Tag: Islamic State

Civil Servant And Women Recruiter Among Those Arrested In Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR: A civil servant said to be one of the most senior Islamic State (IS) members in Malaysia and a 29-year-old housewife who recruited a 14-year-old girl into the militant movement are among three people detained by Bukit Aman.

The 39-year-old civil servant was arrested in Kuala Lumpur on Monday while the housewife was picked up in Muar on Saturday.

The third suspect – a 22-year-old trader – was also arrested in Perak on Monday.

The three were detained by the Bukit Aman Special Branch Counter-Terrorism Division in separate operations.

“The housewife is believed to have influenced and recruited the girl via Facebook and other media. Police are investigating whether she was also targeting other girls for IS,” a source said.

“The trader is suspected of funding the girl’s trip to Cairo and may have allocated funds for her expenses,” added the source.

The civil servant is believed to have used his position to recruit members to ensure the local militant network ran smoothly.

“He is a senior IS member with direct links to Malaysians in Syria,” said one of the sources.

Another source said the civil servant was also responsible for creating Facebook pages and other communication means for the local militant network.

Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said all three suspects had planned to head to Syria “in the near future”.

Vowing that Bukit Aman would never let Malaysia become a hotbed for militants, he pledged to use all resources to hunt them down.

Two weeks ago, the 14-year-old girl was detained as she was about to board a plane bound for Cairo.

The girl had intended to marry a 22-year-old Malaysian student in Cairo before making her way to Syria to join the IS.

In Britain, The Telegraph reported that Scotland Yard was trying to track down three teenage girls who were suspected of travelling to Syria to join the IS.

The report stated that the Metropolitan Police were extremely concerned about the girls from east London who were believed to have attempted to travel to Syria via Turkey.

Source: www.thestar.com.my

March 4, 2015
IS Militants Targeting Minorities, Women And Children

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Islamic State militants have abducted, injured and killed thousands of civilians across northern Iraq and uprooted millions from their homes in a bid to eradicate the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, rights groups said on Friday.

Several minority communities, including Christians, Yazidis and Turkmen, have been subjected to killings, rape and sexual enslavement, and women and children have been targeted in particular, a report by four human rights organizations said.

Islamic State seized the Iraqi city of Mosul in June last year while sweeping through the north towards Baghdad, meeting virtually no resistance from the army and declaring a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria under its control.

Around 8,000 civilians were killed and more than 12,000 wounded between June and December 2014, the United Nations said.

Alison Smith, legal counsel of No Peace Without Justice, said Islamic State had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide against minorities in northern Iraq.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador told the U.N. Security Council last week that Islamic State had committed genocide.

Sectarian violence across Iraq has worsened since June last year according to Mark Lattimer, executive director at Minority Rights Group, who said the abduction of thousands of women by Islamic State was “particularly concerning”.

“Islamic State have sold Yazidi slaves to families in Mosul, which wasn’t hidden or kept secret,” Lattimer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Enslavement has become an accepted fact of life in areas under (Islamic State) control.”

The report said that thousands of women and girls had been raped, tortured and forced into conversion and marriage, while a pregnant teenager who escaped Islamic State said captives were forced to donate blood to keep wounded fighters alive.

The bodies of women raped and killed by Islamic State in the Turkmen majority town of Beshir in June last year were stripped naked and hung from lamp posts around the city, the report said.

Children as young as 13 have been used to carry weapons and act as human shields for the militants during combat, it said.

“HUMANITARIAN CRISIS”

More than two million people in Iraq have been displaced, primarily in the north, according to the latest figures from the International Organisation for Migration.

The majority are living under bridges or squatting in abandoned buildings, while those in refugee camps face a lack of food, water and healthcare because of government failings and limited aid from international agencies, the report said.

International donors have so far provided 37 percent of the $2.23 billion requested for humanitarian aid for Iraq, according to the United Nations.

“The sheer number of displaced people means the country continues to face a humanitarian crisis… many of them are in a difficult and precarious situation,” Lattimer said.

Many minority groups are now trying to leave the country, fearing that the government will be unable to support any return to their communities, locate missing people and ensure the recovery of possessions looted by Islamic State.

“It’s a feeling that we are no longer welcome in our own home,” one Christian leader told the writers of the report.

The report said the Iraqi government lacked a legal framework to address the rights and entitlements of those displaced, and should clarify its role and responsibilities.

It also called on Iraq to investigate and prosecute corruption in the delivery and acquisition of humanitarian aid, provide urgent assistance to the humanitarian effort, and resettle minorities who have been displaced.

The report was co-authored by the Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Minority Rights Group International, No Peace Without Justice and The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.

Source: www.todayonline.com

February 28, 2015
Jihadi John Unmasked: Mohammed Emwazi – The Murderer From London

He is one of the world’s most wanted militants and the symbol of brutality by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Known as ‘Jihadi John’, the black-clad militant brandishing a knife and speaking with an English accent in videos by ISIS is said to be Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old Londoner, according to Washington Post.

Here is a look at the man behind the mask:

Born to a middle-class family

Emwazi was born in Kuwait but moved to Britain with his family when he was six years old. He arrived in London speaking only a few words of English. His father found work as a minicab and delivery van driver, while his mother was a housewife.

The family live in a small apartment in the west London neighbourhood in Queen’s Park. Emwazi has two younger sisters and a younger brother.

He was reported to have occasionally prayed at a mosque in Greenwich, south-east London.

Polite and mild-mannered in school

The young Emwazi was described as polite and mild-mannered. He appeared to embrace British life, playing football regularly and supporting Manchester United. The Daily Mail newspaper published a picture of Emwazi smiling and sitting cross-legged on the grass with his classmates from the St Mary Magdalene Church of England primary school in Maida Vale, West London.

Despite his limited command of the English language, Emwazi was popular in school as he was often engaged in sports, especially football, with his classmates.

He was the only Muslim in class and one former classmate recalled a lesson when Emwazi got up from his seat and shared with the class about his religion. “He wrote Arabic on the board to show us what it looked like..He showed us a religious text and spoke about what his religion was about,” said the classmate.

When he grew older, Emwazi was known among friends as polished and having a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith. He had a beard and was mindful of making eye contact with women, friends said.

Influenced by radicals in university

After finishing primary school in 1999, he moved to Quintin Kynaston Community Academy in St John’s Wood, where he became more observant of his religion and began wearing more traditional Islamic attire. But it was after he was admitted to the University of Westminster to study computing that his behaviour began to change, according to media reports.

The university has been linked to several proponents of radical Islam and Emwazi appeared to have fallen under their sway, it was reported.

Enwazi graduated in 2009 in information technology. However, instead of building a computing career, he ended up on the radar of the British intelligence service MI5.

“Harassed” by British intelligence service

Emwazi claimed he was harassed by MI5 over a planned trip to Tanzania in May 2009. He reportedly emailed Cage charity, which campaigns for those detained on terrorism charges, to say that he had been harassed by MI5 which tried to recruit him as an informant.

Asim Qureshi, research director of Cage, said after Emwazi’s graduation from university in 2009, he travelled to Tanzania for what he said was a safari holiday with two friends – a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man called Abu Talib.

But the trio were refused entry and held by police once they arrived in Tanzania. They were later put on a plane to Amsterdam, where Emwazi claimed he was questioned by a MI5 agent called Nick. The British officer accused him of planning to travel to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda linked militant group.

“He knew everything about me; where I lived, what I did, the people I hanged around with. He also believed that I was lying and I wanted to go to Somalia,” Emwazi wrote in his email to Cage.

“I said to him that ‘I have just shown you my ticket for going to Tanzania’. Now the argument had started going back and forth, same thing again and again, like in a circle. He just wanted to force it out of my mouth that I intended to go to Somalia. But I stood firm and maintained that I had no reason to go to Somalia.

“He said that he was going to keep in touch and call me regularly. He even said that he would try to visit me,” he said.

None of the events mentioned by Emwazi have been verified by the British intelligence service.

“A prisoner in London”

After the Tanzania episode, Emwazi moved back to his birthplace of Kuwait. He had found a job working for a computer company but he returned to London on two occasions, the second time in June 2010 to finalise his wedding plans to a woman in Kuwait.

According to Mr Quershi, Emwazi was stopped by counter-terrorism officers in Britain who detained him and took his fingerprints. He was also reportedly stopped from travelling back to Kuwait the following day while intelligence officers investigated him.

In a frustrated email to Mr Quershi at the time, Emwazi allegedly wrote: “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started.”

“I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace and country, Kuwait,” he wrote.

Sympathy for other militants

Besides the alleged harassment by MI5, Emwazi was reportedly upset when an al-Qaeda terrorist was convicted for the attempted murder of US nationals in Afghanistan. US-trained neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui became a cause celebre in the Muslim world after she was jailed for 86 years for a shooting which took place while she was being questioned as an al-Qaeda suspect in Afghanistan in 2008.

