• Senior ISIS leader Abu Omar al-Shishani killed in U.S. strike

    Abu Omar al-Shishani, a Syrian-based Georgian national who was a senior ISIS leader, was killed in a 4 March air strike by the U.S.-led coalition. U.S. officials said that the militant was killed near the Syrian town of al-Shadad. He had a reputation as a close military adviser to ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who relied heavily on Shishani.

  • ISIS plotted to kidnap Malaysia’s prime minister, other high officials

    Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, said Malaysia had foiled a plot by ISIS to kidnap government leaders, including the country’s prime minister. Hamidi to say that jihadists attempted to kidnap him and two other Malaysian officials — including the prime minister Najib Razak and the defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein.

  • Secretive Area 6 used to test aerial radiation detection equipment

    Top-secret Nevada site – even more secret than neighboring Area 51 — is used by Pentagon, DHS to test drones equipped with sensors to detect radioactive material which could be used in dirty bombs. The site, located in Yucca Flat, was once used for nuclear testing.

  • U.S. air strikes kills 150 al-Shabaab militants in Somalia

    Strikes by U.S. drone ad manned aircraft has killed 150 al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia, the Pentagon said on Monday. The strikes were conducted on Saturday against the Raso Camp, 120 miles north of Mogadishu, where the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist group built a training facility.

  • ISIS hackers post N.J. police officers’ details online, calling on followers to attack them

    ISIS hackers have posted the personal details of U.S. officials online, encouraging the group’s supporters to carry out “lone wolf” attacks against them. The Caliphate Cyber Army (CCA), formerly known as the Islamic Cyber Army, posted the personal details of fifty-five New Jersey police officers last week after hacking into the Web site of the New Jersey Transit police.

  • The staggering cost of war to Syria, neighbors

    A new report evaluates the economic losses to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey to date and into the future. The report concludes that the cost of conflict to Syria is an estimated $275 billion in lost growth opportunities. If the conflict continues to 2020, the cost of conflict to Syria will be $1.3 trillion.

  • Calif. terrorists’ iPhone may have been used to introduce malware into data networks: DA

    San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos has advanced what experts describe as an unusual reason for forcing Apple to allow the FBI to break the password of the iPhone used by the two terrorists as part of the agency’s investigation of the attack. Ramos says the phone might have been “used as a weapon” to introduce malicious software to county computer systems.

  • Dissident republicans’ weapons cache discovered in Northern Ireland

    Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has discovered a terrorist weapons cache in a forest park in Northern Ireland. Police have been warning for a whole that dissidents republicans were planning to ramp up violence in the run-up to the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Dublin.

  • U.S. to send troops to Nigeria to help fight Boko Haram

    Hundreds of U.S. military advisers would soon be on their way to the front lines of the battle raging in north-east Nigeria and neighboring countries against the Islamist Nigerian insurgency Boko Haram. The plan to send U.S. military personnel to the area was as part of a recent confidential assessment by the top U.S. Special Operations commander for Africa, Brig. Gen. Donald C. Bolduc.

  • Sahel youths susceptible to radicalization: UN envoy

    Hiroute Guebre Sellassie, UN envoy to the Sahel region in Africa, said last week that up to forty-one million young people in the Sahel have nothing hut a bleak future to look to, pushing them to migrate and making them susceptible to radicalization. She said that young people under age 25 in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger “face hopelessness.” She noted that 44 percent of children in the Sahel lack access to primary education and only 36 percent of the population can read or write.

  • Russia, Syria triggered refugee crisis to destabilize Europe: NATO commander

    General Phil Breedlove, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe and head of the U.S. European Command, said Russia and Syria are indiscriminately bombing Syrian civilians to drive the refugee crisis and “weaponize migration.”He said that weapons such as barrel bombs, widely used by the Assad regime against Sunni civilian population, have no military value, and are used solely to terrorize those living in rebel-held territories. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the destruction formed part of a deliberate strategy by Russia and the Assad regime to “get them on the road” and “make them a problem for someone else.”

  • Syrian, Russian forces targeting hospitals as a war strategy: Amnesty

    Russian and Syrian government forces appear to have deliberately and systematically targeted hospitals and other medical facilities over the last three months to pave the way for ground forces to advance on northern Aleppo, an examination of airstrikes by Amnesty International has found. Even as Syria’s fragile ceasefire deal was being hammered out, Syrian government forces and their allies intensified their attacks on medical facilities.

  • ISIS “spreading like cancer” among refugees: NATO commander

    General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top commander, on Tuesday told a congressional panel that refugees from the Middle East and north Africa are “masking the movement” of terrorists and criminals. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Breedlove said that ISIS is “spreading like a cancer” among refugees. The group’s members are “taking advantage of paths of least resistance, threatening European nations and our own,” he said.

  • Destruction of Timbuktu sites by Islamists shocked humanity: ICC prosecutor

    Fatou Bensouda, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, speaking at the opening of the war crimes trial against a Malian jihadist leader charged with demolishing ancient mausoleums in Timbuktu, said the world must “stand up to the destruction and defacing of our common heritage.” Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, 40, is the first jihadist to is the first person to face a war crimes charge for an attack on a historic and cultural monument.

  • Cloud-based biosurveillance ecosystem

    The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are developing a system which lets epidemiologists scan the planet for anomalies in human and animal disease prevalence, warn of coming pandemics, and protect soldiers and others worldwide.