The US Government is taking the battle against terrorism online, countering extremist ISIS messaging with some powerful messages of its own

The US Government is claiming an online win against ISIS, saying the terrorist group’s social media influence, and its ability to recruit, is declining.

Taking the battle to Twitter, US State Department officials say ISIS has seen a 45 percent drop in traffic on the social network, Associated Press reports.

The decline comes off the back of a push by the Global Engagement Center, a US Government agency set up in March this year to help count terrorist messaging and online propaganda. The GEC has fought ISIS propaganda with its own messages, including an image of a teddy bear made up of Arabic words and phrases, saying that ISIS “slaughters childhood” and ”kills innocence.”

By disseminating images and messages in Arabic and sharing them through “credible voices” in local communities, officials hope to counter radical messaging on the front line.

The US Government is not new to the online battlefield. In April, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said the US was “dropping cyberbombs” on ISIS, attempting to infiltrate its networks and counter messaging from within.

Speaking about its win against ISIS (also known as ISIL) on social media, Global Engagement Center head Michael Lumpkin said the terrorist organisation was losing its dominance.

“We’re denying ISIL the ability to operate uncontested online, and we’re seeing their social media presence decline,” he told AP. “Anti-ISIL audiences are increasingly vocal on social media. This only weakens ISIL’s ability to recruit, a key aim of our messaging efforts.”

 

 

cnet.com

Under attack from US-backed forces, the caliphate shrank by 12% in the first six months of this year after losing 14% in 2015

To hear Islamic State tell it, the extremist group’s two-year-old caliphate has become “more manifest than the sun in the middle of the sky.”

However, the slick video the militants released last week, with children training for war instead of basketball in the background, belied the facts on the ground: its territory is shrinking, finances are dwindling, and the attempt at governance that distinguished it from other jihadist groups is failing, according to a report by IHS Conflict Monitor published on Sunday. The fear now is of an increase in attacks as the group refocuses on insurgency, IHS said.

“They have to justify that they’ve lost territory with big wins and the way they can get big wins and make the headlines is by launching big attacks against civilians, not just in Iraq and Syria, but also further afield, including Europe,” Columb Strack, lead analyst for the IHS Conflict Monitor, said in an interview.

Islamic State declared a caliphate straddling parts of Syria and Iraq after capturing Mosul, Iraq’s biggest northern city, in June 2014. Since then, extremists linked to the group have proliferated and murdered hundreds in Ankara, Beirut, Brussels and Paris as well as in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. The risk of further attacks echoes the narrative from the US and European governments, which say Islamic State still poses a major terrorism threat despite losing ground.

Under attack from US-backed forces dominated by Kurdish fighters, the caliphate shrank by 12% in the first six months of this year after losing 14% in 2015, the IHS report said. As of 4 July, Islamic State controls about 68,300 square kilometers (26,370 square miles) in Iraq and Syria, roughly the size of the Republic of Ireland, it added.

The group, which boosted funding with illegal oil sales and extortion, has also suffered a decline in revenue. Monthly income fell to $56 million as of March from about $80 million in mid-2015 and has probably decreased another 35% since then, IHS said.

Death toll

The militants, meanwhile, killed more than 350 people since late May with coordinated blasts in the Syrian coastal cities of Tartus and Jableh, a massive truck bombing in Baghdad’s Karrada area, a hostage-taking in Bangladesh and three suicide bombs in one day in Saudi Arabia. The Turkish government blames Islamic State for attacks at its main international airport in Istanbul that killed at least 47 people in late June.

“They’re going back to what they know and they’re going back to what they can do very well,” said Strack. “They’re emphasizing the broader, global scale of their endeavor as opposed to just the governance project that they set up in Iraq and Syria.”

The caliphate has been fraying since last year. The militants lost the two major cities in the Iraqi province of Anbar: Ramadi in December and Fallujah last month. Today, Islamic State is engaged in battles with mostly Kurdish forces who advanced into the Syrian town of Manbij, a key logistics hub close to the Turkish border and 100 kilometers northwest of Raqqah, the group’s self-proclaimed capital.

