RUTHFULLY YOURS

BEIRUT—Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for a deadly double suicide bombing in a Kurdish Syrian city, part of the extremist group’s campaign against Kurdish-controlled areas of the country.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights both reported casualties of at least 16 and no more than 20, and about 30 wounded.

The Sunni Muslim militant group claimed the attacks in a statement distributed online, boasting that it had killed 30 people and wounded hundreds more.

Islamic State bombers targeted two crowded restaurants on Wednesday evening in central Qamishli, in the northeastern province of Hasakah, according to Syria’s state news agency and the Observatory, a U.K.-based opposition monitoring group.

They entered and detonated their explosives as people ate, the Observatory said. The majority of the victims were Christian, it added.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ordered his defense minister to expedite development of the country’s ballistic missile program in response to new U.S. sanctions set to be imposed on Iranian defense companies.

Mr. Rouhani’s comments, made on his official Twitter account Thursday, cast fresh doubts on the prospects for the U.S. and Iran to successfully implement the landmark nuclear agreement reached last July.

The Obama administration has said it could begin removing sanctions on Tehran as early as January since Iran has begun taking steps to roll back its nuclear program.

But the U.S. is concurrently preparing to impose new sanctions on Iranian defense firms and officials in the wake of two ballistic missile tests staged by Tehran over the past three months, according to senior U.S. officials.

Mr. Rouhani said Thursday such sanctions are illegal and that Tehran will take steps to retaliate, including accelerating the pace of its missile program.

WASHINGTON—The White House has delayed its plan to impose new financial sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program, according to U.S. officials, amid growing tensions with Iran over the nuclear deal struck earlier this year.

The officials said the Obama administration remains committed to combating Iran’s missile program and that sanctions being developed by the U.S. Treasury Department remain on the table. They also said imposing such penalties was legal under the landmark nuclear agreement forged between global powers and Iran in July.
U.S. officials offered no definitive timeline for when the sanctions would be imposed after the decision was made Wednesday to delay them. At one point, they were scheduled to be announced Wednesday morning in Washington, according to a notification the White House sent to Congress.

Republican leaders on Thursday accused the Obama administration of losing its will to challenge Iran after Tehran countered on Thursday that it would accelerate the development of its arsenal.

“If the president’s announced sanctions ultimately aren’t executed, it would demonstrate a level of fecklessness that even the president hasn’t shown before,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a leading critic of the nuclear deal, in an interview.

“While the Hizballah-loving Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership of Britain’s Labor party, Sahra Wagenknecht, one of two leaders of Germany’s hard-left die Linke party, recently made headlines by equating the aerial bombing campaign against Islamic State with the group’s own barbaric deeds. Her opinions are shared by her fellow party members, as Benjamin Weinthal reports:

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has a socialist doppelganger in Germany. Her name is Sahra Wagenknecht and she serves as co-chairperson of the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag—The Left Party.

Her remarks blanketed the German media on Tuesday because she equated Islamic State terrorism in Paris with Britain’s aerial campaign designed to help destroy the terrorist organisation in the Syrian and Iraqi theatres of war.

‘Of course it is no less a crime to murder innocent civilians in Syria with bombs than it is to shoot them in Parisian restaurants and concert halls. One is individual terrorism, the other state-sponsored,’ Sahra Wagenknecht, an admirer of the now-defunct East German communist state and Stalinism, told the Bundestag on Monday.

The attitudes of Wagenknecht’s Left Party mirror in many respects the enthusiasm of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn for Hamas, Iran’s clerical regime and Hezbollah. Moral conflation and a bottomless level of cultural relativity dominate the thinking of both hardcore left-wing leaderships. For Wagenknecht, Corbyn brought ‘movement into the sleeping social democracy of Europe’.

The Left Party is a formidable force in German politics. Germany’s Parliament has 630 members, of which the Left Party has 64 seats. This amalgam of West German leftists, trade unionists and East German communists (including many former Stasi officers) catapulted itself into the largest opposition bloc in the 2013 national election.

Earlier in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he found it difficult to understand what Russia was doing in Syria, since “it does not even border Syria.”

By that logic, Turkey should not be “doing anything” in the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or any of the non-bordering lands into which its neo-Ottoman impulses have pushed it.

In a 2012 speech, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, then foreign minister, predicted that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered and that he would depart “within months or weeks.” Almost three and a half years have passed, with Assad still in power, and Davutoglu keeps on making one passionate speech after another about the fate of Syria.

