described in court was completely different to the one they knew.

“We were shocked to learn of the accusations involving Amer. Amer is not and has never been radicalized in any way,” the family said in a statement.

“He grew up in this country and loves it here. He is peaceful and kind. He was very young and immature when he got involved in the online conversations that are the basis for these accusations. He did not think those conversations were serious and he never had any intent to harm anyone. We love him and continue to fully support him.”

Alhaggagi’s uncle, Hashem Awnallah, said his nephew was known “to be an amazing, kind-hearted soul.”

The defence team said the charges against thier client are “overblown”.

Alhaggagi remains in custody.

Home-made bombs, known as Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, are used by Islamic terrorists not only to attack opposition military forces, but also increasingly to harm civilian populations, like reported by voa.gov. As a world leader in clearing explosive hazards that threaten civilians, the United States is taking action to tackle these deadly devices in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.

According to the Landmine Monitor, an annual report by a non-governmental organization, “person-activated IEDs and improvised landmines caused 1,075 casualties in 2014 and 1,331 casualties in 2015.

IEDs are a particular threat to both military personnel and civilians as they enter areas previously occupied by terrorists. For example, during the final months of the battle for Mosul, ISIS sowed the city streets with IEDs to prevent civilians from leaving. Later, as they retreated from the city, the terrorists set thousands of IEDs around critical infrastructure like power and water utilities, schools, and hospitals.

“Non-state armed groups such as ISIS and the Taliban often use IEDs to destabilize peace operations and terrorize civilian populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria,” writes Stephanie Pico, a Public Diplomacy Officer at the U.S. Department of State.

“ISIS also has deliberately placed IEDs before retreating from an area with the intent of prolonging insecurity, inflicting additional casualties on communities struggling to recover, and delaying economic redevelopment in liberated communities long after direct ISIS-instigated hostilities in those areas cease.”

The United States is the world leader in conventional weapons destruction, including humanitarian demining, having invested over 2.8 billion dollars in projects in more than 100 countries since 1993.

In addition to humanitarian demining the United States Counter-IED efforts work to disrupt networks that use IEDs, and train the forces fighting those networks to identify IEDs and protect against them.

“Counter-IED differs from humanitarian demining in that it focuses on deterring, detecting, and preventing IED employment before threats become imminent,” writes Stephanie Pico.

Working with our allies and the international community, she writes, the United States will continue to develop strategies to address the IED threat to prevent IED users from carrying out their nefarious plans and achieve peace and security.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed, Lebanese-based terror group, is preparing for another war against Israel. And one of its chief weapons will be the press, like reported by washingtonexaminer.com.

Hezbollah (Arabic for “Party of God”) is a Shi’ite Muslim, U.S.-designated terrorist group that receives its marching orders from Tehran. Ordered to disband by UN Resolutions 1559 and 1701, the organization has instead repeatedly attacked the Jewish state.

In 2006, the Shi’ite militias’ decision to kidnap Israeli soldiers led to a brutal thirty-four-day war. Throughout, the group proved adept at manipulating the media.

Hezbollah’s tactics have included indiscriminate missile launches and artillery fire from civilian areas. This allows the nearby civilians to be used as “human shields” for propaganda purposes. Many in the media failed to note this double war-crime or uncritically quoted claims of anti-Israel NGOs that—echoing Hezbollah propaganda—charged Israel with carelessly targeting civilians.

On certain occasions, the Western press did, in fact, note Hezbollah’s propaganda methods. For example, the Australian newspaper The Herald Sun published images showing members of the terror group dressed in civilian garb and operating anti-aircraft weaponry in a residential Lebanese neighborhood. In another instance, CNN producer Charlie Moore noted a “well-coordinated and not-so-subtle” effort by Hezbollah to manage the press via “guided tours” complete with photo opportunities of prearranged ambulances, driving around in circles with sirens blaring.

Hezbollah is nothing if not image-conscious. As one operative, Sheik Nabil Qaouk, told The New York Times in July 2000, “The use of the media as a weapon” has “an effect parallel to a battle.” In this respect, Hezbollah is well armed.

The group operates its own TV channel, Al Manar (The Beacon), which routinely broadcasts calls for “Death to America,” age-old antisemitic tropes and hate speech, and promises of the impending destruction of the Jewish state. In 2006, Al Manar was labeled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity, along with other Hezbollah-linked mouthpieces such as the Lebanese Media Group and Radio al-Nour. In its statement announcing this designation, the U.S. Treasury Department noted that an Al Manaremployee had used his position to engage in “preoperational surveillance” on behalf of Hezbollah.

