The Afghan authorities issued today a terror alert decree for the capital and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, after an escalation of attacks causing nine dead and 45 wounded.

The Interior Ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqi, announced the adoption of stringent security measures to prevent insurgent attacks.

Sediqi said they will use all the resources available to prevent actions like yesterday’s two, that left four dead, including two suicide bombers, and 36 wounded near the Kabul International Airport.

In the Balkh province, there is also an order of alert and increased security measures after the attack on Sunday against the Indian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital.

Over the past year, the country experienced one of the bloodiest periods since the invasion and occupation of the country in 2001 by an international force, with a death toll of nearly 1,600 deceased, and 3,329 wounded.

plenglish.com

The Minister of Justice of the Pakistani province Punjab, Rana Sanaullah, today announced the arrest in that territory of 42 people linked to the terrorist organization Islamic State (IS).

In a press conference, Sanaullah said the police launched an operation this weekend in four cities of Punjab against supporters of the radical group.

He said that among those arrested are the alleged Islamabad chief Amir Mansoor, his deputy Abdullah Mansoori and the group’s chief for Sindh province, Umer Kathio.

According to what was explained, a number of detainees had the mission to create cells of the IS.

A week ago the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) dismantled a group of eight suspected members of the IS in the city of Sialkot, also in Punjab.

During the operation weapons, explosives and several computers were seized.

Last Friday, CTD units arrested a member of the Islamic State in the city of Karachi, capital of Sindh, whose mission was to recruit young people, three of whom were sent to Syria to fight for this terrorist organization.

plenglish.com

The Taliban are increasing suicide attacks in and around Kabul in Afghanistan, in a turf was with ISIS. As NATO forces withdraw, attacks against NATO and Afghan civilians are a statement of who is really in charge, mostly in a show of power against ISIS.

In this sense, Monday was a typical day.  A German convoy was hit by a Taliban suicide bomber in Kabul. Two soldiers were slightly injured, Spiegel reports. The target was a German Brigadier General, Michael Podzus, Spiegel reports. The General makes part of NATO’s “Resolute Support” mission, with a mandate to train and advice the Afghan army.

Elsewhere in Kabul on Monday, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a truck bomb attack on Camp Baron, a residential complex near the city’s airport, which killed over 30 civilians, Reuter reports; a suicide bomber blew himself up near a police checkpoint. Finally, Afghan forces were able to end a 25-hour siege of the the Indian consulate in city, near Kabul.

In thickening there attacks, the Taliban are asserting their presence. Meanwhile, in the “enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” spirit, on Christmas Day, CNN reported on the Russian admission that Moscow is sharing intelligence with the Taliban.  Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, said the contact with the Afghan was limited to the fight against ISIS. Meanwhile, the Taliban deny the embarrassing cooperation with Russia. US commanders told Congress in November that ISIS has over 3,000 fighters there.

neurope.eu

Gunshots continued to ring out Monday at the Indian consulate in Afghanistan’s Mazar-e-Sharif city that a group of armed men attacked a day before, an official said.

The attackers had taken up positions in a residential home located in front of the consulate and were firing from there, Xinhua quoted the official as saying.

Without commenting on possible casualties, the official said security forces had tightened the siege and were trying to capture or kill the assailants.

Meanwhile, a security official told Xinhua that four security personnel and three civilians have sustained injuries during the gunfight.

No Indian has suffered in the incident and all of them have been evacuated to a safer place, the official added.

The number of attackers, according to the official, could be between eight to 12, all armed with assault rifles and suicide vests.

Indian diplomatic missions in Afghanistan have come under militant attacks earlier too. In 2008 and 2009, the embassy in Kabul was attacked, leaving dozens dead.

In May 2014, gunmen attacked the Indian consulate in Herat, while in August 2013, nine civilians died when the consulate in Jalalabad was targeted.

newindianexpress.com

Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah revealed on Monday that less than 100 Pakistanis left the country to join militant group, Islamic State, in Iraq and Syria, Express News reported.

“Hundreds of people from different countries have fled to Iraq and Syria to join Da’ish. However, only a very few Pakistanis have left the country in hopes of joining the militant organization,” Sanaullah said while speaking to media representatives in Faisalabad.

The law minister vowed to strengthen the security institutions to help curb any influence of the Islamic State in the country, saying those rounded up from Daska last month were preparing to leave for Syria.The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader further revealed that all nine suspects belonged to Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a local charity organisation which was put on UN terror blacklist in December 2008 for allegedly carrying out deadly attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai.