Strack said the militants are throwing everything they have at Manbij, contrasting with their relatively quick withdrawal from Fallujah. If Manbij and the other logistics hub, Al-Bab, fall and Raqqah is isolated, it will be very difficult for the group “but it won’t spell the end of the Islamic State as an organization,” said Strack.

 

 

livemint.com

NATO allies agreed Saturday to do more to help countries in North Africa and the Middle East that are targets of Islamic extremism, including using NATO surveillance planes in the fight against the Islamic State group.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said alliance leaders also agreed to launch a new naval mission in the Mediterranean, and made commitments to maintain a stable military presence in Afghanistan and to fund Afghan security forces through 2020.

“Today we have taken decisions to strengthen our partners and to project stability beyond our borders,” Stoltenberg told reporters on the second day of a crucial NATO summit in Warsaw. He said millions of people in Africa and the Middle East have been rendered “homeless and helpless” by radical organizations like IS and that the extremist groups are also to blame for organizing terrorist attacks in Europe and America.

In response, Stoltenberg said NATO will start a training and capacity-building mission for Iraqi armed forces in Iraq, a country he called central in the fight against IS. NATO is also working to establish an intelligence center in Tunisia, a major recruiting ground for IS, and will shortly start providing support to Tunisian special operation forces, he said.

Stoltenberg said U.S. President Barack Obama and leaders of the other 27 NATO countries also agreed in principle for alliance surveillance aircraft to provide direct support to the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS in Syria and Iraq, a decision the NATO chief called “a clear signal of our resolve to help tackle terrorism.” NATO diplomats say they expect flights by alliance AWACS planes to begin this fall.

Stoltenberg said the alliance will launch a new maritime operation in the Mediterranean called Operation Sea Guardian, whose responsibilities will include counterterrorism. NATO will also cooperate with the European Union’s efforts to shut down human smuggling operations that have fueled Europe’s greatest migrant crisis since World War II.

The alliance will also increase cooperation with Jordan, and is preparing to help the new government in Libya design policies and institutions to help it better defend itself against extremist organizations, Stoltenberg said.

“We will provide greater support to our partners, so they can secure their countries and push back against violent extremism,” he said.

Obama had been urging his fellow NATO leaders in Warsaw to expand their support for the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban. Meanwhile, violence in the U.S. led him to cut his Europe trip short so he can return home Sunday.

The U.S. has pledged to provide $3.5 billion annually to fund Afghan forces, and the government in Kabul is expected to contribute as much as $500 million. Allies would provide the remaining $1 billion. The funding would maintain a total of 352,000 Afghan Army troops and police officers.

“We are very close and I am certain we will reach that (funding) level,” Stoltenberg told reporters. A senior U.S. administration official said NATO has commitments for about 90 percent of the goal.

Stoltenberg said it’s too soon to say exactly how many troops allies will agree to keep in Afghanistan under NATO’s Resolute Support training and advisory mission. But he said he believed that, based on commitments made Saturday, force levels will remain largely stable. Specific numbers will be finalized this fall, he said.

U.S. administration officials said they believe the number of forces dedicated to the NATO mission will be a bit more than 12,000, and the U.S. has pledged about 6,700 of that total. The officials were not authorized to discuss the details publicly, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Earlier this week, Obama announced that overall he would keep 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, rather than cut their numbers to 5,500 as he once planned. In addition to taking part in the NATO advisory-and-assist mission, the U.S. has special operations forces in the country that conduct counterterrorism missions.

The planned force levels allow NATO allies to remain in regional hubs around Afghanistan, with Germany in the north, Italy in the west, Turkey in the capital of Kabul and the United States in the east and south.

The Warsaw summit, NATO’s first in two years, is considered by many to be the alliance’s most important since the Cold War. Stoltenberg says NATO, founded in 1949, needs to adapt to confront an array of new threats to its member nations’ security, including cyberattacks and violence sparked by radical organizations like IS.

