Category Archives: Terrorism

Week’s Tweets (4/22): TRUMP, White Lives Lost, Black Lives Matter, Roger Stone, Colorado, Brussels, Cruz Crap

Crime, Debt, Donald Trump, Europe, Objectivism, Race, Terrorism

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‘How ISIS Built the Machinery Of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze’ (UPDATE: 4/22)

EU, Europe, Homeland Security, Islam, Jihad, Terrorism

Donald Trump is right, Again. Europe and the UK are unsafe. ISIS is operating in plain sight. With imprimatur, if to go by the New York Times’ “How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze.” The ISIS EU operatives are often given free passage by European gatekeepers. The question: Who’s complicit and is this treason by design or by accident?

Highlights from “How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze” :

… the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down. …

… For much of 2012 and 2013, the jihadist group that eventually became the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, was putting down roots in Syria. Even as the group began aggressively recruiting foreigners, especially Europeans, policy makers in the United States and Europe continued to see it as a lower-profile branch of Al Qaeda that was mostly interested in gaining and governing territory.

One of the first clues that the Islamic State was getting into the business of international terrorism came at 12:10 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2014, when the Greek police pulled over a taxi in the town of Orestiada, less than four miles from the Turkish border. Inside was a 23-year-old French citizen named Ibrahim Boudina, who was returning from Syria. In his luggage, the officers found 1,500 euros, or almost $1,700, and a French document titled “How to Make Artisanal Bombs in the Name of Allah.”

But there was no warrant for his arrest in Europe, so the Greeks let him go, according to court records detailing the French investigation.

Mr. Boudina was already on France’s watch list, part of a cell of 22 men radicalized at a mosque in the resort city of Cannes. … his ties to the [ISIS] group were buried in French paperwork and went unconnected to later cases. … Like the killers in Paris and Brussels, all of these earlier operatives were French speakers — mostly French and Belgian citizens, alongside a handful of immigrants from former French colonies, including Morocco.

They were arrested in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon with plans to attack Jewish businesses, police stations and a carnival parade. They tried to open fire on packed train cars and on church congregations. In their possession were box cutters and automatic weapons, walkie-talkies and disposable cellphones, as well as the chemicals to make TATP.

Most of them failed. And in each instance, officials failed to catch — or at least to flag to colleagues — the men’s ties to the nascent Islamic State. …

… In one of the highest-profile instances, Mehdi Nemmouche returned from Syria via Frankfurt and made his way by car to Brussels, where on May 24, 2014, he opened fire inside the Jewish Museum of Belgium, killing four people. Even when the police found a video in his possession, in which he claimed responsibility for the attack next to a flag bearing the words “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” Belgium’s deputy prosecutor, Ine Van Wymersch, dismissed any connection.

“He probably acted alone,” she told reporters at the time.

“All of the signals were there,” said Michael S. Smith II, a counterterrorism analyst whose firm, Kronos Advisory, began briefing the United States government in 2013 on ISIS’ aspirations to strike Europe. “For anyone paying attention, these signals became deafening by mid-2014.” …

… Intelligence officials in the United States and Europe have confirmed the broad outlines of the external operations unit: It is a distinct body inside ISIS, with its command-and-control structure answering to Mr. Adnani, who reports to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State. …

… In an audio recording released on Sept. 22, 2014, Mr. Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and chief of the external operations wing, addressed the West.

“We will strike you in your homeland,” he promised, calling on Muslims everywhere to kill Europeans, “especially the spiteful and filthy French.” And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.

In the months that followed, a man decapitated his employer near the French city of Lyon, sending a snapshot of the severed head to the Islamic State. Another man stormed a police station in Paris, carrying a butcher’s knife and a photocopy of the Islamic State’s flag. …

… the group’s method for carrying out jihad in Europe involves an adaptation of Auftragstaktik, a combat doctrine within the German Army in the 19th century. Those tactical guidelines call for commanders to give subordinates a goal and a time frame in which to accomplish it, but otherwise to give them the freedom to execute it.

The Islamic State explains in the article that it adopted the system to give recruits “complete tactical autonomy,” with few fingerprints that could be tracked back to the group, and “no micromanaging.”

.. That network stretched like a web across Europe to at least a dozen other accomplices, including a cell holed up in an apartment in the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek, where two other teams of Islamic State fighters prepared the bombs detonated last week in Brussels Airport and a metro station.

And Trump is right about community complicit, too.

The overpowering odor that comes with refining and storing TATP was noticed by the building’s owner weeks before the bombings, Belgian officials said, but he did not report it until after the attacks.

READ “How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze.”

AND NOW (4/22):

UPDATES ONGOING (4/22): Poland, Hungary & Czech Republic Are Safe Because Relatively Islam Free

Europe, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Terrorism

We might all end up fleeing to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which, thanks to patriotic people heeded by leadership, is not suffering the depredations that come with importing Islam. If Central Europe becomes the last bastion of civilization, because patriots keep its Dar al-Harab status, the Merkels, Obama’s, Camerons of the world—the left-liberal Soros, political cesspool—must be kept out.

… Central Europe, chiefly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, remain largely safe from the terror threat, despite the former in particular being a Nato player in the Middle East. It is precisely because the reasons for this are so obvious that they cannot be mentioned. Poland is 0.1 percent Muslim, most of whom are from a long-settled Tartar community, Britain is 5 percent, France 9 percent and Brussels 25 percent, and those numbers are growing. … these statistics correlate to terrorism risk. …

The above is the only worthy information in this unremarkable Spectator article.

