The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and other ships in its strike group are scheduled to depart Hampton Roads this morning for a planned seven-month deployment to the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea.

Some 7,000 sailors are deploying aboard the Ike and the other six ships in its group.

The strike group will relieve the carrier Truman, which for months has launched jets on bombing raids against Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria.

The strike group includes aircraft squadrons assigned to Carrier Air Wing 3, as well as the guided missile cruisers San Jacinto and Monterey, and the guided missile destroyers Stout, Roosevelt, Mason and Nitze.

pilotonline.com

With its territories reduced, cash-strapped ISIS has imposed new taxes and fines like a USD 100 penalty for shaving a beard and women being charged USD 25 for wearing cloaks deemed too tight, according to a research.

In response to their worsening financial situation, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is continuing to increase taxes and fines throughout its territory and in some cases introducing new ones, according new analysis released by IHS Inc based on its monitoring of local news reports.

“In the past six months, the Islamic State has introduced a range of new taxes and fines as a means of generating additional revenue from the population to compensate for the loss of oil revenue and from its shrinking territory. Since September, we have seen taxes rise across the caliphate,” Ludovico Carlino, senior analyst at IHS, said.

Among the fines now imposed are USD 100 for shaving a  beard and USD 50 for trimming a beard. Men are fined USD 5 for not properly wearing the traditional izar (a long garment), while women are charged USD 25 for wearing cloaks deemed too tight and USD 10, or 1 gramme of 24 carat gold, for revealing their eyes.

A woman not wearing socks or gloves can be fined USD 30, the research said. If found in possession of a packet of cigarettes can lead to a USD 46 fine for a man and a USD 23 fine for a woman, it said.

Trucks crossing check points now have to pay between USD 600 and USD 700 while last summer the fee was USD 300.

The ISIS also requires non-Sunni Muslims, former members of the security forces or former civil servants working for the Iraqi or Syrian government living in its territory to buy from it a ‘repentance’ certificate.

Repentance used to be paid on an annual basis, now it is charged monthly. This is on top of the required payment of the jizyah, a tax historically levied on non-Muslims permanently residing in Muslim lands under Islamic law.

“Taxation makes up about 50 per cent of the Islamic State’s monthly revenue sources and encompasses almost every aspect of the population’s life,” Carlino said.

“Taxes are imposed by a central government body and flexibility is allowed for regional governors. But, revenue from taxation has decreased by 23 per cent due to the group’s failure to hold onto territory,” he said.

Between December 2015 and March 2016, the Islamic State lost about 22 per cent of its territory, according to IHS.

Another very interesting trend, the IHS said was that ISIS is now also accepting money in exchange for corporal punishment.

deccanchronicle.com

The woman is young, perhaps 18, with olive skin and dark bangs that droop onto her face. In the Facebook photo, she attempts to smile but doesn’t look at her photographer.

The caption mentions a single biographical fact: She is for sale.

“To all the bros thinking about buying a slave, this one is $8,000,” begins the May 20 Facebook posting, which was attributed to an Islamic State fighter who calls himself Abu Assad Almani. The same man posted a second image a few hours later, this one a pale young face with weepy red eyes.

“Another sabiyah [slave], also about $8,000,” the posting reads. “Yay, or nay?”

The photos were taken down within hours by Facebook, and it is unclear whether the account’s owner was doing the selling himself or commenting about women being sold by other fighters. But the unusual posting underscores what experts say is an increasingly perilous existence for the hundreds of women who are thought to be held as sex slaves by the Islamic State.

As the terrorist group comes under heightened pressure in Iraq and Syria, these female captives appear to be suffering, too — sold and traded by cash-strapped fighters, subjected to shortages of food and medicine, and put at risk daily by military strikes, according to terrorism experts and human rights groups.

Social-media sites used by Islamic State fighters in recent months have included numerous accounts of the buying and selling of sex slaves, as well the promulgation of formal rules for dealing with them. The guidelines cover such topics as whether it’s possible to have sex with prepubescent prisoners — yes, the Islamic State’s legal experts say — and how severely a slave can be beaten.

But until the May 20 incident, there were no known instances of Islamic State fighters posting photographs of female captives being offered for sale. The photos of the two unidentified women appeared only briefly before being deleted by Facebook, but the images were captured by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit group that monitors jihadists’ social-media accounts.

“We have seen a great deal of brutality, but the content that ISIS has been disseminating over the past two years has surpassed it all for sheer evil,” said Steven Stalinsky, the institute’s executive director, using the common acronym for the Islamic State. “Sales of slave girls on social media is just one more example of this.”