On Friday, NATO leaders approved the deployment of four multinational battalions to Poland and the Baltic states to deter Russia, as well as a Romanian-Bulgarian brigade for the Black Sea region. Germany will lead a multinational battalion in Lithuania, with similar battalions to be led by the United States in Poland, Britain in Estonia and Canada in Latvia.

Those moves were strongly criticized Saturday by Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president during the Cold War.

“NATO has begun preparations for escalating from the Cold War into a hot one,” Gorbachev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. “All the rhetoric in Warsaw just yells of a desire almost to declare war on Russia. They only talk about defense, but actually are preparing for offensive operations.”

The White House, meanwhile, announced Obama would cut his Europe trip short by one day in the wake of the attack in Dallas that killed five police officers and wounded seven others during protests over fatal police shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana.

Obama will attend meetings in Warsaw on Saturday before heading to Spain for meetings with Spanish leaders and a visit with U.S. troops.

He returns to Washington on Sunday and will visit Dallas early next week at the request of Mayor Mike Rawlings.

 

 

 

ap.org

A maverick computer scientist explains how the lessons of one internet fight are applicable to another

How can the U.S. fight the spread of Islamic State propaganda? The militant group’s infamous videos of beheadings, violence and torture have a dangerous allure for would-be radicals, and they proliferate over social media in a way that can make containment seem hopeless.

But fighting extremist content online need not be very complicated, according to Dr. Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College.

“We don’t need to develop software that determines whether a video is jihadist,” Farid recently told The Huffington Post. “Most of the ISIS videos in circulation are reposts of content someone has already flagged as problematic.”

“We can easily remove that redistributed content,” he went on, “which makes a huge dent in their propaganda’s influence.”

Farid is referring to a technique called “hashing,” which he pioneered nearly a decade ago while battling a different but equally vile online scourge: child pornography. Hashing involves scanning the unique digital fingerprint, or “hash,” of a video or photo, making it easy to find instances of that content and remove it. Last month, it was reported that Facebook and YouTube might start using this technique to automatically scour extremist content from their platforms. If they do, they will be taking a page from Farid’s book.

In 2008 and 2009, Farid developed PhotoDNA, a hashing software that helped identify and remove images of child porn from the internet. Microsoft funded PhotoDNA, and according to Farid, it’s still used by companies like Facebook and Twitter today.

Now, Farid is adapting his software to fight the threat of ISIS propaganda. He has partnered with the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit think tank, which is maintaining a database of extremist media. When a photo or video is flagged as extremist propaganda on a platform like Facebook, its hash is entered in the CEP database.

The ‘worst of the worst’

As Farid finalizes the software, he’s keeping a close eye on the tech industry’s changing attitudes toward extremist content. He said the debate today reminds him strongly of a decade earlier, when Silicon Valley effected a major crackdown on child porn amid public pressure.

“What I’m hearing from tech companies is eerily similar to what they were saying 10 years ago,” Farid said.

Then as now, he said, the federal government was urging the tech sector to act. Then as now, the First Amendment was keeping the government from imposing stricter regulations itself. In 2006, then Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez spurred the creation of the Technology Coalition, a group of big-name tech firms aimed at battling child pornography. (The group included Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, which now owns The Huffington Post.) Likewise, in December 2015, President Barack Obama called on tech companies to step up in the fight against ISIS recruitment propaganda.

In both cases, Farid said, there was a focus on the “worst of the worst,” meaning the most graphic and problematic content. For child porn, this meant images that depicted children under 12 engaging in sexually explicit acts. On the counter-extremism front, this means explicit videos of beheadings, physical torture and graphic violence.

“This is low-hanging fruit,” Farid said. “A beheading video violates the terms of service of every tech company in the world.”

Farid is quick to emphasize that just because we can never completely wipe out the problem of extremist propaganda, it doesn’t mean we should stop chipping away at it. ISIS propaganda videos only seem like an unprecedented threat, he said. But they fit into an existing category, and there’s some precedent for how to deal with them.