UPDATES ONGOING (4/22):


These clowns don’t like walls:

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UPDATES ONGOING (4/22): Why Belgium Should Be Rioting, Not Crying

Europe, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Terrorism

The Belgians should be rioting, not crying. Enough of the wreath laying. You’re filling landfills, which is where your government and its security apparatus belong. Make government officials cry. Overthrow your flaccid overlords. The contempt this left-liberal, impotent outfit evinces for the lives of its citizens is unparalleled.

The Turks are way better than the Europeans. When the butcher Brahim Abdeslam commenced his pilgrimage to Syria, the Turks were sharp enough and responsible to send him packing back to Brussels, where he was wanted, but not a Wanted Man. Brussels let Brahim go.

This time, even Washington, less diligent than Ankara, is hot under the collar about indifference and incompetence that goes beyond what is expected from government. (Government can never do anything right, because the incentives are inverted; the worse the functionaries do; the more funding they get.)

European citizens, like Americans, are being placed in danger by their governments’ policies of egalitarian, indiscriminate mass immigration. The only thing individuals can do is refuse to die; which means stop frolicking like idiots. Realize that the mindless mantra, “Don’t let the terrorists win,” is also the European State’s mantra. Other than East-European governments like Hungary’s, western power brokers like Angela Merkel want their citizens to soldier on; die to maintain status quo. Smart Europeans will boycott hotbeds of violence and incivility–Belgium—until the power base gets scared that the tax base is goign to dry up.

Background courtesy of The Daily Beast.

… “Jihadists think that Europe is the soft underbelly of the West and Belgium is the soft underbelly of Europe,” said French terror expert Gilles Kepel.

Many of the major recent attacks in Europe have clear links to Belgium. In May 2014, French ex-Syria jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche went to the Belgian capital to attack the Jewish museum in Brussels. There are Brussels links to the weapons used by Amedy Coulibaly in his attack on a Jewish supermarket on Jan. 9, 2015, shortly after the Jan. 7 attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the Paris attack in November last year has clear ties to the Molenbeek neighborhood specifically. Many of its attackers either resided or grew up in the borough.

Jean-Charles Brisard, the author of a biography of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s earlier incarnation al Qaeda in Iraq, said it’s more useful to think about the ISIS phenomenon in Western Europe as a Francophone network because the operatives in Brussels are a mix of French and Belgian nationals.

Brisard calculates that 534 Belgians have gone to Syria and about 200 have returned; he believes the French-Belgian ISIS apparatus is much greater than European security officials initially thought.

Tracking the individuals is a mammoth task.

“For now, the networks comprise basically 20 individuals around the 10 [Paris] terrorists,” he said. “So it’s least 30. It’s still looking like four or five connected but there might be more that we don’t know yet.” For every terror suspect being surveilled it takes between 20 and 25 counterterrorism officials to track him. Coulibaly, for example, was using 20 different phones, according to Brisard, and each required a different officer to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls.

The Belgians are unwilling or unable to commit that kind of manpower, one of the country’s counterterrorism officials told BuzzFeed a week before the attack.

“Frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links,” he said.

The problem is exacerbated in Brussels because the local police force is divided into six police corps spread over 19 boroughs (particularly odd since the population is only 1.3 million). Sharing intelligence is complicated by the silos.

Robin Simcox, a British-born specialist on European terror networks who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says the Paris and Brussels attacks prove that European intelligence agencies have been comforting themselves—and their constituencies—with a fallacy for a decade.

“What have they been saying since 7/7?” Simcox asked, referring to the al Qaeda bombings in London in July 2005. “‘Oh, those kinds of attacks are not possible anymore. Any time a network gets too big, we find out about it. Anyone tries to construct a suicide vest, we’ll get it. The attacks will be knives and guns.’ Well, it’s the emperor has no clothes, isn’t it? It happened in Paris, now Brussels; it nearly happened in Verviers back in January [2015]. All kinds of assumptions about the kind of threat we were going to be facing in coming years. And we were all too complacent about it.”

The Belgian field commander, if not quite the “mastermind” of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had previously been linked to four separate terror plots in Europe. He got away each time.

He was thought to have “guided” Nemmouche, the Frenchman who shot up the Jewish museum in Brussels. In the attack planned but later aborted in Verviers, Abaaoud had remotely instructed two Belgian nationals, Sofiane Amghar and Khalid Ben Larbi, who fought with ISIS’s elite Battar Brigade.

Abaaoud had been in Greece at the time, and subsequently returned to Syria after Belgian commandos raided Amghar and Ben Larbi’s safe house in Verviers. (The operation constituted the largest firefight in Belgium since the end of World War II.) Abaaoud was also involved in the failed attack on a high-speed train from Paris to Amsterdam in August 2015. It failed only because three American tourists, two of them in the Oregon National Guard, wrestled the AK-47-wielding gunman to the ground before he could kill anyone.

In a February 2015 issue of ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, Abaaoud boasts about being able to slip by a continent-wide dragnet for him, despite the fact that European security services all had a recent photograph of him, which had been published by a Western journalist.

“I suddenly saw my picture all over the media, but… the kuffar were blinded by Allah. I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance! This was nothing but a gift from Allah!”

Abaaoud’s turn from first-generation Belgian into international terrorist follows an all-too-familiar script to those who monitor European jihadism. Although he was once enrolled in the Catholic college Saint-Pierre, an elite school in a tony suburb of Brussels, he dropped out and took to a life of gangsterism and petty crime.

UPDATES ONGOING (4/22) WITH RELATED TWEETS: