RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271930/return-taliban-five-lloyd-billingsley

In the run-up to the November election, five Taliban commanders freed from Guantanamo in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl rejoined the Taliban’s political office in Qatar. That development calls for a look at the back story.

“One big concern is that the U.S. will be releasing five Taliban commanders in exchange for Bergdahl,” the Washington Post explained in 2014. “So who are these men? And what might they do when released?” The Post weighed in on both counts.

Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhw helped to create the Taliban movement in 1994 and once served as its interior minister. According to his Guantanamo case file, he was known to have close ties to Osama Bin Laden of al Qaeda, prime mover of the 9/11 attacks.

Mullah Mohammad Fazl had served as a senior commander in the Taliban army during the 1990s, rising to chief of staff. He likely supervised the killing of thousands of Shiite Muslims near Kabul and was present during a prison riot that claimed CIA operative Johnny Spann. According to his file, if released Fazl would likely rejoin the Taliban and resume hostilities against the United States and coalition forces.

Mullah Norullah Noori was one of the Taliban’s provincial governors and rumored to be a player in the massacre of Shiites. According to his file, he is a significant figure who encourages acts of aggression.

Abdul Haz Wasiq, deputy intelligence chief for the Taliban, used his office to support al Qaeda. Wasiz also forged alliances between the Taliban and other Islamic militants.

For his part, Mohammed Nabi Omari was a member of a joint al Qaeda-Taliban cell, and one of the most significant Taliban leaders detained at Guantanamo. All five Taliban bosses were high risk and posed considerable threat to the United States and its allies. Even so, POTUS 44 pushed for their release, which came as a surprise to Senate Intelligence Committee boss Dianne Feinstein, a left-leaning San Francisco Democrat.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/homegrown-jihad-10-years-of-terrorist-radicalization-in-the-somali-american-community/

Ten years ago today — the same day that Barack Obama was elected president — a group of young Somali-American men left Minneapolis intending to join the al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia. Nearly two dozen men were part of that first wave of terror recruits, but they wouldn’t be the last. And Somalia wouldn’t be their only destination.

This proved to be one of the first major signs of an escalating problem of terrorist radicalization in the Somali-American community that has continued for the past decade. Among the fallout from that radicalization has been several attempted terror attacks here in the U.S., and the death of these youths in fields of jihad abroad.

I was one of the first to speak out about the problem nearly a year before.

In December 2007, I wrote about my attempts to get Homeland Security to prevent the entry of a known deputy of a U.S. designated terrorist leader from keynoting a series of fundraisers in Minneapolis, Columbus, and Washington, D.C. — three of the largest Somali communities in the country.

That speaker, Zakariya Mahmoud Haji Abdi, was here to raise funds and to recruit for the jihad in Somalia. I noted in my report that a summary, published in Somalia, recorded the fundraiser held in Minneapolis. That event summary is still online.

It was later acknowledged that the fundraisers I warned federal officials about were the tipping point for radicalization in the Somali community.

The first group composed of six men from Minneapolis left only several days after the Zakariya Abdi fundraiser.

Among that group was Shirwa Ahmed, who conducted a suicide terror attack on October 28, 2008, just a few days before the next group left. Ahmed had arrived in the U.S. at an early age, had done well in school, went to college, and had a good job. But he fell into a group at the Abubakar as-Siddique mosque in Minneapolis, where most of the men who later left for Somalia attended.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/#2c5303742a3b

If you want to believe America is still the “arsenal of democracy” that Franklin Roosevelt described in 1940, you might want to avoid looking too closely at the U.S. manufacturing sector. China has become the world’s premier industrial power, greatly out-producing the United States in everything from steel to smartphones. Germany’s machine-tool industry outshines our own. No U.S. shipyard has built a commercial ship destined for international commerce in decades.

The economic consequences of America’s manufacturing decline have been widely reported. What gets less attention is how industrial decay might impact national defense. Nobody really knows how a future great-power conflict might unfold, but Washington could be forced to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat if it can’t mobilize quickly for conventional combat. President Trump is the first chief executive since the Cold War ended who seems to grasp what a waning industrial base might one day mean for our security.

On Thursday of this week, I toured the last remaining tank plant in America, located in Lima, Ohio. General Dynamics, a donor to my think tank and consulting client, flew me there to see where it assembles the latest version of the Army’s M1A2 main battle tank. The cavernous facility contains 1.6 million square feet of manufacturing space. The Trump administration is investing a boatload of money in modernizing the facility, but it’s clear the place was neglected for a long time after Washington declared victory over communism.

How neglected? The Army actually wanted to close it — it is a government-owned facility — even though it was the only surviving tank plant in the Western Hemisphere. At the time, the Obama administration was forecasting relaxed tensions around the world, and steadily withdrawing U.S. military units from Europe. Obama’s predecessor had done the same. Up until the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, nobody thought Moscow was going to be a problem. So the Army figured it could save money by mothballing the plant and reopening it at some future date.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/fbi-arrests-iraqi-refugee-in-tucson-for-building-car-bomb-teaching-others/

The FBI arrested 30-year-old Ahmad Suhad Ahmad in Tucson, Arizona, last week following a two-year investigation.

According to the limited information contained in the two-page criminal complaint, Ahmad had told a confidential source in December 2016 that he knew how to detonate a bomb using a cell phone — a technique he said he learned during the war in Iraq.

In April 2017, the same confidential source asked Ahmad if he knew how to make a car bomb for a target in Mexico, and if he could show him how to build one. Ahmad agreed.

A week later Ahmad showed the source an image on his cell phone of explosive materials and instructions written in Arabic, which he promised to translate into English. He also met with other sources and undercover FBI agents about planning to build the bomb.

