Tag Archives: Islamic State

Twitter praised for cracking down on use by Islamic State

(Reuters) – Officials with the nonprofit Simon Wiesenthal Center praised Twitter Inc on Monday for increasing efforts to thwart Islamic State’s use of its platform for recruitment and propaganda.

The center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project gave Twitter a grade of “B” in a report card of social networking companies’ efforts to fight online activity by militant groups such as IS.

“We think they are definitely heading in the right direction,” the project’s director, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, told Reuters in a telephone interview ahead of Monday’s release of the report card at a press conference in New York.

He said the review was based on steps that Twitter has already taken and information that center staff learned in face-to-face meetings with company representatives.

Islamic State has long relied on Twitter to recruit and radicalize new adherents. The Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization, has been one of toughest critics of the Twitter’s strategy for combating those efforts.

Some vocal Twitter critics have tempered their views since December, when the site revised its community policing policies, clearly stating that it banned “hateful conduct” that promotes violence against specific groups and would delete offending accounts.

Researchers with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism last month reported that Islamic State’s English-language reach on Twitter stalled last year amid a stepped-up crackdown by the company against the extremist group’s army of digital proselytizers.

The center gave Twitter grade of “C” in a report card last year, which covered efforts to fight terrorism along with hate speech. This year it gave two grades, awarding Twitter a “D” on hate speech, saying the company needed to do more to censor the accounts of groups that promote hate.

A Twitter spokesman declined comment, but pointed to a statement on the company’s blog posted Feb. 5 on combating violent extremism.

“We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter Rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service,” Twitter said in the blog.

Among other major Internet firms included in this year’s survey, Facebook Inc got an “A-” for terrorism and a “B-” for hate. Alphabet Inc’s YouTube got a “B-” for terrorism and a “D” for hate.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Peter Cooney and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Militants attack Tunisian forces near Libyan border, 53 killed

TUNIS (Reuters) – Dozens of Islamist fighters stormed through the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdan near the Libyan border on Monday, attacking army and police posts in a raid that killed at least 53 people, including civilians, the government and residents said.

Local television broadcast images of soldiers and police crouched in doorways and on rooftops as gunshots echoed in the center of the town. Bodies of dead militants lay in the streets near the military barracks after the army regained control.

Authorities sealed off the nearby beach resort town of Djerba, a popular destination for foreign and local tourists, imposed a curfew on Ben Guerdan and closed two border crossings with Libya after the attack.

“I saw a lot of militants at dawn, they were running with their Kalashnikovs,” Hussein, a resident, told Reuters by telephone. “They said they were Islamic State and they came to target the army and the police.”

It was not clear if the attackers crossed the border, and no group immediately claimed responsibility. But it was the type of militant operation Tunisia’s government has feared as it prepares for potential spillover from Libya, where Islamic State militants have gained ground.

Since its 2011 revolt to oust ruler Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia has struggled with Islamist militancy at home and across the border. Militants trained in jihadist camps in Libya carried out two attacks last year in Tunisia.

“This attack was an unprecedented, well-organized. They wanted to try to control the Ben Guerdan region and name it as their new Wilaya,” President Beji Caid Essebsi said, referring to the name Islamic State uses for regions it considers part of its self-described caliphate.

Soldiers killed 35 militants and arrested six, the Interior Ministry said. Hospital and security sources said at least seven civilians were killed along with 11 soldiers.

Troops also later discovered a large cache of rifles, explosives and rocket-propelled grenades in Ben Guerdan, a security source said.

“If the army had not been ready, the terrorists would have been able to raise their flag over Ben Guerdan and gotten a symbolic victory,” said Abd Elhamid Jelassi, vice president of the Islamist party Ennahda, part of the government coalition.

REGIONAL JIHADISTS

More than 3,000 Tunisians have gone to fight with Islamic State and other groups in Syria and Iraq. Tunisian security officials say increasingly they are returning to join the militant group in Libya.

Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi five years ago, Libya has slipped into chaos, with two rival governments and armed factions struggling for control. Islamic State has grown in the turmoil, taking over the city of Sirte and drawing foreign recruits.

Tunisian jihadists are taking a lead role in Islamic State camps in Libya, Tunisian security sources say.

Tunisian forces have been on alert for possible militant infiltrations since last month, when a U.S. air strike targeted mostly Tunisian Islamic State militants at a camp near the border in Libya’s Sabratha.

Western military advisers are starting to train Tunisian border forces to help better protect the frontier with electronic surveillance and drones and authorities have built a trench and barrier to help stop militants crossing.