Following her conviction, Emwazi was alleged to have written that he had “heard the upsetting news regarding our sister.This should only keep us firmer towards fighting for freedom and justice!”

He has also been linked to another British militant, Bilal al Berjawi, a leader of Al-Shabaab. The Lebanese born militant travelled to Kenya in February 2009, telling his family he was heading for a safari trip. He and a friend were detained in Nairobi and sent back to London but made it to Somalia in October that year.

So it is likely that Emwazi’s own safari trip a few months later in May, from Britain to Tanzania, set off alarms with the British security services. Berjawi was killed in Somalia in 2012 in a US drone attack.

A quiet, intelligent ISIS militant

Emwazi is believed to have travelled to Syria around 2012 and later joined the ISIS, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolise. It is unclear how he managed to travel to Syria despite being on MI5 watchlist. “He was upset and wanted to start a life elsewhere,” said one of his friends.

A former hostage said Emwazi was part of a team in charge of guarding Western hostages at a prison in Idlib, Syria, dubbed “the box”. One former hostage said Emwazi was there with two other men with British accents. Emwazi was described as quiet, intelligent and “the most deliberate”.

One former hostage said Emwazi was obsessed with Somalia and made his captives watch videos on the Al-Shabaab militant group.

In early 2014, the hostages were moved to a prison in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the ISIS, where they were visited often by the trio. They appeared to have taken on more powerful roles within the militant group, said the former hostages.

‘Jihadi John’: The face of ISIS brutality

A video was released by ISIS in August 2014 showing a masked man raging against the United States before apparently beheading US citizen James Foley off camera.

Dressed entirely in black, with a balaclava covering all but his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and a holster under his left arm, the man was nicknamed “Jihadi John”. He and other Britons in the ISIS were named after the Beatles.

‘Jihadi John’, now believed to be Emwazi, is said to be also responsible for the killings of US journalist Steven Sotloff, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, and American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig. He also appeared in a video with Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto shortly before they were killed.

He used the videos to threaten the West, admonish its Arab allies and taunt President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. In the video, he was often seen standing next to petrified hostages cowering in orange jump suits.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

February 27, 2015
Another Malaysian IS Member Abdul Samad Shukry Mohamad Dies

PETALING JAYA: The escalating fight in Syria has taken the life of another Malaysian militant, named Abdul Samad Shukry Mohamad (pic).

The 55-year-old former Jemaah Ismiyah member, also known as Abu Aisyah, was injured in an attack by Syrian forces five months ago but succumbed to his injuries.

“He went to Syria on February 1 last year. Then five months ago, he sustained severe leg injury after being bombed by (Syrian president Bashar) Assad forces.

“It is believed that he was brought for treatment in Turkey but complications suffered during an operation led to his death,” a source said on Thursday.

Abu Aisyah is believed to be the sixth Malaysian killed in the ongoing IS conflict in Syria.

The news of Abu Aisyah’s death has received messages of condolences from friends and acquaintances on social media.

In a Facebook posting, a fellow militant said Abu Aisyah, who was a former Internal Security Act (ISA) detainee was a martyr.

“He died after the surgery following a long battle against severe pain in his leg, inflicted during an attack in Arzay about five months ago.

“Abu Aisyah was a good friend of Ustaz Mat (Mohd Lotfi Ariffin) who arrived together with him in Syria,” he said.

In May, Ahmad Tarmimi Maliki became the country’s first suicide bomber when he rammed a vehicle full of explosives into a SWAT headquarters in Iraq, killing 25 police personnel. Ahmad Tarmimi is believed to be fighting under the banner of the Islamic State.

In December, Ahmad Affendi Abdull Manaff, 27, also known as Abu Zakaria was reported to have died after driving an explosive-laden truck into an army camp in Homs, Syria, killing about 50 soldiers from Syrian president 50 Bashar Al-Assad’s army.

Abu Turab, whose real name is Mat Soh, was the first Malaysian militant to be killed in Syria in Aug 19, while defending the town of Arzeh.

On September 9, Mohammad Fadhlan Shahidi Mohammad Khir, 21, from Kedah, was in a truck when he was hit by shrapnel and fell out of the speeding vehicle during an ambush on rebels on 9 Sept 2014 in east Hama.

The attack also took the life of former Internal Security Act (ISA) detainee Mohd Lotfi Ariffin, 45, who died after falling into a coma following the assault.

Abu Aisyah, Mohd Lotfi, Fadhlan and Abu Turab are not believed to be working alongside the Islamic State.

Source: www.thestar.com.my

February 27, 2015
America’s Freelance IS Killers

The Kurds fighting the so-called Islamic State are attracting combatants from all over the world. Some head into battle out of conviction. Others want to make a buck.

DAQUQ, Iraq — The so-called Islamic State has recruited copious cannon fodder from around the world, along with quite a few ferocious fighters. But its toughest opponents on the ground, the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, are attracting Western ex-soldiers for their ranks who are determined to see the self-proclaimed “caliphate” not only “degraded,” as Washington puts it, but destroyed.

At a Kurdish Peshmerga base on the fluid battle lines outside the ethnically and religiously mixed Iraqi city of Kirkuk, three American fighters sat down with The Daily Beast. We were less than half a mile from the black flags of ISIS, as the would-be Islamic State is widely known, and the soldiers asked that I not give too many details about their identities. They worry that their families could become special targets for a fanatical fighting force whose battlefields, like its targets, seem limitless.

Dressed in a Peshmerga uniform, Jeremy is a compact, affable 28-year-old-guy from Mississippi who fought with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s been fighting alongside the Pesh for the last six months.

Leo is a tall and direct 38-year-old Texan who worked security for private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mel’s background also is in military security contracting and he says he served for a while with an army from a European country, but he won’t specify which. Mel’s a little eccentric. At 41, the Colorado native sports a pair of carefully pointed canine teeth—fangs, in fact— and a goatee that gives off a strong goth-metal vibe.

For two months Leo and Mel have been with the Peshmerga, the erstwhile guerrilla army that now makes up the autonomous armed forces of Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, and both are dressed in the gray flannel shirts and cargo pants often associated with private security contractors, but they and Jeremy all claim to be volunteers who are not receiving any kind of salary.

As we sit in the comfortable field office of Peshmerga Maj. Gen. Karwan Asaad, with Kurdish TV playing on a flat screen in the background, the hazy battle lines feel bizarrely distant despite a network of frontline dugouts only a few hundred yards away. But the Americans are anything but complacent.

Brett, a 28-year-old U.S. national who fights jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group alongside Dwekh Nawsha, a Christian militia whose name is an Assyrian-language phrase conveying self-sacrifice, poses for a photograph on February 5, 2015, in the northern Iraqi town of Al-Qosh, located 35 km north of Mosul. (Safin Hamed/Getty)

“ISIS are tough, real tough,” Jeremy says with his Mississippi twang. With fog settling in, he says it’s prime conditions for ISIS to make a move. It’s a different kind of warfare from what he saw when he was with the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees ISIS not so much as an insurgency as an invasion force. “It’s very different fighting a group that’s trying to take over,” he says.

The three men say their main assignments are guarding high-ranking Kurdish military officials and transporting jihadist prisoners in Peshmerga custody. It’s work Mel and Leo became well accustomed to when hired as contractors in earlier American wars. Here, Mel says he’s transported ISIS prisoners that come from Chechnya, Ireland, France, Germany, the UK, The U.S. and Canada, but maintains he is barred from speaking with them and has no idea what happens once they are handed over to Kurdish guards.

The three say, without specifics, they have received U.S. assurances they won’t be prosecuted when returning home, but that to be sure requires dealing with a lot of government clearances and maintaining a low profile. According to Jeremy, a lot of his ex-Army buddies are itching to get to Iraq and join the anti-ISIS fight, but he says many have been blocked because they make those plans public on social media.

The three say they have no interest in internal Kurdish politics and that even their sympathies for the Kurdish national struggle are secondary to their goal of contributing to the defeat of ISIS. They doubt the capabilities or commitment of the Iraqi Army and see the Kurds as the first defense against the spread of an American enemy.

Leo believes that if ISIS isn’t defeated, he could end up fighting its militants on battlefields around the world, and he is seriously disappointed in the way the Obama administration has handled the rise of the would-be caliphate. He says the failure of U.S. policy is a central reason he felt the need to join the Pesh.

Jeremy says he was uncomfortable sitting at home and watching the news of ISIS beheadings, mass killings and enslavements and felt obligated to use his military training and skills to support those fighting the jihadists.

For Mel, it was a matter of feeling disheartened by the large numbers of foreigners joining ISIS. He became convinced he had to join the Kurds.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com

February 24, 2015