“We’ve quite literally done this before,” he said. “Flagging and removing the very worst content is a modest step, but it puts a significant dent in the problem.”

The parallels between the present day and the previous decade are striking, Farid said. When PhotoDNA launched, Microsoft was the first adopter, followed by Facebook in 2011, Twitter in 2012 and Google in 2013. Google was the most resistant to the idea of content moderation, citing privacy concerns, according to Farid. This time around, Microsoft again was an early supporter of anti-propaganda efforts, funding Farid’s lab with $100,000. And Facebook was the first big company to meet with him about the software, in February of this year.

The main challenge in adapting PhotoDNA to combat today’s extremist content is the rise of videos, which are more complex and exist in more variations than static photos. There are about 24 still images in every second of a video, which makes Farid’s task that much harder.

A slippery slope?

Although Farid maintains that his work amounts to a “very modest step,” hashing software in general has raised questions about privacy.

“There’s a valid concern about overreach,” Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, told HuffPost. “Just because a video is flagged, it doesn’t mean there are no conditions under which it should circulate, like as part of a news report, or a parody.”

“Plus, as with other algorithms, the question is, is the tech working correctly?” he went on. “We don’t know enough about how these technologies [like hashing] really work.”

Still, Krishnamurthy acknowledged that the government is in a tough position. Militant propaganda is a genuine national security concern, and it can’t be ignored.

“Under the First Amendment, it’s very difficult for the government to tell anyone to take down anything,” Krishnamurthy said. “But YouTube and Facebook are not the government.”

The government, however, seems to approve of the current course of action.

“We welcome the launch of initiatives such as the Counter Extremism Project’s National Office for Reporting Extremism (NORex) that enables companies to address terrorist activity on their platforms,” Lisa Monaco of the Department of Homeland Security told The Washington Post last month.

 

 

huffingtonpost.com

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the war in Syria and Russian involvement in Ukraine in a telephone call ahead of Obama’s trip to the NATO summit starting Friday in Warsaw.

The summit is expected to ratchet up tensions with Moscow as the alliance discusses Russian aggression in Ukraine, as well as fortifying defences along NATO’s eastern flank and implementation of a missile defence system that Moscow has long opposed.

The US strengthened its defence cooperation with Georgia on Wednesday in a memorandum signed by Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili and US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Kerry was to travel Thursday to Ukraine. The former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia both have aspirations to join NATO, saying they need to protect their borders from Moscow.

In their telephone talks Wednesday, Putin called on Obama to draw a clear line between the moderate Syrian rebels and extremist groups, the Kremlin said. Obama called for Putin to do more to pressure the Syrian regime, a Moscow ally, to abide by a cessation of hostilities agreement, the White House said.

Russia’s involvement in Ukraine is among the chief concerns at the NATO summit, and Obama urged Putin to halt a “significant uptick” in fighting in eastern Ukraine and to abide by the Minsk agreement, the White House said.

Meanwhile, NATO officials said its ambassadors will hold a new round of talks on July 13 with their Russian counterpart.

“Our practical cooperation with Russia remains suspended, but we are keeping channels for political dialogue open,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said.

The meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels with Russian Ambassador Alexander Grushko is to focus on the Ukraine crisis and the need to fully implement the Minsk peace deal for eastern Ukraine, Stoltenberg said.

Relations between NATO and Moscow have been at a post-Cold War low amid Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Both sides have since been flexing their military muscle in Eastern Europe, accusing each other of sabre-rattling and provocation.

Moscow is likely to be further irritated by a decision expected to be taken by NATO leaders at the Warsaw summit to deploy four battalions of some 1,000 troops each to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

A push for resuming high-level contacts with Moscow gained momentum last year after the downing of a Russian jet by NATO member Turkey. Many NATO countries were keen to avoid such incidents in the future.

The July 13 talks will touch on “military activities with a particular focus on transparency and risk reduction,” Stoltenberg said, as well as the security situation in Afghanistan.

NATO ambassadors last met their Russian counterpart in April, after a hiatus of almost two years. Stoltenberg said afterward that “profound” disagreements remained.