Almani, the apparent owner of the Facebook account, is thought to be a German national fighting for the Islamic State in Syria, according to Stalinsky. He has previously posted to social-media accounts under that name, in the slangy, poorly rendered English used by many European fighters who can’t speak Arabic. Early postings suggest that Almani is intimately familiar with the Islamic State’s activities around Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria. He also regularly uses his accounts to solicit donations for the terrorist group.

In displaying the images of the women, Almani advised his Facebook friends to “get married” and “come to dawlah,” or the Islamic State’s territory in Iraq and Syria. Then he engaged with different commenters in an extensive discussion about whether the $8,000 asking price was a good value. Some who replied to the postings mocked the women’s looks, while others scolded Almani for posting photos of women who weren’t wearing the veil.

“What makes her worth that price? Does she have an exceptional skill?” one of his correspondents asks about woman in the second photo.

“Nope,” he replies. “Supply and demand makes her that price.”

The Islamic State’s leaders have historically used U.S.-based social media such as Facebook and Twitter to attract recruits and spread propaganda, but in the past year American companies have sought to block jihadist accounts and postings whenever they are discovered.

Facebook in particular has garnered high marks from watchdog groups for reacting quickly to terrorists’ efforts to use its pages. But at the same time, the militants also have become more agile, leaping quickly from one social-media platform to another and opening new accounts as soon as older ones are shut down.

The Facebook incident comes amid complaints from human rights groups about waning public interest in the plight of women held as prisoners by the Islamic State. The organization Human Rights Watch, citing estimates by Kurdish officials in Iraq and Syria, says the terrorist group holds about 1,800 women and girls, just from the capture of Yazidi towns in the region. After initial denials, the Islamic State last year issued statements acknowledging the use of sex slaves and defending the practice as consistent with ancient Islamic traditions, provided that the women are non-Muslims captured in battle or members of Muslim sects that the terrorist group regards as apostates.

A report last month by Human Rights Watch recounted the ordeals suffered by three dozen Iraqi and Syrian women who escaped from terrorist-held towns in recent months. Among the women were former Yazidi sex slaves who described abuses that included multiple rapes by different men as they were sold and traded.

The problems faced by such women appear to be growing worse as military and economic pressure against the Islamic State increases, the report said.

“The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yazidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” said Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Meanwhile, ISIS’s restrictions on [non-enslaved] Sunni women cut them off from normal life and services almost entirely.”

orlandosentinel.com

Attacked on numerous fronts, the brutal jihadist group is no longer certain to survive; it may ultimately become ‘just’ another evil terrorist organization

It may be too soon to write off Islamic State, the fundamentalist Sunni terror organization controlling large swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, but there are hints that the terror group is beginning to crumble under the pressure of attacks from multiple fronts.

In a series of deadly attacks in the Alawite region of Syria just this week, Islamic State bombs killed some 150 people; in Fallujah, Iraq, only an hour’s drive from Baghdad, at least 35 Iraqi soldiers and Shiite militia forces were killed when they were trying to liberate the city from IS control; and earlier this month, a series of deadly terror attacks ripped through the city of Baghdad, killing hundreds.

But despite the death and destruction Islamic State is leaving in its wake, an examination of recent developments on both the Iraqi and Syrian fronts demonstrates how dire the organization’s state has become, as an Iraqi-Iranian alliance is closing in on it from the east while Kurdish and American forces are advancing from the north.

Outnumbered to the east

In the east, war is raging on the outskirts of Fallujah, where IS is attempting to reap as many casualties as it can by employing its tried and true fighting techniques – those that helped it capture the city in the first place – namely the use of suicide attackers driving cars rigged with explosives into Iraqi army posts.

Fallujah is extremely important to IS; it was the first city to be seized by the organization and the base from which it began its violent escapades into the region. As a result, fighting at Fallujah may drag on for months to come.

It’s fair to assume that IS will do almost anything to defend the city and to prove it can survive. But IS fighters’ famously fearsome reputation and high motivation – the elements that often gave them the upper hand even when outnumbered – may not be enough to help them out of their current plight. The city of Ramadi, a symbol of resistance against American forces just a decade ago, was recaptured from IS in a mere month.

The Iranians, perhaps out of concern for the Iraqi and militia forces fighting IS, sent Qassem Sulaimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, to oversee fighting at Fallujah. His forces, alongside militia fighters and Iraqi soldiers, comprise some 20,000 men facing only around 1,000 IS fighters barricaded inside the city.

In light of the Iraqi offensive that began again this week, IS may try to demonstrate its ongoing capacity to wreak havoc by targeting locations across Europe and the West. Whatever horrors it can unleash, however, the fall of Fallujah would constitute a crushing blow to IS sovereignty in the east.