Islamist militant gunmen trained in Libyan camps carried out two of the three major attacks on Tunisia last year, including assaults on the Tunis Bardo museum and a Sousse beach hotel targeting foreign tourists.

(Reporting by Tarek Amara; Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Janet Lawrence, Larry King)

Islamic State looking for ‘spectacular’ attacks, UK police say

LONDON (Reuters) – Islamic State fighters want to carry out “enormous and spectacular” attacks against Britain and the Western lifestyle in general, Britain’s most senior anti-terrorism officer said on Monday.

London Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said the threat from the group which has taken over large parts of Syria and Iraq was evolving, and that it was keen to repeat elsewhere incidents such as last year’s Paris shootings and suicide attacks that killed 130 people.

“What we are now seeing in recent months … is the broadening of that threat, more plans to attack Western lifestyle … going from that narrow focus on police and military and symbols of the state to something much broader,” Rowley told reporters.

“You see a terrorist group that has big ambitions for enormous and spectacular attacks, not just the types that we’ve seen foiled to date.”

British security chiefs have previously warned that the biggest threat posed by the group was the radicalization of young Britons over the internet and the danger posed by those who joined the fighting in Syria and Iraq to return home to carry out attacks.

About 800 British citizens are thought to have traveled to Syria, many to join Islamic State (IS), since the outbreak of civil war.

Rowley said recent arrests showed that IS was adopting a different methodology in trying to get fighters into northern Europe who had weapons and paramilitary training.

“Terrorist groups have always wanted to do the grand and the more spectacular attack because it gets more impact,” he said.

He said British police had made more counter-terrorism arrests in 2015 than in any previous year including a marked number of women and those aged under 20.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Stephen Addison)

National Guard may join cyber offense against Islamic State, Carter says

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Washington (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the National Guard’s cyber squadrons will play an increasingly important role in assessing the vulnerabilities of U.S. industrial infrastructure and could be asked to join the fight against Islamic State.

The National Guard – a reserve military force that resides in the states but can be mobilized for national needs – is a key part of the military’s larger effort to set up over 120 cyber squadrons to respond to cyber attacks and prevent them.

One such unit, the 262nd squadron, is a 101-person team that includes employees of Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google. The unit is “famous throughout the country” for several high profile vulnerability assessments, Carter said at the Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington late on Friday.

He told reporters the squadron was not currently engaging in offensive cyber missions but could be in the future.

“Units like this can also participate in offensive cyber operations of the kind that I have stressed we are conducting, and actually accelerating, in Iraq and Syria, to secure the prompt defeat of ISIL, which we need to do and will do,” Carter said. “We’re looking for ways to accelerate that, and cyber’s one of them.”

The 262nd squadron’s work includes a study last year on the control system used by Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington state, which helped the utility strengthen its security, and a 2010 case in which the U.S. Air Force briefly lost contact with 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The 2010 assessment cost about $20,000, much less than the $150,000 that a private sector company would likely charge, said Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Borchers, deputy commander of the 252nd Cyber Operations Group, which oversees the 262nd squadron.

Borchers said the squadron is the only National Guard group that currently assesses industrial control systems, but it is now looking to train others. It is also studying the security of big weapons programs, such as the B-52 bomber.

Using National Guard units for such work made sense because it allowed the military to benefit from private sector cyber experts, Carter said.

“It brings in the high-tech sector in a very direct way to the mission of protecting the country,” he told reporters. “And we’re absolutely going to do more of it.”

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, editing by Tiffany Wu)

Spanish officials seize 20K military uniforms from alleged ISIS suppliers

Police in Spain have neutralized a “very active and effective business network” that allegedly supplied a variety of materials to terrorist groups, the country’s interior ministry said Thursday.

A counterterrorism investigation last month led to the arrest of seven people who are accused of providing “logistical and financial support” to the Islamic State and the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, the ministry announced in a news release. Authorities also confiscated about 20,000 uniforms and other accessories that could have been used “to equip an army that would be perfectly prepared for combat” out of three shipping containers in Valencia and Algeciras.

The ministry said the containers were tied to the business network, and had been labeled as carrying “second-hand clothes” so as not to arouse suspicion from customs officials. However, authorities discovered bundles of uniforms hidden among other clothing inside the containers.

The now-neutralized network helped provide a constant supply of weapons, military equipment and other technological supplies to areas controlled by the Islamic State, the ministry said.

U.N. team calls destruction in Iraq’s Ramadi ‘staggering’

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Destruction in Ramadi is “staggering” and worse than anywhere else in Iraq, a U.N. team concluded this week after making the first assessment visit to the city since its recapture from Islamic State.