The alliance’s relationship with Russia will be a key topic at the summit, US ambassador to NATO Doug Lute told reporters, describing the alliance’s posture toward Moscow as a “balance between strength and dialogue.”

 

 

lse.co.uk

Islamic State has faced significant difficulties in enlisting Western recruits, an Arab intelligence official has told Breitbart Jerusalem

The organization has returned to its original recruitment material, alluding to a doomsday war that is to take place near Aleppo in Syria.

In the immediate aftermath of last week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, the organization’s propaganda organ disseminated statements about the conquest of Constantinople as an overture to the conquest of “Crusader” Europe.

“In returning to its initial recruitment methods, IS signals that it seeks to return to propaganda that has proven itself, but mostly it reveals great distress,” the official said. “We no longer see exquisitely produced videos, but rather a use of classic leitmotivs, such as Salafi teachings about the end of time, and about the conquest of Turkey, who chose to join the infidel coalition, as a stepping stone on the way to conquering Rome and the Crusaders’ countries.”

The main difficulties stem from successful anti-IS coordination between Western countries as well as between Europe and Middle Eastern countries, the official said.

“Up until recently, Western countries didn’t detain or even question young men who wanted to travel to Turkey or the Middle East,” he said. “Neither did they pass on their names and details to the authorities in the region, but recently they have started to. This exchange of information has delivered a significant blow to IS’ recruitment apparatus. It deters potential candidates, and these difficulties trickle up very quickly, hence the return to the original propaganda.”

The organization’s distress has prompted it, on the one hand, to carry out attacks that are much more violent, but also, on the other, to look for new potential arenas, like Jordan.

IS has focused its efforts on creating an infrastructure of sympathizers, supporters, and informants among Jordanian Salafi groups, one that would substitute for the lost infrastructure in Syria and Iraq.

In relation to this, he added, the Jordanian security services have stepped up surveillance on Salafi strongholds such as Salt, Maan, Irbid, and Zarqa, the birthplace of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the mastermind behind the idea of an Islamic State that preceded the organization.

 

 

breitbart.com

The advertisement on the Telegram app is as chilling as it is incongruous: A girl for sale is “Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old…. Her price has reached $12,500 and she will be sold soon.”

The posting in Arabic appeared on an encrypted conversation along with ads for kittens, weapons and tactical gear. It was shared with The Associated Press by an activist with the minority Kurdish Yazidi community, whose women and children are being held as sex slaves by the extremists.

While the Islamic State group is losing territory in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on the estimated 3,000 women and girls held as sex slaves. In a fusion of ancient barbaric practices and modern technology, IS sells the women like chattel on smart phone apps and shares databases that contain their photographs and the names of their “owners” to prevent their escape through IS checkpoints. The fighters are assassinating smugglers who rescue the captives, just as funds to buy the women out of slavery are drying up.

The thousands of Kurdish Yazidi women and children were taken prisoner in August 2014, when IS fighters overran their villages in northern Iraq with the aim to eliminate the Kurdish-speaking minority because of its ancient faith. Since then, Arab and Kurdish smugglers managed to free an average of 134 people a month. But by May, an IS crackdown reduced those numbers to just 39 in the last six weeks, according to figures provided by the Kurdistan regional government.

Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organization Luftbrucke Irak, said in the last two or three months, escape has become more difficult and dangerous.

“They register every slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes, every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force – they know that this girl … has escaped from this owner,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group.

U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told the AP that the U.S. continues “to be appalled by credible reports that Daesh is trafficking in human beings, and sex slavery in particular.”

“This depravity not only speaks to the degree to which Daesh cheapens life and repudiates the Islamic faith, it also strengthens our resolve to defeat them,” he said.

The AP has obtained a batch of 48 head shots of the captives, smuggled out of the IS-controlled region by an escapee, which people familiar with them say are similar to those in the extremists’ slave database and the smartphone apps.