Trouble from the north

Fighting on the northern front will take longer to be resolved. Although Syrian opposition forces have already begun carpet bombing villages in the Raqqa district, the fighting there is still some 60 kilometers (37 miles) away from the heart of the IS stronghold in the city of Raqqa itself.

Operations carried out against IS in the Raqqa district are being overseen and aided by American forces. The American contribution to the offensive against IS was underlined by a recent visit to the front by the commander of the United States Central Command, Josef Votel, where he met with representatives of Syrian and Kurdish forces fighting IS, such as the Syrian Democratic Forces and the YPG, which is the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party in Rojava, the Kurdish region of Syria.

The joint Kurdish-Syrian offensive on Raqqa may take some time, but even the mere announcement of its commencement is reason for IS to worry.

Is this the end?

It may be that the fighting around Fallujah and Raqqa is only just beginning, but we can cautiously say at this point that the survival of IS is no longer a given. If the IS strongholds in Raqqa and Fallujah fall, all the organization will have left is control over the small area of Mosul, which is bound to be captured by the Iraqi army or by pro-Iranian militia forces.

Overpowered on its home turf, IS would shift from the bureaucratic enterprise of running a sharia state to become one of the pedestrian variety of terror groups — the kind that “only” conduct terror and guerrilla attacks.

toi.com

Intelligence officials have pieced together details of the recent movements of the world’s most wanted man

At the closest point they can reach to the Islamic State heartlands, the Kurdish Peshmerga can almost feel their enemy. Most days Isis fighters fire mortars or bullets at their frontline, 10 miles south of Sinjar, sometimes crawling through long grass for hours until they are close enough to shoot.

Several miles further south, some of Isis’s most senior leaders regularly gather in the grey concrete villages of the terror group’s northern vanguard, which for more than a decade had been the safest corners of Iraq for them to come and go. Moving among the nearby towns of Ba’ej and Billij, according to the Kurds watching from the ground, and intelligence officials keeping tabs from other vantage points, is the world’s most wanted man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Intelligence officials, who have spent the past two years trying to pinpoint Baghdadi’s movements, are now convinced that he moves within a tight arc of north-western Iraq and north-eastern Syria, within sight of this frontline, an area in which he has remained for almost all of his time as self-anointed leader.

For almost six months of that time, from March last year, Kurdish and western officials, senior members of Isis and several others who are close to Baghdadi say he did not move from Ba’ej, as he recovered from serious injuries he suffered in an airstrike that few friends, or even foes, knew had hit him.

In northern Iraq, which has been the the most important hub in the war against Isis, intelligence officers and Peshmerga leaders say they are sure that Baghdadi has been moving widely around north-western Iraq in recent weeks, particularly near Ba’ej and Tal Afar. “He’s on the move a lot,” said a senior intelligence official. “He also goes into Mosul.”

On the frontline south of Sinjar, which was retaken by Kurdish forces aided by US airstrikes last November, Lieutenant Colonel Khalid Hamza said he was certain that Baghdadi had visited Ba’ej two months ago. “We have very accurate information from inside the city that he was there visiting the Wali [local Isis leader],” he said, standing behind a giant earth berm built to stop sniper fire from Isis positions less than two miles away.

To the west of where Hamza was standing a giant water tank towered above Ba’ej, which was visible on the horizon. In the foreground were three mass graves, containing the bodies of an estimated 150 Yazidi women, whom Isis forces had deemed unsuitable to be enslaved when they rampaged into Sinjar from Ba’ej and Billij in August 2014.

“He is supported by tribes there,” said Hamza. “They are very loyal to him. We know when he is in town. On that day, they confiscated all the phones off everyone several hours before he arrived. They didn’t want anyone making calls.”

Next to him was a Peshmerga air spotter, whose job it was to call in airstrikes by providing GPS co-ordinates. He wore a large watch-like device on his wrist, with a broad screen, and was called on most days to summon fighter jets to attack Isis members either speeding towards the frontline along a long straight road or crawling through long grass to within sniping distance.

Two years into the fight against Isis, more than 15 of the group’s most senior members have been killed by airstrikes. They include Baghdadi’s former deputiesAbu Muslim al-Turkmani and Abu Ali al-Anbari, Omar al-Shishani, the head of the group’s chemical weapons programme in Iraq, Abu Malik and numerous regional leaders in Anbar and Nineveh province. Last year Baghdadi very nearly joined them.

