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Refugees
A Syrian national who arrived in Germany as a refugee has been arrested and charged with war crimes in his home country. The man is accused of leading a 150-strong armed militia which tortured civilians, kidnapped others for ransom, and enriched itself by selling looted art.
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Dirty bombs
The worrying news that individuals affiliated with the so-called Islamic State have undertaken hostile surveillance at a Belgian nuclear research facility has created growing speculation about the group’s nuclear ambitions. There are no indications that a terrorist group has obtained any fissile material to date. An easier option for a terrorist group would be to build a dirty bomb or, technically, a radiological dispersal device. This is the reason for sensible concern, rather than hysterical speculation about Islamic State’s recent activities in Belgium and, especially, Iraq and Syria. After all, without an effective government, it is unclear who controls the many radioactive sources in the region.
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Refugee crisis
Frontex, the EU’s border police, has said that terrorists may have entered Europe by hiding among asylum seekers. Frontex noted that two of the bombers in last November’s Paris attacks made it to the continent in a smuggling boat from Turkey. “As the vast majority of migrants arrive undocumented, screening activities are essential to properly verify their declaration of nationality,” the report says.
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Counterterrorism
Counter-terrorism technologies and diverse partnerships are essential when dealing with terrorist threats in cities. The findings follow the European Commission-funded TACTICS project to create a better counter-terrorism system for EU member states.
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Decision making
A leaner, more-focused national security decision-making system can help the United States succeed in a period of tumultuous change, according to a new report. Increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the National Security Council (NSC) is necessary as the country contends with many more state and nonstate actors, around-the-clock public scrutiny, and exploding nontraditional threats, according to the report.
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Syria
ISIS has used mustard gas against Bashar al-Assad’s forces in battles at a key airport in eastern Syria. The chemical weapons were used as part of the militants’ effort on Monday to recapture the military airport at Deir ez-Zor. UN officials confirmed that ISIS has the capability to build and use chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq.
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Radicalization
Islamist radicals born and educated in Muslim countries are seventeen times more likely to have an engineering qualification than the general population in these countries. A new book, which relies on a study of over 800 members of violent Islamist groups, challenges a widely held view that many terrorists are “poor, ignorant and have nothing to lose,” according to its authors. “There is little doubt that violent Islamist radicals are vastly more educated than the general population born and educated in the Muslim world, and engineers are dramatically over-represented,” the authors say.
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African security
Khalid al-Barnawi, the leader of Nigeria’s Ansaru jihadist group, a Boko Haram splinter group ideologically aligned with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has been arrested, a Nigerian army spokesman said on Sunday. Al-Barnawi, 47, was born as Usman Umar Abubakar in Biu town in northeast Borno state. He is one of three Nigerians listed by Washington in 2012 as “specially designated global terrorists.
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Nuclear terrorism
Prime Minister David Cameron warned that ISIS terrorists are planning to use drones to spray nuclear material over Western cities in a lethal “dirty bomb” attack. Security experts are worried about jihadists buying simple drones, which are widely available, and use them to carry radioactive material into the centers of large cities in attacks which would kill thousands and contaminate large sections of cities, making entire areas uninhabitable for years.
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Terrorism
Hassan Ali Dhoore, a senior leader of the Somali al-Shabaab Islamist group, was killed by a U.S. drone strike on Thursday. On 5 March a U.S. air strike killed more than a 100 al-Shabaab fighters in one of the group’s training facilities.
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Terrorism
Jasim Khadijah, a former Iraqi officer in Saddam Hussein’s army who joined ISIS and led the organization’s rocket development effort, was killed by a drone strike in northern Iraq Sunday. Khadijah was responsible for a rocket attack last month on a U.S. military base near the town of Makhmour, located between Mosul and Kirkuk. That attack killed marine staff sergeant Louis Cardin and wounded eight others.