It said the main hospital and train station had both been destroyed, along with thousands of other buildings. Local officials told the UN team 64 bridges and much of the electricity grid had been ruined.

Iraqi forces declared victory over the jihadist group in Ramadi in December and has since cleared most of the western Iraqi city. Islamic State fighters still hold pockets in the northern and eastern outskirts.

Its recovery boosted Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in his campaign to oust the militants from their northern stronghold of Mosul later this year.

But more than six months of fighting shattered most infrastructure and leveled many homes in Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital where around half a million people once lived.

The fighting saw Islamic State bomb attacks and devastating U.S.-led coalition air strikes.

“The destruction the team has found in Ramadi is worse than any other part of Iraq. It is staggering,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.

The two-day assessment found that nearly every building had been damaged or destroyed in frontline areas. In other districts, one in three or four buildings were damaged, it said.

U.N. analysis of satellite imagery last month showed nearly 5,700 buildings in Ramadi and its outskirts had been damaged since mid-2014, with almost 2,000 completely destroyed.

Grande said it was too early to say how much time and money it would take to rebuild.

The cash-strapped government in Baghdad is appealing to international donors to help the city, the largest retaken from Islamic State. It must first clear bombs planted by the militants in streets and buildings – an effort which also requires funding it lacks.

The assessment team said the greatest concentration of such explosives was reported in south-central Ramadi.

The United Nations is working with local authorities on plans to rebuild health, water and energy infrastructure.

The U.N. team said a water plant in central Ramadi could probably be repaired quickly.

It said it had identified four potential relocation sites for returning civilians. Iraq’s central government has yet to give the all-clear for the return of residents.

(Reporting by Stephen Kalin; editing by Andrew Roche)

White House hesitant to call Islamic State’s actions genocide

The White House does not believe the Islamic State’s actions against Christians in the Middle East have risen to the level of genocide, a spokesman told reporters in Washington this week.

Speaking at a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration was “concerned by the way that ISIL attempts to target religious minorities” — including Christians — in Iraq and Syria. But when a reporter asked the spokesman if the White House was prepared to call the situation genocide, he declined to give the acts that distinction.

“My understanding is, the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has at this point not been reached,” Earnest told reporters, according to a transcript published on the White House website. “But we have been quite candid and direct about how ISIL’s tactics are worthy of the kind of international, robust response that the international community is leading. And those tactics include a willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

ISIL is an acronym for the Islamic State, which controls large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria and has been accused of widespread atrocities and human rights abuses in those areas.

The European Parliament and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have recently adopted resolutions that accuse the organization’s operatives of committing genocide, which is outlawed under a 1948 United Nations treaty that defines the crime as certain acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Those actions include murdering or inflicting serious harm upon a group’s members.

According to ADF International, there are now 1.8 million fewer Christians living in Iraq and Syria than there were a few years ago. The religious freedom advocacy group places the current population at 775,000, down from 2.65 million, and says Yazidis have nearly been wiped out.

The European Parliament’s resolution, adopted last month, accuses the Islamic State of “committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis, and other religious and ethnic minorities, who do not agree with” the group’s radical interpretation of Islam. It states the Islamic State has slaughtered, beaten, extorted, enslaved and forcibly converted many minorities, and its operatives have also vandalized cemeteries, monuments, churches and other places of worship.

The resolution called for the United Nations Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court, which would formally investigate the genocide allegations. The court would also prosecute and try the accused, and impose punishments upon a guilty verdict.

ADF International has issued a similar call for action.

The United States has also been asked to characterize the Islamic State’s actions as genocide.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent commission that makes recommendations to politicians, in December asked the government to designate Christians and four other groups as victims of Islamic State genocide in Iraq and Syria. So far, though, the White House has yet to place the label on the Middle East situation.

“In that region of the world, Christians are a religious minority, and we certainly have been concerned,” Earnest said during the press briefing on Monday. “That’s one of the many reasons we’re concerned with ISIL and their tactics, which is that it’s an affront to our values as a country to see people attacked, singled out or slaughtered based on their religious beliefs.”

The Omnibus spending bill approved by Congress in mid-December includes a provision that says the Secretary of State, John Kerry, must submit an evaluation on the Islamic State’s attacks on Christians and other people of faith in the Middle East to lawmakers within 90 days. That evaluation must include if the situation “constitutes mass atrocities or genocide,” the bill states.

The deadline for that report falls in mid-March.