Interviews conducted by the Guardian over the year have revealed that the extent of Baghdadi’s injuries after he was hurt in an airstrike remained one of the most closely guarded secrets of his organisation. His enemies were also reluctant to disclose just how close they had come to killing Baghdadi – seemingly because the airstrike that wounded him was intended for someone else.

A Guardian investigation has pieced together details of the attack, of Baghdadi’s slow recuperation, his recent return to prominence within Isis communities, and of the now intensified efforts to ensure that the next strike is both targeted and successful.

Baghdadi was hit near the small Iraqi town of Shurgat on the Tigris river, about 190 miles (300km) north of Baghdad, a regional intelligence chief has confirmed.

The Guardian has contacted eight sources with direct knowledge of Baghdadi’s injuries. All reported that he had suffered a serious wound to his lower back, which had immobilised him for several months before a long recovery.

As he was being treated, only a small number of his personal doctors and nurses knew of his condition. Within Isis itself, very few outside of the senior leadership groups were aware. Even confidantes who had known Baghdadi well before the terror group’s inception were left guessing at the reason for their boss’s long absence from gatherings where his presence would normally have been expected.

A senior Isis member and Iraqi officials in Baghdad had earlier believed that the airstrike had taken place near the Syrian border on 18 March last year. The Shurgat strike took place around the same time, but was about 100 miles to the east.

One source is a senior member of the organisation’s foreign legion, from Uzbekistan, Hamid Khalilov. He had been based near Dabiq in Syria with Shishani, the group’s commander in northern Syria, who was killed in an airstrike two months ago. Khalilov was captured in Baiji, near Shurgat, in August 2015 and spoke of meeting Baghdadi with Shishani both near Shurgat and in the town of Ba’ej in Iraq’s north-west, where he was being treated. Khalilov has provided details of his meetings with Baghdadi to intelligence officers in Iraq. He has also responded to questions from the Guardian.

A second prisoner, who was captured near Shurgat, has detailed Baghdad’s injuries to Iraqi and US interrogators. So too has a third man with direct regular access to the Isis leader, who has insisted on his name being protected. The Guardian has independently verified the man’s identity. A fourth source is a senior member of Isis, with whom the Guardian has maintained close contact over several years.

The information provided by all four men has been corroborated by a senior regional intelligence chief, and two western governments with access to details of both the airstrike and Baghdadi’s recovery. None would put their names to the information, citing sensitivities about relationships with intelligence partners. “I know he was injured. It was an accident, and it wasn’t fatal,” said one of the intelligence sources. “He is moving around now, but it took a long time. And we have a better idea of his movements than we used to.”

“This is now widely known by Iraqi intelligence agencies,” said the Baghdad-based scholar and author on Isis Dr Hisham al-Hashimi. “It took a long time for the information from the Americans and others to be confirmed, but that has happened now.”

Details of Baghdadi’s injuries have been shared across the Five Eyes intelligence community of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and among partners in the Middle East, including the Kurds, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

However, a divide remains between intelligence officers who wanted to disclose the details and policy makers who chose not to. The discussion centred on who would end up prevailing in the court of public opinion if information about a failed and accidental attack was revealed.

“I can’t really tell you why people don’t want to talk about it, because I don’t know,” said one senior official with full knowledge of what happened. “However, there has been an ongoing discussion about whether to talk about it would build him up because he could say he survived, and whether that would outweigh the value of us being able to say we got him in the first place.

“What we all know is that he was back on his feet by late last year.”

In a statement to the Guardian, a US official continued to deny knowledge of an airstrike having hit Baghdadi: “We have no credible information to indicate al-Baghdadi was injured in an airstrike,” the official said in a statement. “The intelligence community considers al-Baghdadi the overall emir of [Isis], providing leadership to the group, consistent with his role as described in [Isis] propaganda.”

Officials in Iraq’s Kurdish north and in Europe believe that, having mostly recovered, Baghdadi is now moving regularly around northern Iraq and north-eastern Syria. In the past six months there have been confirmed sightings of him in Shadadi in Syria and the nearby border town of Boukamel, and a strong belief that he has also visited Ba’ej, Abbasia and Tal Afar in Iraq’s north-west, as well as Mosul, where he anointed himself as caliph of the so-called Islamic State in June 2014 in a public appearance at the city’s al-Nouri mosque.

Inside Sinjar, Lieutenant Colonel Qassem, the leader of the local security unit, known as Asseyesh, said: “We have people who speak with us. We know when [Baghdadi] comes. Around three weeks ago, Isis in Tal Afar all started acting strangely, moving all their cars out into the open and standing openly themselves. It was clear something was going on and we called the Americans. They agreed, but said: ‘We can’t just attack anything. Give us a target.’