Lamiya Aji Bashar tried to flee four times before finally escaping in March, racing to government-controlled territory with Islamic State group fighters in pursuit. A land mine exploded, killing her companions, 8-year-old Almas and Katherine, 20. She never learned their last names.

The explosion left Lamiya blind in her right eye, her face scarred by melted skin. Saved by the man who smuggled her out, she counts herself among the lucky.

“I managed in the end, thanks to God, I managed to get away from those infidels,” the 18-year-told the AP from a bed at her uncle’s home in the northern Iraqi town of Baadre. “Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it, because I have survived them.”

The Sunni extremists view the Yazidis as barely human. The Yazidi faith combines elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion. Their pre-war population in Iraq was estimated around 500,000. Their number today is unknown.

Nadia Mourad, an escapee, has appeared before the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament to appeal for international help.

“Daesh is proud of what it’s done to the Yazidis,” she said to Parliament. “They are being used has human shields. They are not allowed to escape or flee. Probably they will be assassinated. Where is the world in all this? Where is humanity?”

IS relies on encrypted apps to sell the women and girls, according to an activist is documenting the transactions and asked not to be named for fear of his safety.

The activist showed AP the negotiations for the captives in encrypted conversations as they were occurring in real time.

The postings appear primarily on Telegram and on Facebook and WhatsApp to a lesser degree, he said.

Both Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption to protect users’ privacy. Both have said they consider protecting private conversations and data paramount, and that they themselves cannot access users’ content.

“Telegram is extremely popular in the Middle East, among other regions,” said Telegram spokesman Markus Ra. “This, unfortunately, includes the more marginal elements and the broadest law-abiding masses alike.” He added the company is committed to prevent abuse of the service and that it routinely removes public channels used by IS.

In addition to the posting for the 12-year-old in a group with hundreds of members, the AP viewed an ad on WhatsApp for a mother with a 3-year-old and a 7-month old baby, with a price of $3,700. “She wants her owner to sell her,” read the posting, followed by a photo.

“We have zero tolerance for this type of behavior and disable accounts when provided with evidence of activity that violates our terms. We encourage people to use our reporting tools if they encounter this type of behavior,” said Matt Steinfeld, a spokesman for WhatsApp.

Like the Bible, some passages of the Quran implicitly condone slavery, which was widespread when the holy book emerged. It also allows men to have sex with both their wives and “those they possess with their right hands,” taken by interpreters to refer to female slaves.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most Muslim scholars backed the banning of slavery, citing Quranic verses that say freeing them is a blessing. Some hard-liners, however, continued to insist that under Shariah sex slavery must be permitted, though the Islamic State group is the first in the modern era to bring it into organized practice.

In the images obtained by AP, many of the women and girls are dressed in finery, some in heavy makeup. All look directly at the camera, standing in front of overstuffed chairs or brocade curtains in what resembles a shabby hotel ballroom. Some are barely out of elementary school. Not one looks older than 30.

One of them is Nazdar Murat, who was about 16 when she was abducted two years ago – one of more than two dozen young women taken away by the extremists in a single day in August 2014. Her father and uncles were among about 40 people killed when IS took over the Sinjar area, the heart of the Yazidi homeland.

Inside an immaculately kept tent in a displaced persons camp outside the northern Iraqi town of Dahuk, Nazdar’s mother said her daughter managed to call once, six months ago.

“We spoke for a few seconds. She said she was in Mosul,” said Murat, referring to Iraq’s second-largest city. “Every time someone comes back, we ask them what happened to her and no one recognizes her. Some people told me she committed suicide.”

The family keeps the file of missing Yazidis on a mobile phone. They show it to those who have escaped the caliphate, to find out if anyone has seen her, and to other families looking for a thread of hope they’ll see their own missing relatives again.

The odds of rescue, however, grow slimmer by the day. The smuggling networks that have freed the captives are being targeted by IS leaders, who are fighting to keep the Yazidis at nearly any cost, said Andrew Slater of the non-profit group Yazda, which helps document crimes against the community and organizes refuge for those who have fled.