When it’s not running its own press operations, Hezbollah seeks to influence others’. In his 2009 book, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday, New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar wrote that the group even has a specific section tasked with cultivating the press by sending reporters birthday cards and well wishes, among other ham-handed methods. Similarly, journalist Michael Totten detailed in his 2011 work The Road to Fatima Gate how Hezbollah’s media relations office initially welcomed him, arranging interviews with English-speaking representatives of the organization, affecting a friendly tone and disseminating well-rehearsed talking points.

When charms fail, Hezbollah resorts to what it knows best: Intimidation and violence. CNN producer Moore noted that he and his film crew were “being watched” by members of the terror group as they traveled throughout Lebanon during the 2006 war. More recently, in 2012, journalist Rami Aysha was kidnapped, beaten and interrogated by Hezbollah while investigating the group’s arms trafficking to Syrian rebels for TIME magazine’s Lebanese bureau.

Indeed, as Totten pointed out in his book, the group’s history of targeting journalists during the 1980s, such as Terry Anderson of the Associated Press, who was held for more than six years, was well known among the foreign press.

There is every indication that Hezbollah is preparing for another war. According to April 19, 2016, testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, the Shi’ite terror group reportedly has more than 120,000 rockets and missiles—many of which are capable of advanced targeting. Battle-hardened from fighting in the Syrian civil war on behalf of their Iranian masters, the group has also developed an advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capacity. These drones, as Middle East scholar Michael Rubin told the committee, could easily be deployed over international air paths above Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport—potentially wreaking havoc on Israel’s economy.

The battle lines of the next conflict would be ripe for propaganda purposes as well.

In October 2016, Lebanon elected a Hezbollah-ally named Michael Aoun as president. Aoun is now commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which receive U.S. taxpayer assistance. This is noteworthy, as prior to the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terror group. Aoun has declared that Hezbollah’s growing arsenal is “not in contradiction with the state.”

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has been candid about its aims and consistent in its methods.

On April 21, 2017, the Shi’ite terror group organized a tour for journalists along the Israel-Lebanon border—violating a U.N.-mandated buffer zone. Less than three months later, the IDF released footage showing Hezbollah operatives working with an environmental group called “Green Without Borders,” using the NGO’s facilities to conduct surveillance on Israeli military positions.

The next Israel-Hezbollah war may feature the terror group’s widespread use of drones, indiscriminate firing of missiles, and launching attacks behind the cover of “human shields.” The group might even act in concert with the LAF. Whether or not the press will act as the “weapon” that Hezbollah intends it to be remains to be seen.

No longer merely against the ropes, the Islamic State is on the canvas. Aftermonths of bloody urban warfare, the Islamic State’s uprooting from Mosul represents the latest and most significant blow in an eighteen-month period of disastrous losses, like reported by nationalinterest.org. It seems like only a matter of time before the Islamic State loses its already tenuous grip on the Syrian capital of Raqqa. Yet we have been here before. A decade ago, an earlier iteration of the group had appeared decimated by the efforts of coalition forces and the Sunni Awakening. The difference today is that while the Islamic State is indisputably weaker compared to its 2014–15 boom, it is indisputably stronger than after its 2007–08 bust.

Something else that is indisputable: the Islamic State will deploy its propaganda machine to the frontlines of an epic battle for survival and relevance until, once again, the foundations for another resurgence are set and it is ready to ascend the politico-military phases of its campaign strategy. Craig Whiteside and Daniel Milton have clearly shown that loss does not diminish the importance of propaganda in Islamic State’s strategic calculations but accentuates it. Put simply, devising effective ways to combat Islamic State propaganda will be as important as ever.

Recent events in Mosul gifts government, private and civil-society actors with opportunities to strike decisive blows to Islamic State’s propaganda machine. However, precedence shows that certain responses may inadvertently help to shut this narrow window of opportunity. Letting actions and facts “speak for themselves” will create vacuums in the information theater that a battered Islamic State will rush to fill with its propaganda. Equally, seeing strategic communications as a panacea guarantees the types of “say-do” gaps that Islamic State’s propagandists relish exploiting. Yet an overly cautious approach that waits for a perfect strategic-communications strategy to develop on paper will prevent the expedited implementation of an adequate one. Trial and error will not suffice either.