Turkey’s failure to devise a credible policy on Syria has made the country’s leaders nervous. Both Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have lately resorted to more aggressive, but less convincing, rhetoric on Syria. The new rhetoric features many aspects of a Sunni Islamist thinking blended with illusions of Ottoman grandeur.

On December 22, Davutoglu said, “Syrian soil is not, and will not be, part of Russia’s imperialistic goals.” That was a relief to know! All the same, Davutoglu could have been more direct and honest if he said that: “Syrian soil will not be part of Russia’s imperialistic goals because we want it to be part of Turkey’s pro-Sunni, neo-Ottoman imperialistic goals.”

Hospitals across Britain are dealing with at least 15 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) every day. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1984, there has not been a single conviction.

At least 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013 in the town of Rotherham, mostly by Muslim gangs, but police and municipal officials failed to tackle the problem because they feared being branded “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar of St John’s in Waterloo, central London, allowed a full Muslim prayer service to be held in his church. He also asked his congregation to praise “the God that we love, Allah.”

There has been a 60% increase in child sexual abuse reported to the police over the past four years, according to official figures.

British intelligence are monitoring more than 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks in Britain.

A Muslim worker at a nuclear power plant in West Kilbride, Scotland, was removed from the premises after he was caught studying bomb-making materials while on the job.

“We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist.” – Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic.

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2015 to become around 5.5% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.

Whether or not violent Islamists represent the ‘true’ Islam is beside the point: they kill and die believing that they do. Logic decrees that the key weapons will never be cruise missiles and drones. Rather, the most potent strategy hangs on a keen and clear-minded willingness to understand what motivates such actions and goals
The recent recapture of Ramadi, Iraq, from the Islamic State is a welcome development to emerge from a region not known for good news. The withdrawal of ISIS fighters displays the jihadists’ military weakness in the face of the American-backed Iraqi national forces. Before pats on the collective back of the anti-IS alliance are shared, however, we need to pause and consider the nature of the threat before us.

The fascination with the Islamic State’s gruesome tactics has meant that the ideological foundations of the caliphate have been underestimated. World leaders might claim a victory against ISIS in the months to come, but this will be a limited triumph; the repercussions of the caliphate will be felt for decades.

The Islamic State was never going to be a conventional army for long, considering the overwhelming firepower facing it. Its ability to capture and control entire cities, a powerful propaganda tool, could not last and the current rolling back of its territory is not surprising. The jihadists’ use of heavy weapons and armed convoys will lessen as they sustain further losses under bombardment from Russia, and the US and its allies in Iraq and Syria.

ISTANBUL—Behind the reinforced door of an unmarked office in this teeming immigrant neighborhood, a man who goes by the name of Hawez Zaman moves money the same way his predecessors in the Middle Ages did, in an off-the-books transfer system critical to today’s spiraling migrant crisis in Europe.
The centuries-old system known as hawala enables users to transfer money from one point to another entirely on the basis of trust—largely without a paper trail and often outside the law. It is the dominant way migrants flooding into Europe pay for their journeys, used for 90% of the transactions in a people-smuggling trade valued at around $2.5 billion a year in Europe, according to European security officials and researchers. It is used for a further $390 billion a year migrants send back home as part of an informal but widely accepted financial system used across the developing world.
The money flows are also drawing renewed attention among terrorist finance investigators, who since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have tried to monitor hawala systems. They are concerned that some of the same hawala systems flourishing from the business of moving migrants could also be tapped by would-be attackers as a source of financing.
“Given what we’ve seen so far, we have very strong suspicions terrorists receive money via hawala,” said Calogero Ferrara, a Palermo-based prosecutor heading a large pan-European people-smuggling investigation. “After the Paris attacks, we have intensified investigations on this front.”

Millions of people around the world are gathering in public places Thursday to celebrate the New Year, which means there’s no holiday for counterterrorist officials, who are on high alert seemingly everywhere.

Turkish police said Wednesday they arrested two people with alleged Islamic State ties on suspicion of planning bombing attacks on New Year’s Eve in Ankara. The pair, who police said had a vest with explosives and a backpack “ready for use,” were arrested while scouting targets in the Kizilay district known for its shopping centers. In October two bomb attacks outside Ankara’s main train station killed more than 100 innocents. No one has claimed responsibility but Turkish officials have blamed Islamic State.

Meanwhile, Belgian authorities cancelled a New Year’s Eve fireworks display scheduled for the historic Grand Place in downtown Brussels. This followed the arrest a day earlier of two members of a motorcycle group for plotting an attack. Police say they found Islamic State propaganda in a raid this week that led to the arrests.