U.S. forces capture Islamic State operative in Iraq: NYT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. Special Operations Forces captured a significant Islamic State operative in Iraq, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the first suspected raid by a new force sent in recent weeks to target the jihadist group’s fighters and leaders.

The newspaper said the unidentified detainee was being interrogated by U.S. officials in a temporary facility in the Kurdish city of Erbil, but the defense officials it cited provided few other details. (http://nyti.ms/1LwtTTz)

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on details of the force’s missions but said any detention would be “short term and coordinated with Iraqi authorities.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he would not comment because of “operational security reasons.”

Carter reiterated that if detentions took place they would be for “a very short time.”

“Anything having to do with Iraq would be in partnership with the Iraqi government,” he told reporters at the annual RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco.

Iraqi and Kurdish military spokesmen declined immediate comment.

(Reporting by Iraq newsroom; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in San Francisco; Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Lisa Shumaker)

Report shows ISIS bomb supply chain stretches to 20 countries

The Islamic State is building and deploying improvised explosive devices on a “quasi-industrial scale” across Iraq and Syria, according to a new report that examines the group’s supply chain.

The organization has utilized bomb components that were manufactured in 20 countries across four continents, Conflict Armament Research said last week in a report on its 20-month study.

The bombs have become the organization’s “signature weapon,” according to the report, in large part because they can be built out of inexpensive components that can easily be purchased.

The report notes many IED parts are commercial goods like fertilizer, cell phones and other electronic elements, the sale of which aren’t as tightly scrutinized and regulated as firearms. That has allowed more than 700 items connected to Brazil, China, Switzerland, Japan, the United States and 15 other nations to end up in the Islamic State’s improvised explosive devices.

The study indicated 13 Turkish companies were connected to the supply chain, the most of any nation. India followed with seven companies and the United Arab Emirates was third with six.

The report does not accuse any of the 20 countries, or the 51 companies, of directly supplying the material to the Islamic State. It notes that all of the products were lawfully obtained by trade and distribution companies, who subsequently sold them to smaller commercial outlets.

Many of those smaller entities “appear to have sold, whether wittingly or unwittingly” the items to people in some way associated with the Islamic State, the report states, adding that those smaller sellers “appear to be the weakest link in the chain of custody.”

Conflict Armament Research found the Islamic State was able to obtain some products shortly after they were legally given to commercial entities, suggesting some issues with the process.

“The appearance of these components in possession of IS forces, as little as one month following their lawful supply to commercial entities in the region, speaks to a lack of monitoring by national governments and companies alike,” the report states. “It may also indicate a lack of awareness surrounding the potential use of these civilian-market components by terrorist and insurgent forces.”

Islamic State terrorist attacks killed 6,073 people in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey in 2014, according to the most recent edition of the Global Terrorism Index.

The organization was also linked to another 20,000 deaths on various battlefields, the index found, but it did not indicate how many of the 26,000-plus deaths were specifically from IEDs.

Iraqi forces try to cut Islamic State supply lines in western desert

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi security forces and Shi’ite militia began an operation on Tuesday to dislodge Islamic State militants from desert areas northwest of Baghdad and cut their supply routes between western Anbar province and the northern city of Mosul.

Efforts by the Iraqi government and the U.S.-led coalition backing it to break jihadist control of large swathes of Iraq have shifted towards Mosul, the largest city under Islamic State control. Government forces retook the key cities of Tikrit, Baiji and Ramadi last year.

The new operation, called al-Jazeera Security in reference to the desert area, was launched from west of the northern cities of Tikrit and Samarra, Iraqi security officials said.

“These operations will play a significant role in cutting all the supply routes in areas still under the terrorists’ control,” Brigadier General Yahya Rasool, an Iraqi military spokesman, told state television.

The offensive is intended to drive the militants from open desert used to transport supplies and launch regular attacks on the government-controlled cities of Tikrit and Samarra, the officials said.

It seeks to prevent insurgents from moving from the western areas of Falluja and Thirthar towards Tirkit and Mosul in the north, said Colonel Mohammed al-Asadi, a military spokesman in Salahuddin province, where Tikrit is located.

“Iraqi army, federal police, counter-terrorism forces and Hashid Shaabi are participating in the military campaign and were deployed on the fronts with air support from the Iraqi and coalition air force,” Asadi said.

The Hashid Shaabi is a coalition of mainly Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias mobilized to combat Islamic State.

Militants attempted three car bomb attacks against the advancing Iraqi armed forces west of Tikrit, but they were intercepted by air strikes, Asadi said.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement distributed online by supporters.

(Reporting by Saif Hameed, editing by Larry King)