Fortunately, an enormous corpus of multidisciplinary research and cross-sector institutional knowledge exists that can inform strategic-communication efforts. This principle has driven the work of researchers at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in the Hague—including JM Berger,Colin Clarke, Alastair Reed, Craig Whiteside and Charlie Winter. Those researchers have sought to identify trends in violent-extremist propaganda and, upon that basis, develop more effective approaches to CT-CVE strategic communications. For example, a recently published strategic framework for CT-CVE strategic communications—the linkage-based approach—draws on five bodies of research:

• Historical analyses of strategic-communication campaigns during conflict, including what worked and why. Indeed, many of these core lessons featured in a previous article for the National Interest.

Behavioral and social-science studies, especially from the field of behavioral economics, which is aimed at understanding how humans tend to interpret information and how, in turn, that informs their decisionmaking process.

• Field interviews with non-state and state practitioners to draw on their practical experiences.

• The impact of online disengagement strategies and disruption strategies as well as offline organizational dynamics on propaganda output.

• In-depth primary source analyses of violent-extremist propaganda messagingand doctrine.

The latter was particularly important given the raison d’être of the strategic framework is to undermine the strengths and exploit the weaknesses of violent-extremist propaganda. After all, violent-extremist propaganda seeks to shape the perceptions and polarize the support of its audiences. It achieves this by generating self-reinforcing and compounding cycles of logic via the “linkages” its messages draw between carefully selected strategic factors (e.g. Islamic State’s actions) and psychosocial dynamics (e.g. identity, solution and crisis constructs) using a mix of pragmatic- and identity-choice appeals (illustrated here). Ultimately, the Islamic State uses propaganda to provide audiences with a competitive system of meaning (i.e. a lens through which to perceive the world) that is designed to drag supporters deeper into its propaganda web.

The linkage-based approach focuses on the design and deployment of messages that attack the linkages at the heart of violent-extremist propaganda via two mutually reinforcing lines of effort. Tier 1 messages seek to dissolve the violent-extremist “system of meaning” by attacking those aforementioned linkages and offering alternative narratives. The primary audiences for Tier 1 messaging ranges from those already against violent extremists to those who may be susceptible to their propaganda. Tier 2 messaging targets those who may tacitly or actively support violent extremists with a fusion of network-disruption actions and disengagement messaging. The strategy’s message design matrix offers practitioners a toolkit of interlinked pragmatic- and identity-choice—as well as offensive and defensive—messaging themes. The resulting strategic framework is comprehensive and flexible with potential applications as a guide for building a strategic-communication plan from scratch or enhancing ongoing plans. It also offers practitioners a means to measure the comprehensiveness of a communication campaign’s messaging output and medium utility.

The research that underpins this strategy challenges several leading trends in the field of thinking and practice. First, the linkage-based approach offers an alternative to ideology-centric strategies that, despite dominating the field,research suggests are rarely effective and potentially counterproductive. Second, the research underpinning the strategy indicates that prioritizing counter-narratives (i.e. defensive messaging deployed in response to adversary messages) is misguided. Historical analysis demonstrates that ascendancy in the information theater follows when offensive messaging (i.e. messaging designed to elicit a response from adversaries) outweighs defensive messaging across a campaign.

Third, the notion that effective messages must tell a story is debatable. A communication campaign that tells compelling stories requires audiences to engage in deliberative thinking that is cognitively taxing. Empirical researchshows that the cognitive abilities of humans under stress is significantly diminished and this stunted ability to trigger deliberative-thinking results in a greater reliance on automatic thinking and increased susceptibility to cognitive biases. Given that perceived crisis arguably defines the psychosocial condition of those susceptible to violent-extremist propaganda, a campaign dominated by messaging that is persuasive, simple, positive and short is far more likely to resonate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt1VR3UJydw

Thousands of children are in jails across Iraq, suspected of being fully trained up as fighters by Islamic State. Some are just six years old, like reported by newshub.co.nz.

The children have been brought up not just as bystanders caught in a brutal war, but also recruited and indoctrinated by IS.

Adiba Qasam told CBS News she watched IS’s propaganda to help the young ones. She returned to Iraq to help identify and help IS’s child victims recover from their torture.

“Maybe this one is brainwashed. Look at his eyes, he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said while watching one video.

“They’re victims. Those kids are victims. They’re under [IS’s] control.”

One woman whose children were indoctrinated told CBS News she saw the boys practicing beheading by chopping the heads off dolls.

She said they suffered mental and psychological torture from IS fighters and she feared they were so attached to their captors, they’d report her if she tried to escape.

It starts young. They learn to tell the time with clocks on timebombs.

From the age of five, school books are teaching them IS’s brutal rule. Bombs and firearms sit alongside apples and bananas while learning addition and subtraction, and English books ask them to complete sentences reading: “I can shoot [blank].”

The battle is still raging across Iraq and Syria to tear away IS’s hold. But for some of their victims, the violence they’ve been raised with is all they know as a normal life.

An unnamed Islamic State command team has published an e-book for apprentice terrorists that aims to multiply attacks against civilian targets in the United States and Europe. The handbook likely is a forecast of attacks that will be made in forthcoming months based on the fact that the deadly truck attack in Nice, France July 14, 2016, was preceded five months earlier by an ISIS video promoting murder by Truck, like reported by eurasiareview.com.

First released in Turkish on July 3 in the Telegram application ISIS chat rooms, the encrypted social media platform, the “Lone Wolf’s Handbook” gives simple but detailed instructions for burning vehicles, setting forest fires, creating highway accidents, making bombs, vehicular homicide, and bringing down buildings with explosives. The 66-page manual includes 174 illustrations and 7 charts and is written in casual language pitched to younger readers.

Additionally, German language version of Islamic State’s magazine Rumiyah (issue 11 published in July 2017) incited and asked its followers to carry out similar attacks including committing arson with a how-to guide and other dangerous low-tech tactics detailed in the “Lone Wolf’s Handbook.” At the same time, Islamic State social media accounts started a social media campaing called “Lone Wolves to the fields.”

The New Threats: Highway Traps and Forest Fires

The first chapter is titled “Operation Parking is Forbidden,” which suggests that the author may be a veteran terrorist commander having spent time in the Nineveh Plain battles in Iraq. In this section, ISIS cadre are advised to burn their enemies’ cars in retaliation to the bombings of the US-led Coalition forces. Arson is one of the user-friendly weapons: “All you need is some gas and a match.”

Prospected arsonists are advised to be vigilant about CCTV cameras and to carefully plan exit routes. The manual references French radicals who are infamous for burning as many as 1200 vehicles in coordinated riots over a large area. In France, car burning for some youth was a kind of extreme sport. The terrorists know that scores of boys between the ages of 12 and 16 are easy to recruit and without video evidence, these crimes can be hard to solve.

I encountered the challenge first-hand as chief of counter-terrorism police in Turkey in 2012. Our police personnel in the 2-million-person city of Sanliurfa were tied down for weeks with a coordinated campaign of car burnings at the same time of night in distant parts of the city. Unless there is direct intelligence or the perpetrators are caught red handed, countering these campaigns is a rubix-cube test for police.

Chapter two and three broach entirely new frontiers of terrorism in the West: triggering highway accidents and causing forest fires.

Chapter two is dedicated to “Causing Road Accidents.” The manual claims that the infidels had already chosen the “wrong way” and now “it is time to ensure their cars go the wrong ways, too.” The recipe for this attack calls for 40 liters (12 gallons) of motor oil of grease (or even kitchen vegetable oil) and applying it 50 feet before entering the highway curves so that the drivers would lose the control of their cars.

Another method to cause accidents, the reader is advised, is by blowing up car tires on vehicles in motion. This entails creating road traps and concealing them so that accidents would happen after drivers run over them. ISIS even provided statistics about road accidents and how many people are dying due to accidents around the world and in the United States. According to the manual, every year 37,000 people die due to road accidents in the U.S. costing over $230 billion dollars to the budget.

The third chapter gives instructions on how to cause forest fires. Readers are given the steps to making napalm-like explosives, taught how to ignite the explosives remotely and where to place the explosives in a forest. In addition to electronic ignition, the manual describes more primitive ways, including acid-and-match combinations. The latter basically delay a fire as the acid melts nylon covers to ignite the fire. The budding arsonist learns how to accommodate for humidity, wind conditions, elevated land and to choose forests close to residential housing.

Terrorists are strictly advised about their own security, too, since getting caught up in the fire they cause can lead to loss of face.

The fourth section, titled “the ultimate human lawn mower” is about the use of vehicles to kill, first promoted in a slickly produced music video in January 2016. Since then, this tactic has claimed dozens of victims in France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. This section starts with justifications and explanations why the U.S. is a terrorist state and why it is time to have the Americans pay for their crimes. ISIS members are advised to get a large 4X4 truck and to weld knife-like metal blades on bumpers and around headlights to increase the causalities.