Kurdistan’s regional government had been reimbursing impoverished Yazidi families who paid up to $15,000 in fees to smugglers to rescue their relatives, or the ransoms demanded by individual fighters to give up the captives. But the Kurdish regional government no longer has the funds. For the past year, Kurdistan has been mired in an economic crisis brought on by the collapse of oil prices, a dispute with Iraq’s central government over revenues, and the fallout from the war against the Islamic State.

Even when IS retreats from towns like Ramadi or Fallujah, the missing girls are nowhere to be found.

“Rescues are slowing. They’re going to stop. People are running out of money, I have dozens of families who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt,” Slater said. “There are still thousands of women and kids in captivity but it’s getting harder and harder to get them out.”

Lamiya was abducted from the village of Kocho, near the town of Sinjar, in the summer of 2014. Her parents are presumed dead. Somewhere, she said, her 9-year-old sister Mayada remains captive. One photo she managed to send to the family shows the little girl standing in front of an IS flag.

Five other sisters all managed to escape and later were relocated to Germany. A younger brother, kept for months in an IS training camp in Mosul, also slipped away and is now staying with other relatives in Dahuk, a city in the Iraqi Kurdish region.

Sitting very still and speaking in a monotone, Lamiya recounted her captivity, describing how she was passed from one IS follower to another, all of whom beat and violated her. She was determined to escape.

She said her first “owner” was an Iraqi IS commander who went by the name Abu Mansour in the city of Raqqa, the de-facto IS capital deep in Syria. He brutalized her, often keeping her handcuffed.

She tried to run away twice but was caught, beaten and raped repeatedly. After a month, she said, she was sold to another IS extremist in Mosul. After she spent two months with him, she was sold again, this time to an IS bomb-maker who Lamiya said forced her to help him make suicide vests and car bombs.

“I tried to escape from him,” she said. “And he captured me, too, and he beat me.”

When the bomb-maker grew bored with her, she was handed over to an IS doctor in Hawija, a small IS-controlled Iraqi town. She said the doctor, who was the IS head of the town hospital, also abused her.

From there, after more than a year, she managed to contact her relatives in secret.

Her uncle said the family paid local smugglers $800 to arrange Lamiya’s escape. She will be reunited with her siblings in Germany, but despite everything, her heart remains in Iraq.

“We had a nice house with a big farm … I was going to school,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

 

 

ekurd.net/

As a U.S.-led coalition claws away territory from Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the extremist group is shifting its emphasis away from building a caliphate to spreading terror around the world, according to terrorism experts.

Its tactics, on display in four attacks over the last week that claimed 228 lives, come from the playbook of Al Qaeda, an ally until an acrimonious split in 2013.

The attacks follow losses of territory in Iraq, including the city of Fallujah last week, and in Syria, where Islamic State militants are now being forced out of the northeast town of Manbij.  The losses have compromised their ability to function as a state, experts said.

“What they are saying is, ‘The more you hit us, the more we will become Al Qaeda,’” said Mathieu Guidere, a professor at the University of Paris who monitors audio, video, texts and social networks of major terrorist organizations as part of a project to  track radicalization.

He summarized their message: “You the international community did not want us to become a state, focused on our land. Now we will move on to a clandestine, terrorist mode of organization.”

One difference, he said, is that while Al Qaeda preferred to use Arab fighters who were vetted and trained, Islamic State has deployed volunteers from non-Arab states and to work with other local terrorist groups on the fly.

Another is that its reach is far greater than that of Al Qaeda. The carnage attributed to Islamic State is rising by the day.

In Istanbul last week, at least 45 people were killed and more than 200 injured when three gunmen from Russia and Central Asia equipped with suicide belts attacked the main airport. Although Islamic State did not claim credit — and almost never does in Turkey —  the Turkish government said the assault had all the earmarks of the group.

The militants did claim credit in Baghdad, where a van packed with explosives was detonated early Sunday amid a crowd of families gathered at a shopping mall to break the Ramadan fast. At least 157 people were killed, many of them children.