“I also know for a fact that he has been back in Abassia delivering prayers recently. He was staying in a small hut near the edge of town. We are very sure of this. We know when he comes and goes.”

The air campaign is being led by a mix of signals intelligence, which comes from interceptions of telephone calls and messages, as well as emails and short messaging programs. A former US intelligence officer has told the Guardian that Isis’s information technology arm is in the hands of no more than 30 people, who are entrusted with establishing secure communications within the so-called Caliphate and other members of the organisation elsewhere in the world.

“The best of them are very good, as good as we have,” the source said. “But many others are sloppy.”

Tal Afar, Billij and Ba’ej are all within range of phone towers erected by the Kurdish region. And, while Isis has targeted some towers, residents of the towns can still get access to the Kurdish networks – which allows sources to make contact with Kurdish officials.

“We will get him eventually,” said one of the Kurdish officials in Sinjar. “These villages you see may be very loyal to him, but not everyone inside them is.”

theguardian.com

Operation Inherent Resolve has quietly but dramatically escalated its operations in Iraq in 2016. Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition are up by 65 percent over the same period last year, according to data tallied from Central Command’s daily rundowns.

Targets have included ISIS fighters, tanks, checkpoints, oil fuel trucks, arms depots, cash storage sites and tunnels. So many fighters have died that ISIS recruitment has dropped from 1,500 a month to 200 a month, the Pentagon claimed in April. Meanwhile, the number of American forces on the ground in Iraq increased to some 4,000.

In contrast, the number of airstrikes in Syria in 2016 has actually dropped 5 percent compared to the first four months of last year, according to CENTCOM figures. The targets included ISIS weapons factories, bunkers, mortar positions, supply caches, tanks and rockets systems.

Pentagon officials, who have described an overall acceleration of the campaign in both Iraq and Syria since late last year have not publicly offered reasons for the decrease in airstrikes. But compared with Iraq, the United States has fewer allies on the ground in Syria to coordinate military operations and identify targets.

The difference in the two fronts is reflected in strikes on the two ISIS strongholds. The coalition hit Raqqa—a backwater city that is the nominal capital of its pseudo-caliphate in Syria—less than 60 times this year, or only 8 percent of the total airstrikes in Syria. The coalition hit areas in and around Mosul—a commercial center in Iraq at least 10 times larger than Raqqa—almost 500 times, or a quarter of all strikes in Iraq this year.

After some 12,000 airstrikes over the past 21 months, costing $7 billion, Operation Inherent Resolve has had an impact in aiding local forces who have fought ISIS on the ground. But their progress in Iraq and Syria has varied.

Due to a wide range of local and international efforts against ISIS, the group haslost 40 percent of its territory in Iraq, and only 11 percent of its turf in Syria.

Iraq

The escalation in Iraq was particularly pronounced in April, when the U.S.-led coalition conducted nearly 550 airstrikes – more than any month of the campaign so far. As part of the push to retake Mosul, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced on April 20 that AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and 217 additional soldiers would be sent to Iraq.

Carter attributed the heightened tempo of airstrikes to better intelligence by U.S. forces in identifying targets. The increased U.S. presence carries risks—three U.S. service members have been killed in northern Iraq since October. And on April 25, U.S. Central Command acknowledged that airstrikes have killed 41 civilians since August 2014. Monitoring organizations estimate that civilian casualties could actually number more than 1,000.

Operation Inherent Resolve also has little support among Iraqis. Around half of Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites oppose the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, according to a State Department report in March.

Syria

A different pattern is playing out in Syria. Unlike the push to retake the border town of Kobani in early 2015—which took more than 700 airstrikes over four months—the United States has so far directed only limited air power at Raqqa. The U.S.-led coalition actually carried out more airstrikes on four other cities this year: Mar’a, Manbij, al Hawl and Hasakah.

Instead, the United States is counting on Syrian rebels to lead the fight in Raqqa. In April, Secretary Carter said that finding and training local forces who can “isolate and pressure Raqqa” is key to “accelerating [ISIS’s] lasting defeat.” In late April, the White House authorized an additional 250 U.S. troops, who are intended “to further enable those local forces” in Syria, according to Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook.

But the United States has struggled to find reliable partners in Syria. A $500 million training program was shut down in October after fielding only a handful of fighters. The Pentagon revamped the program in April.

Col. Steve Warren, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, announced that the United States had begun training dozens of Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. The revival of the program quickly met skepticism from Congress.

Challenges

In both countries, the U.S.-led coalition—of more than 60 nations from Europe, North America, the Arab world and Australia—still faces daunting challenges in destroying ISIS. On April 28, Secretary Carter said that he was “increasingly concerned” that political, economic and diplomatic challenges could derail progress in the military campaign. Iraq’s government is plagued by power struggles and corruption.