Attackers are advised to choose the most crowded places and drive over people as fast as possible to exact the most damage. They are also told not to stop after the first hit and to keep driving over as many victims as possible. Furthermore, the terrorists are advised to choose the routes appropriately to ensure that there would be many other victims after the initial hit. According to ISIS, these kinds of attacks should be considered as suicide missions as in most cases the attackers would be captured or killed. The driver assassins are advised to have weapons if possible and fight back until the very end. Attackers are particularly advised to carry out such attacks in Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. They are also instructed to leave a note behind claiming the attack in the name of ISIS.

Bomb Making “in Mom’s Kitchen”

The fifth chapter focuses on demolishing buildings. The manual starts with explaining that there are two ways to tear down buildings or cause explosions: mechanical and chemical. While chemical explosions require some level of professionalism, it is always easier to carry out mechanical explosions, claims the manual. Mechanical explosions are described as mixing a kind of explosive material like gas or gun powder with oxygen and an igniter. ISIS describes the easiest way to carry out such attacks as using the gas or propane tanks or by using already available gas lines to cause explosions. The authors advise several ways to carry out such attacks with several precautions so that the perpetrators are not captured and so that the attack would cause the maximum damage. Attackers are advised not to purchase several propane tanks at the same time not to get the attention of the sales clerks. They are instructed to set up the explosions in a way that the police and firefighters might conclude that the incident was an accident. Terrorists are told not to leave fingerprints and CCTV camera recordings behind. Finally, the attackers are advised which parts of larger buildings to blow up so that whole building could be brought down.

The sixth chapter is titled “the Chefs’ Recipes: Kitchen Fun,” which instructs how to “make a bomb in your mom’s kitchen.” A homemade bomb is one of the best ways to carry out attacks in the West because the ingredients are readily and publicly available everywhere and could be reached without getting any attention, according to the manual. Also, in case there is a search of a terrorist’s house, law enforcement would not find explosives and bomb-squad dogs would not be able to sniff them as explosives. Finally, by applying the tactics and methods described in the manual, a lone terrorist could kill several people through simple procedures periodically.

There are four steps. First, they talk about the casings. Second, they instruct how to produce the main ingredients for the explosives from sugar and matches. Third, they detail how to set up the igniter from different day-to-day materials including Christmas bulbs. In the end, future attackers are taught how to build the explosives by using the materials they gathered. The manual also provides ways to make the bombs deadlier by packing nails or metal fragments on the outer walls of the bombs so as to kill more people. For ignition of the homemade bombs, the manual relates how to use batteries, delayed-ignition systems including manual clocks or remote-control systems.

The seventh chapter of the manual is mostly based on al-Qaeda’s previous instructions by code name “Dr. Khateer” (student of Abu Khabab al-Misri in Afghanistan) about how to produce “peroxide” based explosives including “TATP or TACP” through several and in most cases dangerous chemical reaction processes which would require some level of chemistry knowledge. This section explains step by step how to produce peroxide-based chemical explosives in detail with ample pictures to support the production of the materials. The ingredients are readily available at consumer markets. Each step is detailed with extra precautionary measures and with clues to ensure the successful production of explosive materials.

The eighth chapter tells about “remote detonators.” The manual provides in-depth step by step instructions on how to produce remote detonators from car alarms and washing machine timers. This section is also mostly based on Dr. Khateer’s previously produced al-Qaeda manuals. However, the terrorists are provided knowledge and experiences about where to purchase the electronics they need without arousing suspicion.

The ninth and tenth chapters are about the use of handguns and AK-47s for attacks. While the manual provided additional insights and information in the previous chapters, these two chapters chiefly discuss the Makarov handgun and an AK-47 assault rifle. The guns are explained at length, including their parts, how to dismantle them and clean them and eventually how to use them.

Conclusions

Terrorist organizations stay alive with three essential linked elements: ongoing attacks, propaganda through their attacks and continued recruitment based on sensational publicity. For terrorist organizations staying alive means being able to carry out continued attacks, and for ISIS this means attacks in the West. The mounting defeats of ISIS terrorists in Iraq and the rapid loss of territory may be hurting its star power. Therefore, the “Lone Wolf’s Handbook” likely was rushed to its Turkish-speaking followers regardless of the level of their training and education. The manual also echoes the recent calls of ISIS leaders during the recently-concluded 2017 Ramadan to assault Western interests however they can.

How to Defend against the New Threats

The first line of defense is communicating the existence of this manual to first responders and law enforcement agencies. It is essential that even regular officers who are routinely out on the streets have situational awareness of the threat.

Second, officers should be briefed on how to be vigilant regarding these tactics and what to look for in their daily routines. For example, as they drive, they should be checking roads for traps. In particular, they should increase observation of people who are out late at night and must be able to observe if they are carrying anything flammable liquids or LPG/propane tanks.

Third, law enforcement presence on the streets, around critical infrastructures and where high numbers of people present is crucial. Evaluating possible priorities of terrorists in choosing their targets by law enforcement agencies locally and then allocating their resources based on their evaluations is essential in countering such threats. For this, law enforcement and homeland security officers must be able to think like terrorists and should be fed by intelligence agencies.

The dispatch centers, fire departments and the emergency services should be notified about the true nature of the threats and what to expect. The priority for the dispatch centers should be bearing in mind that fires could be terrorist attacks so that the appropriate communication mediums are established with the related agencies after such incidents. It is also imperative to evaluate the 911 calls from the same perspective as often there might be public tips related to such attacks that might implicate terrorism.

The head of the United States National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) said that the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah is “one of the most capable, proficient and professional terrorist organizations in the world,” and that it has the capacity to use its resources “against the United States including here in the homeland,” in a panel discussion at the Aspen Institute, like reported by thetower.org.

“Hezbollah has always been viewed by the intelligence community, and the counterterrorism community as being among the most capable, proficient and professional terrorist organizations in the world with many of the capacities of a state actor, including resource base, including access to technology, including access to state sponsorship,” Nicholas J. Rasmussen said. “We’ve assessed for many years now, that Hezbollah has the capacity to operate on a world-wide scale, to reach out in asymmetric fashion, potentially triggered by an event that is not tied to a particular action by the United States against Hezbollah, but perhaps that might be tied to our potential conflict with Iran or other geopolitical developments. And Hezbollah has the capacity to turn that capability that they have against the United States including here in the homeland.”

Referring to arrests of Hezbollah operatives made last month, Rasmussen warned “that there is a Hezbollah presence of some sort here in the United States.”

“We’ve known all along the Hezbollah looks to lay infrastructure around the world, to give itself options, to develop a playbook, to give themselves an off-the-shelf capability,” he added.

Egyptian-born American preacher Ammar Shahin gave the sermon at the Islamic Center of Davis California, like reported by jpost.com

In a July 21 lecture posted on the Davis Masjid YouTube channel Muslim preacher Ammar Shahin spoke in English and Arabic about how all Muslims, not only Palestinians or Syrian, will be called upon to kill all the Jews in “the last day.”

In a video translated by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, Shahin also stressed that the Hadith (oral tradition of sayings attributed to the prophet of Islam) does not say where the final battle will take place. “If it is in Palestine,” for example, “or another place.” Hinting at the possibility that such a battle could happen in the US or Europe as well.

He also prayed that al-Aksa mosque be liberated from “the filth of the Jews.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last week that President Trump’s strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is different from former President Obama’s in multiple ways, despite detractors saying little was different, like reported by breitbart.com.

In an off-camera question and answer session with reporters at the Pentagon on Friday, Mattis described how Trump’s strategy was different in four ways.

First, the president has delegated more decisions down, which led to an accelerated campaign, he said.

“That’s how you exploit or pick up the tempo of operation. He did that in order to do what he said he wanted done, an accelerated campaign,” Mattis said.

Second, Trump’s strategy seeks to envelop and annihilate ISIS, versus pushing them to other places, he said.

Mattis said this was so that “foreign fighters can’t get back home again to cause their mayhem.”

Third, the Trump administration got more international partners involved, to carry more of the financial burden, he said.

“Basically, we are right now not resource-constrained due to international donors in our efforts to help the people, for example, in Mosul and stuff,” he said.

Fourth, there are more nations providing military support, Mattis said.

“So, broaden the international coalition both in military and in donors, delegating and speeding up, accelerating the campaign, and surround/annihilate — surround/envelope and then work to annihilate this enemy so they don’t get home again with all the havoc they create,” he said.

“So, there’s four areas. That at least gives you something so you understand what changed,” he added.

So far, the new strategy, which was announced by Mattis in May, has seen success. This month U.S.-backed Iraqi forces recaptured Mosul, ISIS’s stronghold in Iraq.

The terrorist group had held the city for more than two years, since the summer of 2014 when it swept into Iraq from Syria, capturing large swaths of territory and sending Iraqi forces fleeing.

Iraqi forces are now turning their attention to other cities where pockets of ISIS fighters still exist.