Further, Sanaullah requested the Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Shah, who had earlier raised concerns regarding the Islamic State’s recruitment drive in the country, to provide the IS’ recruiting list to the government so that action could be taken against those involved in it.

Lauding the role of the country’s security forces in eliminating terrorism, the Punjab law minister said although security forces have played a vital role in dealing against terrorism, the government is yet to overcome the scourge of terror completely.

Last week, the law minister had said that the nine suspects, who were arrested from Daska by the counter-terrorism department (CTD), had no direct connection with Da’ish. “Preliminary investigation has found that the suspects had no direct contact with Da’ish. They were preaching and trying to get support locally,” he told reporters.

tribune.com.pk

At least 32 Islamic State or Daesh militants have been killed and wounded in latest airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force (AAF) in Achin district of eastern Nangarhar province, an official said on Sunday.

Haji Ghalib Mujahid, the town’s administrative chief, told Pajhwok Afghan News the AAF aircrafts bombarded IS hideouts twice at 11:00am and 3:00pm on Saturday.

The air raids also destroyed a depot of weapons and ammunition in Takhto locality and inflicted heavy causalities on the insurgents.

At least 200 Daesh militants have been killed and wounded in AAF airstrikes since a week.

The air raid targeting Daesh militants came the day President Ashraf Ghani directed the Ministry of Defence to carry on operations against the outfit.

Separately, six insurgents were killed and wounded during a clearing operation in Shegal district of eastern Kunar province.

pajhwok.com

As U.S. commanders in Afghanistan look ahead to the 2016 fighting season, they plan to keep force levels steady while deploying special operations troops and “expeditionary advise-and-assist” teams to support the Afghan army’s ground-level fight against the Taliban insurgency, a top U.S. general in Afghanistan said.

“We expect the troop levels for 2016 to look about what they did for 2015,” said Army Brig. Gen. Wilson Shoffner, deputy chief of staff for communications for the American-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.

About 9,800 U.S. troops are now in Afghanistan. President Obama announced in October a new plan to slow the drawdown of American forces and extend the U.S. military mission there beyond 2016.

Obama said he wants cut the force in half, to about 5,500, before he leaves the White House in January 2017, but the trajectory of that drawdown remains unclear.

Army Gen. John Campbell, commander of the military mission in Afghanistan, will travel to Washington in January to talk with top U.S. officials about plans for 2016. Those conversations may focus on how to most effectively deploy U.S. forces in an advise-and-assist capacity alongside Afghan forces.

“One of the things Gen. Campbell may discuss is what can be done under the current authorities with the train, advise and assist piece,” Shoffner said in an interview Wednesday. “We’ll help as much as we can under the current authorities.”

U.S commanders are considering an expansion of the expeditionary advise-and-assist teams that have begun deploying to hot spots to support Afghan military leaders at the corps level. That’s already underway in Helmand province, where Taliban insurgents are seizing key districts like Sangin and are threatening to topple local governments.

Marine Maj. Gen. Paul Brier, head of the advise-and-assist directorate for the Afghanistan mission, has been routinely sending teams of six to 12 U.S. troops to the Afghan army’s Helmand outpost in Lashkar Gah, a defense official said.

“The expeditionary advising may be the model that we go to as we continue to bring the force levels down,” Shoffner said.

While those teams are at the corps level headquarters, U.S. Special Operations Command teams are farther out with Afghan army battalions, or kandaks. Yet unlike a few years ago, those American troops are staying out of the toe-to-toe fighting.

“They are not participating in combat,” Shoffner said. “Coalition special ops forces are not on the objective. They may provide planning support. They may provide enabler support … ISR and that sort of thing. They may provide transport support.

“But if the Afghan special operations forces are conducting an operation, then the coalition advisers will detach and go to an overwatch position or will go to a command post while the operation is going on.”

Campbell hopes to focus the U.S. training effort on shoring up several key weaknesses in the Afghan army. Those include getting the Afghans to rely less on static, far-flung checkpoints, and to better centralize and mobilize their combat power, Shoffner said.

The Afghan air force also will be a priority. In January, Afghanistan is expecting to receive its first A-29 Super Tucano, a fixed-wing turboprop aircraft that can provide close-air support for ground troops.

“Leadership” also will be a top priority, Shoffner said. The Afghan army continues to suffer from high attrition, a problem that U.S. officials believe is linked to bad or corrupt leaders.

“What we found … is that if you have a problem with attrition, it generally is a function of leadership,” Shoffner said.

