• Three charged in Brooklyn with training to be suicide bombers for al Shabab

    Prosecutors say that three men facing federal terrorism charges in New York City have strong ties to al Shabab, the group responsible for the Nairobi mall attack. Prosecutors in Brooklyn describe the defendants — Ali Yasin Ahmed, Madhi Hashi, and Mohamed Yusuf — as “dangerous and influential” members of al Shabab who were part of an elite unit of suicide bombers. They were captured in Africa last year while traveling to Yemen to team up with the al Qaeda offshoot there.

  • Egypt bans the Muslim Brotherhood, confiscates group’s assets

    Egypt has banned the Muslim Brotherhood, continuing the process of marginalizing the Islamist movement and pushing it out of the country’s public life. A Cairo administrative court on Monday ordered the confiscation of the Brotherhood’s funds, buildings, and assets, and also banned the activities of the Islamist movement’s various spin-off groups. In effect, since early July, when then-president Mohammed Morsi was ousted, the movement has been forced underground.

  • Conference marks opening of UMass Lowell’s new Center for Terrorism and Security Studies

    Top counterterrorism and law enforcement officials and leading researchers are today (Tuesday) gathering at UMass Lowell to discuss the challenges they face in protecting the public and their work to find solutions to security threats. The event marks the opening of UMass Lowell’s new Center for Terrorism and Security Studies.

  • Kenyan security forces in “final assault” on terrorist-held mall

    Kenyan security forces last evening were preparing what they described as a “final assault” on the luxury shopping mall in Nairobi where armed Islamic militants were still holding about thirty hostages. As night fell on Nairobi, loud explosions could be heard from the Westgate mall where the members of the Somali jihadist group al-Shabaab had been barricaded since shooting their way into the mall on Saturday. The Kenyan authorities say that so far they have counted sixty-eight dead, 175 injured, and forty-nine missing, but that toll will likely rise. Unconfirmed reports said that three of the attackers were U.S. citizens of Somali descent.

  • Aon calls on U.S. to extend expiring Terrorism Risk Insurance Act

    Aon plc called on the U.S. government to extend the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), saying that TRIA remains the best solution for handling the terrorism insurance exposure in the United States. Aon says that if the program is allowed to expire, more than 85 percent of insurers will no longer continue to insure terrorism risk. Ultimately, in the unfortunate event of a large-scale attack, the U.S. government would face the full burden of the associated costs of said terrorism.

  • Syria’s chemical program, inventory

    The Syrian chemical weapons program began in the 1970s when the Hafez al-Assad regime purchased chemical munitions from the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, Syria launched a broad program of acquiring the materials, products, and knowledge necessary to set up an autonomous chemical weapons production capacity. In the nearly four decades of acquisition, research, development, and production, Syria has amassed what experts consider to be the world’s largest chemical weapons stockpile, consisting of about 1,000 tons of chemical agents and precursor chemicals.

  • Nigerian terrorist to be extradited to U.S.

    Nigeria is set to extradite Lawal Babafemi, also known as Abdullah Ayatollah Mustapher, to the United States to answer terrorism charges. Babafemi was paid $8,600 by AQAP to recruit English speaking Nigerians to work in AQAP’s English-language media network, al-Malahem, which includes a magazine titled Inspire.

  • Rebels capture historic Christian town

    Maaloula, located about forty miles northeast of Damascus, is a small town of about 3,300 residents, famous mostly for the fact that it is one of three places (the other two being two villages nearby) where western Aramaic – the language spoken by Jesus, even though his dialect was different — is still spoken. Most of the town’s residents are Melkite Greek Catholic and Orthodox Christians, so the fact that it was sitting in the middle of rebel-held territory was a source of unease for its mostly pro-regime residents. Over the weekend, anti-regime rebels had taken over the town — and many Christians in Syria watched the battle for the town nervously, as they have been watching other gains by the rebels, fearing that the alternative to Assad’s regime would be far less tolerant of minority religions. These worries about the Sunni-led rebellion against Assad have caused large segments of Syria’s minority communities to continue to support the Assad regime.

  • U.S. pays growing attention to insider threats

    Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have repeatedly sought to infiltrate the U.S. intelligence community by having supporters apply for intelligence jobs, according to a classified budget document. The U.S government investigates thousands of employees a year to make sure such infiltration does not happen. The CIA says that 20 percent of job applicants whose backgrounds raised questions had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections.”

  • “Climate Change, Water Conflicts, and Human Security” report released

    Increasingly, climate change and the associated increase in the frequency of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and rising sea level, are acknowledged as not only having humanitarian impacts, but also creating national and regional political and security risks. While people and governments can adapt to these impacts, their capacity to do so varies.

  • Pentagon expands Syria attack plan

    The Obama administration, in an effort to mobilize American public opinion to support a strike against Syria, has stressed that any military action would be limited in scope, but the Pentagon is preparing for a longer, and broader, campaign of bombardment of Syria than it originally had planned. The plan includes heavy missile strikes which will be followed by second and third waves of bombing of targets which were not initially destroyed or sufficiently damaged. The plan calls for the use of cruise missiles and aircraft from a U.S. Navy aircraft group in the Red Sea, and long-range bombers from outside the theater.

  • Syria’s chemical weapons stocks will not be attacked

    Military analysts say Syrian president Bashar Assad will emerge with Syria’s chemical arsenal intact if the United States executes a limited airstrike. The United States contemplates a punitive strike in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against Sunni civilians on 21 August – and on about a dozen earlier occasions – but the U.S. attack, if it comes, is not likely to include the depots where the chemical weapons are stored because such an attack may release deadly gases which would cover the neighboring areas with toxic clouds, potentially creating a human and environmental disaster.

  • NYPD designated all NYC mosques as terrorist organizations to facilitate broad surveillance

    The New York Police Department (NYPD) secretly labeled entire mosques in New York as terrorist organizations, allowing the NYPD to use surveillance techniques including informants and spies without needing evidence or proof of criminal or terrorist activities to investigate the mosques. The investigations, known as Terrorism Enterprise Investigations (TEI), began after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

  • Flexible vehicle-arrest system stops cars involved in crime, terrorism

    Researchers have developed a mathematical model that could help engineers design a flexible vehicle-arrest system for stopping cars involved in criminal activity or terrorism, such as suspect car bombers attempting break through a check point, without wrecking the car or killing the occupants.

  • Worries grow about Syria’s biological weapons capabilities, intentions

    The debates among experts in Western and Middle Eastern intelligence services and militaries about the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime revolve around how many times Assad has used chemical weapons, not whether such weapons were used. Neighbors of Syria have become increasingly alarmed – and, in private, have expressed their anxiety in discussions with the United States – about another illicit Syrian WMD program: biological weapons. The readiness of the Assad regime to use one proscribed weapon – chemicals — has led to growing unease among Syria’s neighbors that the regime may not find it too difficult to violate other weapon-related taboos. Biological weapons could give the Assad regime an effective means of retaliation because, if the weapon is well-designed, the lethal contents would spread easily without leaving tell-tale signs about the origin of the attack – or even evidence that there has been an attack.