The military efforts in Syria are playing out against the backdrop of a tenuous U.N.-backed cease-fire signed in February, with no real political transition in sight. The United States is also increasingly concerned about ISIS’s regional affiliates, particularly its Libya branch with some 6,500 fighters. “This fight is far from over,” Secretary Carter said on May 4. “And there are great risks.”

Almost two years of U.S. airstrikes have been instrumental to the progress against ISIS—but so far, at great cost and still with no end in sight.

newsweek.com

https://youtu.be/PgSmEaEmjHg

U.S. security officials are evaluating a new unmanned aircraft system — with potential uses for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and security applications — from a local company that is developing drone technology in Simi Valley.

AeroVironment Inc., which also has offices in Monrovia where the company develops efficient quick-charging technology for electric vehicles, announced Monday that an anti-terrorism office within the U.S. Department of Defense was looking at the new system.

Called Tether Eye, the system can be launched from a small weather-sealed, self-contained base station. Once aloft, the aircraft can ascend to a pre-determined altitude and hover there while providing a video feed with a 360-degree field of view.

The drone is tethered to its base station by a lightweight electric cable that powers the unit and allows it to climb as high as 150 feet. The system is designed to function as a “virtual observation tower,” providing continuous, 24-hour-a-day surveillance.

“This could be up there for an extended period of time,” said Steven Gitlin, vice president of marketing strategy and communications for the company. “It can be used very rapidly in response to specific incidents. It’s an effective way to gain situational awareness. It deploys rapidly and it can also act as a communication relay for other unmanned aircraft.”

The DOD’s U.S. Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office funded development of the Tether Eye program under a government contract.

The aircraft’s current payloads include electro-optical and infrared cameras as well as AV’s encrypted Digital Data Link. The cameras provide both day and night imagery with full-motion video that’s transmitted directly to a ground control station. The Digital Data Link, integrated into each of AeroVironment’s unmanned aircraft systems, provides secure communication that can’t be accessed by others.

A YouTube video demonstrates how efficiently Tether Eye functions. Situated in an open field, the base station’s two doors open up, the drone’s propeller blades begin spinning and the aircraft rises into the air. After a brief flight, the tether cord slowly retracts, pulling the craft back down where it lands on the base station and the doors close.

Gitlin said Tether Eye lends itself to nonmilitary uses as well.

“If there was, say, a facility along the coast line that is subject to earthquakes or tsunamis and something happened, this could be deployed to provide key people with a 360-degree view of the area,” he said. “It could provide information about people who might need assistance.”

The system could also come in handy at large sporting events.

“If there was a marathon or Super Bowl going on, law enforcement could have a greater situational awareness and visibility regarding the flow of cars and people,” Gitlin said.

Erroll Southers, a USC expert on terrorism, agreed.

“A marathon is 26.2 miles, but there are actually twice as many miles they have to control,” he said. “You have to monitor and manage alternate routes for people.”

Southers said unmanned drones are going to play an increasingly important role with law enforcement agencies.

“I think drones are the future for law enforcement,” he said. “It’s inevitable. But I have to stress that this is being done with extreme attention being paid to civil liberties and privacy. If you are flying a drone to a location and fly over my back yard and see something that doesn’t look right, do you have the authority — or the responsibility — to act? That’s a good question.”

AV’s other unmanned drones — including the RQ-11B Raven, RQ-12 Wasp and SwitchbladeTM — are already being used by the U.S. military and allied forces throughout the world.

“We have deployed about 30,000 unmanned aircraft globally and our systems have accumulated more than 1 million hours of operating time,” Gitlin said. “These systems can provide really critical information to people who need that information right then and there. It helps them make better decisions with greater confidence.”

Drone strikes have become increasingly effective in targeting and taking out terrorist leaders.

On Saturday, an American drone strike in a volatile province of Pakistan killed Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, leader of the Afghan Taliban, White House official confirmed Monday.

sgvtribune.com

An Israeli start-up says it can take one look at a person’s face and realize character traits that are undetectable to the human eye.

Faception said it’s already signed a contract with a homeland security agency to help identify terrorists. The company said its technology also can be used to identify everything from great poker players to extroverts, pedophiles, geniuses and white collar-criminals.

“We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other,” said Faception chief executive Shai Gilboa. “Our personality is determined by our DNA and reflected in our face. It’s a kind of signal.”

Faception has built 15 different classifiers, which Gilboa said evaluate with 80 percent accuracy certain traits. The start-up is pushing forward, seeing tremendous power in a machine’s ability to analyze images.