“If soldiers are not getting paid or they are not getting fed properly or they are not getting leave, then you tend to have a problem with attrition. So the fix here is to make sure we have the right leadership in place.”

marinecorpstimes.com

Families sundered by a wave of detentions. Mosques barred from broadcasting the call to prayer. Restrictions on the movements of laborers that have wreaked havoc on local agriculture. And a battery of ever more intrusive ways to monitor the communications of citizens for possible threats to public security.

A recent 10-day journey across the Xinjiang region in the far west of China revealed a society seething with anger and trepidation as the government, alarmed by a slow-boil insurgency that has claimed hundreds of lives, has introduced unprecedented measures aimed at shaping the behavior and beliefs of China’s 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that considers this region its homeland.

Driving these policies is the government’s view that tougher security and tighter restraints on the practice of Islam are the best way to stem a wave of violence that included a knife attack at a coal mine that killed dozens of people in September.

The tough security measures are on full view for travelers as they stop at the ubiquitous highway checkpoints that slow movement across this rugged expanse of deserts and snowy peaks.

As heavily armed soldiers rummage through car trunks and examine ID cards, ethnic Uighur motorists and their passengers are sometimes asked to hand over their cellphones so that the police can search them for content or software deemed a threat to public security.

In addition to jihadist videos, the police are on the lookout for Skype and WhatsApp, apps popular with those who communicate with friends and relatives outside China, and for software that allows users to access blocked websites.

“All of us have become terror suspects,” said a 23-year-old Uighur engineering student who said he was detained overnight in November after the police found messages he had exchanged with a friend in Turkey. “These days, even receiving phone calls from overseas is enough to warrant a visit from state security.”

Here in Kashgar, the fabled Silk Road outpost near China’s border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials have banned mosques from broadcasting the call to prayer, forcing muezzins to shout out the invocation five times a day from rooftops across the city. The new rule is an addition to longstanding policies that prohibit after-school religious classes and children under 18 from entering mosques. (The installation of video cameras on mosque doorways in recent months makes such rules hard to ignore.)

Southeast of Kashgar, shopkeepers in the city of Hotan seethed over a government decision to outlaw two dozen names considered too Muslim, forcing parents to rename their children or be unable to register them for school, according to local residents and the police.

To the north in Turpan, a fertile oasis famed for its grapes, a vineyard owner complained about new restrictions that bar Uighur migrant laborers from traveling there for the harvest, leaving tons of fruit to wither on the vines.

And farther north in Ghulja, an ethnically diverse city near the Kazakh border with a history of tensions, a pair of unemployed college graduates fumed about a crackdown prohibiting young men from wearing beards and women from veiling their faces. Those who ignore the rules are sometimes jailed, residents said.

“Me, myself, I’m not religious, but forcing our women to take off their head scarves is an affront to their dignity and makes many people angry,” said one of the men, who, like others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous for fear of punishment by the authorities.

Other measures contribute to the widespread perception that Uighur identity is under siege. Schools have largely switched to Mandarin as the main language of instruction instead of Uighur, and the government has begun offering cash and housing subsidies to encourage intermarriage between Uighurs and Hans, the country’s ethnic majority, who have migrated to the region in large numbers.

Surveillance, too, has been increased. Since 2014, Uighurs seeking to travel outside their hometowns have been required to carry a special card that lists phone numbers for the holder’s landlord and local police station. Many Uighurs complain that these “convenience contact cards,” as they are called, single them out for scrutiny.

“The state’s ability to penetrate Uighur society has become increasingly sophisticated and intrusive,” said James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. “But while these new measures allow the party to nip a lot of problems in the bud, they also foster new forms of alienation and violence that ultimately weaken the party’s legitimacy and rule.”

After 43 people were killed in a pair of attacks in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2014, Beijing began a “strike hard special operation” that it says has dismantled nearly 200 terrorist groups and resulted in the execution at least 49 people. The state news media describes those caught in the crackdown as terrorism suspects or separatists seeking an independent Xinjiang, and blames recurring violence in the region on jihadists influenced or directed by agents overseas.

Foreign journalists seeking to examine such claims face a gantlet of challenges. Officials in Xinjiang seldom respond to interview requests. Those ubiquitous checkpoints prevent journalists from reaching towns and cities recently hit by unrest, and in other places, the sudden appearance of government minders makes it hard to speak with residents. Last week, Beijing expelled a French reporter for an article that criticized its harsh policies in the region.

Fear and resentment are widespread, though such sentiments often emerged haltingly and only in private.