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ISIS
Two years ago, virtually no one had heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In a January 2014 New Yorker interview, President Obama dismissed the group as “Junior Varsity.” Since then, ISIS has emerged as one of the most wealthy, powerful, and dangerous terrorist organizations that ever existed. UN Security Council Resolution 2249, adopted in November 2015, will likely be viewed as confirming that use of force in self-defense is now permissible against “nonstate actors” such as terrorists when the territorial state is unable to suppress the threat that they pose. The implication of this newly accepted change in the international law of self-defense is that any nation can now lawfully use force against deadly nonstate actors in another country if the government of that country is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat within its borders. With so many potential targets in so many countries – the U.S. terrorist organizations list, for example, includes fifty-eight terrorist groups headquartered in thirty-five different countries (in addition to ISIS in Syria/Iraq) — one must ask whether the possibility of abuse will ultimately outweigh the benefits of weakening ISIS.
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Terrorism
The United States plans to move out a dozen inmates from Guantanamo Bay in the next few weeks, part of the final push by President Barack Obama to shut down the facility. Obama, since his election to the presidency, has said he wants to transfer the men to their home countries, or to maximum security prisons in the United States.
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European security
Hungary’s right-wing government, ahead of a national referendum on the question of EU-mandated refugee quotas for EU member states, has claimed in a Web site post which supports the government’s anti-migration stance, that there are 900 “no-go zones” in London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin. The government Web page, entitled “We say no to mandatory migrant quotas,” defines the 900 “no-go zones” as “neighborhoods not under control, or hardly kept under control,” where “the norms of the host society … barely prevail.”
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Nuclear security
Belgium’s counter-terrorism efforts are once again being called into question following the recent tragedies in Brussels. The attacks were carried out against soft targets – the public check-in area of Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station – but a series of unusual and suspicious occurrences were also reported at nuclear facilities in the country. These events highlight the very real threat to nuclear facilities. For Belgium, this recent episode is one item on a long list of security concerns. Based on this history, the Belgian authorities should be primed to take nuclear security especially seriously. But there are serious questions about whether they are.
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European security
Montenegro has expelled fifty-eight foreigners, all members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo which, in March 1995, launched a deadly nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s underground. Twelve people were killed and thousands injured in Aum Shinrikyo’s nerve gas attack on a Tokyo commuters.
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Terrorism
The French government has decided to abandon plans to strip convicted terrorists with dual nationality of their French citizenship and deport them.French president Francois Hollande also wanted to make the state of emergency, which gives the police special powers and which was imposed for three months after the November attacks, a permanent feature of the constitution, but the government was forced to abandon this proposal, too, in the face of stiff opposition.
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Islam
A 45-page draft policy proposal, to be debated at the end of April at the annual conference of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland),a populist, anti-immigration party which has been gaining in the polls, would prohibit the “construction and operation of mosques.” The policy draft, titled “Courage to take responsibility,” states that “Islam does not belong to Germany.” Mosques are conducive “not only to common prayer, but also to the spread of Islamic teachings directed towards the removal of our legal order,” the draft says.
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Aviation
American Airlines announced it has canceled all flights to and from Brussels until 7 April. The carrier’s decision is in response to the 22 March suicide bombing attack at the Brussels airport. The explosion occurred near the American Airlines counter, and some of the thirty-two people killed in the blast were about to board an AA flight.
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Encryption
The Justice Department on Monday asked a court to withdraw the government’s request that the court order Apple to help the FBI gain access to the encrypted iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorists. The Justice Department filed the request after the FBI had successfully accessed data stored on an encrypted iPhone. The FBI wanted the court to compel Apple to relax the 10-attempt limit, which is part of the encryption system which comes with the device. If there are more than ten attempts to guess the password, the phone locks forever and all the data on it is wiped out. The FBI argued that its computers, using brute-force, would be able to break the phone’s password, but that it would take more than ten attempts.
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The long view
Patriots’ Day: How Far-Right Groups Hijack History and Patriotic Symbols to Advance Their Cause, According to an Expert on Extremism
Extremist groups have attempted to change the meaning of freedom and liberty embedded in Patriots’ Day — a commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord – to serve their far-right rhetoric, recruitment, and radicalization. Understanding how patriotic symbols can be exploited offers important insights into how historical narratives may be manipulated, potentially leading to harmful consequences in American society.