On April 26, 2017, Ahmad traveled with the sources and the FBI undercover agents to an apartment complex in Las Vegas. He brought with him a number of items to build the bomb, including a circuit tester, electrical tape, and Permatex epoxy. The undercover agents also brought items from a list provided by Ahmad.

Over the course of several hours, he built the bomb and explained to the others how to do it. He showed one of the agents where to place the blasting caps and the explosives.

He then supervised the building of a second device. Once completed, he explained how the bombs operated.

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/hezbollah-in-america-unit-910-exposed-in-court-proceedings/

Brooklyn-based Ali Kourani faces trial for multiple charges related to his work as a double agent for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah; specifically for its “External Security Organization” known as “Unit 910.” Kourani’s federal trial is tentatively set for March 2019.
Ali Kourani

As a card-carrying, read-in intelligence operative for Hezbollah’s noxious foreign terrorism wing, Ali Kourani was expected to do far more than videotape a Manhattan armory and gather names of Jewish businessmen from LinkedIn to knock off one day (as reported in Part I of this series). He was expected to keep his killing skills sharp.

In Part I, I revealed part of what Kourani — a U.S.-educated engineer with an MBA — told FBI agents in a series of confessionary interviews about his alleged double life with Hezbollah’s foreign terrorist service Unit 910. He said it recruited him to become a U.S.-based asset in 2008 during a visit to Lebanon, where his extended family clan was deeply enmeshed with the group (this included two brothers and his father, who once illegally entered the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico border).

Kourani allegedly told of how, at just the time he qualified for U.S. citizenship in 2008, he received some initial cloak-and-dagger tradecraft training and was sent to his new homeland, America, with his first easy assignments. He was to apply for U.S. citizenship so he could get a cherished U.S. passport, videotape an armory and FBI office, and gather names of local Jewish businessmen or high-ranking Israeli Defense Forces veterans worth killing. He also sent back to Lebanon intelligence about how passengers disembark from planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport, how U.S. Customs officers screen and collect luggage, and the locations of security personnel, cameras, and magnetometers.

But much more was to come after he achieved citizenship in 2009, and he would need to prepare.

Kourani told the FBI he understood that in the event of war with Israel, he could be called home to fight; that this was expected of all Unit 910 agents throughout the United States, Canada, in Latin America, and across the globe. Kourani believed he and many of the others were overseen by a ranking Hezbollah handler in Lebanon known only as “Fadi.” In July 2011, according to the court records, Fadi summoned Kourani to the homeland for more and better weapons training. CONTINUE ATE SITE

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/ohio-man-arrested-attempting-to-join-isis-affiliate-in-afghanistan/

Federal prosecutors say that 19-year-old Naser Almadaoji of Beavercreek, Ohio, was arrested on Wednesday attempting to fly to Kazakhstan via Washington, D.C., and Germany, where he intended to be smuggled into Afghanistan to join the ISIS affiliate there.

Almadaoji’s arrest at the John Glenn International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, was the culmination of an investigation that began in February of this year after he was questioned by immigration officials on his return from a trip to Egypt and Jordan.

He later began communicating online with someone he believed to be an ISIS operative, who was actually an FBI confidential source. He told the confidential source that he wanted to join up with ISIS in Afghanistan because he wanted “weapons experts training, planning, executing, hit and run, capturing high-value targets, ways to break into homes and avoid security guards.”

Almadaoji attended Beavercreek City Schools in southwest Ohio near Dayton until September 2015, at which point he withdrew from school.

According to U.S. Attorney for Southern Ohio Benjamin Glassman, Almadaoji came to the U.S. from Iraq about a decade ago. Glassman also said that at some point Almadaoji made a video of himself pledging allegiance to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/toledo-woman-arrested-for-directing-financial-support-to-al-qaeda/

A Toledo, Ohio-area woman, Alaa Mohd Abusaad, was arrested Tuesday on charges that she directed an undercover FBI employee to send money to al-Qaeda in Syria.

Abusaad, 22 years old, had recently lived in Birmingham, Alabama, where the charges were filed. She was introduced to the undercover operative earlier this year through an associate while still in Birmingham.

A Justice Department press release summarized the charges:

As set forth in the complaint, Abusaad instructed an FBI undercover employee (UCE) about how to send money to the mujahedeen — fighters engaged in jihad. Abusaad told the UCE that money “is always needed. You can’t have a war without weapons. You can’t prepare a soldier without equipment.”

Abusaad also advised the UCE on how to send money in a manner that would avoid detection by law enforcement, including by using fake names and addresses when conducting electronic money transfers. Subsequently, Abusaad introduced the UCE to a financial facilitator who could route the UCE’s money to “brothers that work with aq” (meaning al-Qaeda).

Abusaad faces up to 20 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine if convicted.

The FBI affidavit filed with the criminal complaint records the discussions and direction that Abusaad provided to the undercover operative. They used a mobile messaging application, where she provided direction on sending money to al-Qaeda by using a fake name and keeping the amounts between $300-400 to avoid detection.

After Abusaad introduced the undercover operative to an overseas financial intermediary, Abusaad offered assurances that the money could be directed towards al-Qaeda, and that the preferred type of support could be specified:

Okay. He can say where he wants it to go specifically. Like for instance if he wants it to be zakat money [a charitable contribution under Islamic law] it can go to the Widows’s of mj [mujahedeen]. Or if he wants it could be for weapons. Bullets. Clothing … Or you can give it to the widow and orphans. Supporting a mujahids family is like taking part in jihad.

In speaking with the financial intermediary — identified in the affidavit as Individual A, who directed her to send the money to a Mustafa Yelatan in Istanbul, Turkey — the undercover operative asked for assurances that the money would go to fighters killing infidels: CONTINUE AT SITE