Nervously rearranging the painted tambourines and traditional carved knives in her family’s tiny gift shop, a young woman in Urumqi wept as she described families torn apart by the recent detentions.

“In some homes, only the babies are left because the father and mother have been taken away,” she said, adding that many were serving three- or four-year sentences for violating religious regulations that provide no avenue for appeal. “We think it’s O.K. to live in China, but we wish they would treat us like they did before,” she said.

In Yarkand, a city in southern Xinjiang where violence claimed nearly 100 lives in 2014, an unwanted escort from the local propaganda bureau, Murat, vigorously defended the new restraints on religious life, saying they were needed to combat the sort of extremism that is convulsing parts of the Muslim world.

“When I was a kid, my mother used to wear sleeveless shirts, but now, because of the rise of conservative Islam, she no longer does,” said Murat, who did not want his last name to be used. “Without the government’s strong hand, we would become more like Iran, where they stone girls to death.”

It remains a matter of dispute whether radical Islam has taken hold among many Uighurs, the majority of whom subscribe to a moderate form of Sunni Islam. But the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and the Islamic State’s killing in November of a Chinese hostage in Syria have prompted Beijing to step up efforts to position its battle to pacify Xinjiang as part of the global war on violent religious extremism.

Experts outside China, however, say much of the bloodshed here is fueled by local grievances, among them job discrimination against Uighurs, endemic poverty and a widespread belief that the flood of Han migrants to the region is part of a government plan to dilute Uighur identity.

“What we’re seeing in Xinjiang is homegrown self-radicalization that is made worse by repressive policies and an attempt to hollow out Uighur culture and religious practices,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for Amnesty International.

Most Uighurs, especially the educated and the middle class, have little interest in pushing back against Beijing, and not just because they are afraid. Abdul, 30, a home furnishing salesman who frequently travels across China for work, said he did not support an independent Xinjiang, citing the social instability and economic stagnation he has seen across Central Asia and the Middle East.

“Here in China, we are 56 minorities living together in peace,” he said, echoing the propaganda that blankets billboards across the region. But later, over a meal of lamb and fragrant rice, he angrily described how the police, alerted by front-desk hotel clerks, almost always visited his room when he was on business trips.

“I am Chinese; this is what it says on my ID card,” he said, his voice rising with emotion. But that same card also lists his ethnic identity, and his facial features — light eyes and an aquiline nose — set him apart in a nation that is 92 percent Han. “Sometimes I feel confused about what I really am,” he said.

Then he paused, glanced behind his shoulder, and leaned forward. “To be honest,” he said, “these days, the government’s policies make me so sick in the heart that I sometimes wish I wasn’t Chinese.”

nytimes.com

Islamist gunmen staged a pre-dawn attack on a key Indian air base near the Pakistan border Saturday with two militants killed in a shootout, officials said, striking a blow to the neighbors’ fragile peace process.

At least four gunmen suspected to be from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed Islamist group dressed in army uniforms infiltrated Pathankot air base in northern Punjab state at around 3:30 a.m. (2200 GMT), security officials said.

It comes one week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a surprise visit to Pakistan, the first by an Indian premier in 11 years and threatens to derail talks between the nuclear-armed rivals, who have fought three wars since independence in 1947.

“We want peace but if terrorists carry out attacks on Indian soil we will give them a befitting reply,” Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh said in televised remarks.

Fresh gunfire was again heard at the base at around 0545 GMT as police combed the installation looking for militants still hiding out in buildings, television channels reported.

H. S. Dhillon, a senior provincial police official, told AFP earlier that the operation was still ongoing.

“We are searching the area. Two of the attackers were killed in the initial exchange of gunfire but we can’t confirm if more have been killed,” he said, in response to reports that four gunmen had been killed.

“Five to six security personnel were injured and they have been evacuated to hospital.”

‘They are heavily armed’

The Pathankot air base houses dozens of fighter jets and is important for its strategic location about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Pakistan border.

Local television stations showed helicopters surveying the area, while elite National Security Guard commandos were flown in to flush out the attackers.

A top security official who was at the scene and asked not to be named said security forces had so far prevented the attackers from inflicting major damage at the base.

“They are heavily armed and the attack is aimed to cause maximum damage to the equipment at the station but we have been successful so far,” he said.

“We believe they are Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists.”

Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is banned in Pakistan, fights against Indian rule in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, where a separatist conflict has claimed up to 100,000 lives.

India blamed the group for a December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament that killed 11 people and which led to a massive military build-up at the border and almost brought the two countries to the brink of war.

manilatimes.net