Yet experts caution there are ethical questions and profound limits to the effectiveness of technology such as this.

“Can I predict that you’re an ax murderer by looking at your face and therefore should I arrest you?” said Pedro Domingos, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and author of “The Master Algorithm.” “You can see how this would be controversial.”

Gilboa said he also serves as the company’s chief ethics officer and will never make his classifiers that predict negative traits available to the general public.

The danger lies in the computer system’s imperfections. Because of that, Gilboa envisions governments considering his findings along with other sources to better identify terrorists. Even so, the use of the data is troubling to some.

“The evidence that there is accuracy in these judgments is extremely weak,” said Alexander Todorov, a Princeton psychology professor whose research includes facial perception. “Just when we thought that physiognomy ended 100 years ago. Oh, well.”

Faception recently showed off its technology at a poker tournament organized by a start-up that shares investors with Faception. Gilboa said that Faception predicted before the tournament that four players out of the 50 amateurs would be the best. When the dust settled two of those four were among the event’s three finalists. To make its prediction Faception analyzed photos of the 50 players against a Faception database of professional poker players.

There are challenges in trying to use artificial intelligence systems to draw conclusions such as this. A computer that is trained to analyze images will only be as good as the examples it is trained on. If the computer is exposed to a narrow or outdated sample of data, its conclusions will be skewed. Additionally, there’s the risk the system will make an accurate prediction, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

Domingos, the University of Washington professor, shared the example of a colleague who trained a computer system to tell the difference between dogs and wolves. Tests proved the system was almost 100 percent accurate. But it turned out the computer was successful because it learned to look for snow in the background of the photos. All of the wolf photos were taken in the snow, whereas the dog pictures weren’t.

Also, an artificial intelligence system might zero in on a trait that could be changed by a person — such as the presence of a beard — limiting its ability to make an accurate prediction.

“If somebody came to me and said ‘I have a company that’s going to try to do this,’ my answer to them would be ‘nah, go do something more promising,’ ” Domingos said. “But on the other hand, machine learning brings us lots of surprises every day.”

washingtonpost.com

In a bustling office in the suburbs of the Kurdish city of Dohuk, 11-year-old Raed quietly begins to recount his ordeal at the hands of ISIL. It does not take long for his eyes to well up.

The diminutive, soft-spoken Yazidi boy had been earmarked as a future jihadist and potential suicide bomber by ISIL, which is grooming the next generation of fighters for its self-proclaimed caliphate in camps set up for this purpose.

Hundreds of Yazidi boys have been forced to undergo the brutal training after being taken from their parents when ISIL attacked Iraq’s northern Sinjar region in August 2014. Raed struggles to hold back his tears as the memories come flooding back.

“I forgot about some things, but other things are more difficult to forget. I can’t get them out of my head,” he says.

Raed spent eight months in a camp called Farouk near Raqqa, ISIL’S main stronghold in Syria, where about a hundred boys were subjected to a gruelling daily routine aimed at forging the model jihadi. He says roughly half of them were fellow Yazidis who had been forced to convert to Islam. The others were children of ISIL members sent there by their parents.

The boys were woken at four in the morning for prayers, the start of a long day filled with military training and indoctrination. They were forced to watch videos of beheadings and other violent deaths, gory propaganda that has become a trademark of ISIL’s recruitment efforts. If they failed to memorise the Quran, they were beaten.

Snatched from their families and subjected to constant manipulation, the boys began to absorb the extremist group’s toxic ideology.

“I started believing the things they taught me. Many of the kids in the camp have been indoctrinated,” says Raed.

To turn them into effective fighters, the boys at Farouk camp were taught how to shoot Kalashnikovs and machine guns. Propaganda material that ISIL has released online shows boys dressed in combat fatigues brandishing weapons and practising martial arts. Their hair is closely cropped and they wear black bandannas with the ISIL logo around their head.

The cruel irony is that the Yazidi boys are being brainwashed into becoming loyal servants of the group that devastated their community.

Estimates vary, but ISIL is believed to have kidnapped about 5,000 people when its fighters stormed into Sinjar, seeking to eradicate the ancient Yazidi religion that they regard as devil worship. The women and girls were sold to ISIL members as sex slaves and servants in Iraq and Syria, while many of the boys ended up in the camps. The men were rounded up and shot.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ISIL has five training camps for boys in Syria. There are at least two such camps in Iraq, in Mosul and the nearby town of Tel Afar, according to a Yazidi teenager who was trained at both places.

Abu Shija, a Yazidi who helps smuggle members of the community out of ISIL areas, estimates that there are about 600 Yazidi boys in the camps in Syria, cut off from the outside world and closely guarded.