In Saudi Arabia on Monday, assailants set off a bomb in Medina outside the Prophet’s  Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. Though no one claimed immediate responsibility for the attack, which killed four people, or for two other bombings in other parts of the country, Islamic State has long been at odds with the Saudis.

The group has also taken responsibility for a growing number of attacks initiated by sympathizers or groups whose affiliations are unclear.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack Friday in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, in which members of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, a local Islamic militant group, stormed a cafe in the diplomatic zone and took foreigners hostage. Twenty-two people were killed.

Rohan Gunaratna, who heads an institute on terrorism at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the group recently created an external operations wing that operates outside Syria and Iraq, trains and dispatches fighters abroad and offers guidance to supporters around the world. The Bangladeshi extremist group had become part of the network, he said.

Reuven Erlich,  a retired Israeli colonel who heads a center on intelligence and terrorism at the Lauder School of Government in Israel, went further, saying that Islamic State directed the Bangladesh attack.

Paul Pillar, an academic who spent nearly three decades with the CIA, said that given the carefully designed infrastructure of the caliphate, it would be surprising if Islamic State did not have a department for foreign terrorism operations. But details on its connection to the Bangladeshi militants remained murky, he said.

It “could be a tenuous relationship” or a case of “the attraction of a known brand-name and being associated with something much bigger” than the local cause, he said.

The reasons for the timing of the upsurge in attacks is also unclear.

It corresponds with the holy month of Ramadan and the second anniversary of the declaration of the Islamic State and the caliphate by Abu Bakr Baghdadi on June 29, 2014.

The announcement that he’d reestablished the center of Islamic rule, which had been in Turkey until it was abolished in 1924, became a magnet that drew thousands of Muslim militants to travel to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State. So did the fact that the self-proclaimed caliphate controlled substantial territory in Syria and Iraq.

In the case of Turkey, it is also possible that the attack is retribution for the country’s rapprochement with Israel, said Magnus Ranstorp,  who directs the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College. Another possible factor is Turkey’s decision a year ago to open Incirlik Air Base to U.S. warplanes for attacking Islamic State targets in Syria.

Whatever may have motivated the latest spate of attacks, the terrorism experts agreed that while Islamic State may be losing territory, it is likely to adapt to the situation and work to regain it.

“They know how to fight the Americans,” Ranstorp said. “They will blend in. They will use suicide bombings. And they will blend in again.”

 

 

latimes.com

 

NATO leaders will approve the use of NATO AWACS surveillance aircraft to assist the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State extremist group, the alliance’s secretary-general said Monday.

Jens Stoltenberg said he expects the alliance summit in Warsaw also to agree on a new role for NATO in the Central Mediterranean, where the European Union has deployed ships to halt human trafficking.

At a news conference at NATO headquarters, Stoltenberg outlined the ambitious agenda of the two-day summit, which opens Friday in the Polish capital.

Since the alliance’s last summit in September 2014 in Wales, NATO has embarked on the biggest reinforcement of its collective defense capabilities since the Cold War, spurred by a resurgent and unfriendly Russia, as well as the spread of Islamic extremism.

“We delivered a faster, a stronger and a more ready alliance,” Stoltenberg said. “We now need to take the next steps.”

The summit, to be attended by President Barack Obama and leaders of the 27 other NATO nations, comes at a moment of great uncertainty in Europe caused by the British public’s June 23 vote to leave the European Union.

The referendum’s outcome led British Prime Minister David Cameron to tender his resignation, but Stoltenberg said Monday he expects whoever succeeds Cameron to maintain Britain’s strong support for NATO.

Stoltenberg also said that after years of decline, defense spending by European NATO members and Canada is expected to rise this year by 3 percent, or $8 billion.

“But we have a very long way to go and we must keep up the momentum,” he cautioned.

The secretary-general said the alliance and Russia weren’t able to agree to hold a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council before the summit, as NATO had wanted. But he said he hopes one can be convened shortly afterward.

 

 

 

ap.org

The details of around 2.2m terrorists and those involved in organised crime have been revealed online

 

 

itpro.co.uk