“We have only been able to rescue a small number of them so far, unfortunately. It has become very difficult to get these children back. Some of our people have died trying to rescue them,” he says.

According to figures provided by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), only 13 of the 603 Yazidi boys freed in Syria and Iraq so far were snatched from the camps. Raed was lucky that he was granted leave to visit his mother, who was kept as a slave in Raqqa, and who was smuggled out with her children during his stay.

Efforts to rescue Yazidis began almost as soon as they were trucked off by ISIL in 2014. Men like Abu Shija with connections to Mosul and Syria established clandestine networks to smuggle captured women and children out. Others were ransomed by their families. Altogether, 2,379 Yazidis have been rescued or ransomed so far, according to the KRG.

The Office of Kidnapped Affairs, established by the KRG and financed by prime minister Nechirvan Barzani, co-ordinates the rescue efforts, and it is here that The National spoke to Raed.

The few Yazidi boys who have escaped ISIL’s camps struggle to rid themselves of the extremist ideology that was beaten into them, which makes it difficult for them to reintegrate into their community.

“When I was with them, I forgot that I was a Yazidi. I was ready to fight for Daesh,” says Raed, who made it out of Raqqa in November last year.

Typically, it takes at least half a year before the brainwashing is reversed, says Khairi Bozani, the representative for Yazidi affairs at the KRG’s ministry for religious affairs.

The Yazidis from Sinjar now live in refugee camps in the Kurdish region, and many families have been shattered, making it harder for the boys to find their way back to normality.

“Most of the children that are rescued have lost their parents. When they come back we send them to their relatives, but some of them are only distant relatives,” says Mr Bozani. He cites the example of a rescued boy who was taken in by his uncle’s family, which already had 15 children to look after.

With no money to spend on psychological treatment, the Yazidi community is wary of these brainwashed boys who have been trained to kill, says Mr Bozani.

“Some of these kids still pray, and they still act as if they were with ISIS,” he says. When their picture is taken for registration, most of them instinctively make the ISIL hand gesture of pointing to the sky.

But not all are brainwashed. Ahmed, a 16 year-old who underwent jihadi training in camps in Tel Afar and Mosul, escaped ISIL’s clutches with his brother, aunt and cousin in May last year. Tel Afar is close to the Kurdish front lines, and several groups of Yazidi captives have managed to cross over.

Ahmed was captured along with his father and brother after they stayed behind in their village of Hardan because there were not enough cars for the entire family to escape. The jihadists beat him severely when he refused to reveal where he had hidden his mobile phone, and he endured nine months of hardship in the training camps.

“They told me that I am a jihadi and that I have to kill Yazidis because they are unbelievers,” he says.

Ahmed’s father is still missing, and the 16-year-old now lives in a refugee camp with his mother and brother. His slight frame and childlike demeanour belie his age. It is as if his development stopped the day the extremists upended his world almost two years ago. While his head is free of ISIL’s toxic beliefs, the trauma of his experience remains.

“I tried to forget what happened many times, but I can’t,” he says.

thenational.ae

The United States rejected Russia’s proposal to carry out joint air strikes in Syria.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said Friday, “We do not collaborate or coordinate with the Russians on any operations in Syria.”

“Russian operations are supporting and enabling the Assad regime and our focus is solely on degrading and defeating ISIL,” he said of the countries’ different military objectives in the battle against the Islamic State, also referred to as ISIS and Daesh.

Russia and the United States have as of late been carrying out separate bombing campaigns against the terrorist organization in civil war-torn Syria.

Earlier Friday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed joint airstrikes planned for Wednesday aimed at the al-Nusra Front. Shoigu suggested targeting the movement of arms at Syria’s Turkish border, insisting the operations would be completed in coordination with the Syrian government.

“Taking such a step would help the progress of the peace settlement in Syria. Of course, such measures have been agreed with the Syrian Arab Republic,” Shoigu said Friday. “We suggest to the U.S. starting on May 25, joint action of the Russian Air Forces and the U.S.-led coalition forces to plan and conduct strikes against the al-Nusra Front, which does not support the cease-fire, as well as against convoys of arms and fighters crossing the Syrian-Turkish border.”

Russia is a strong ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a coalition that has strained relations with the United States and its allies, who have insisted that the removal of Assad is a key component to ending the Syrian conflict. Russia has long backed Assad’s regime.

A shaky Russia-U.S.-brokered cease-fire, which began in late February, is barely holding together and is not being honored by groups that include al-Nusra Front and the IS.

In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin began withdrawing troops from Syria.

upi.com