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Nearly 80 mosques suspected of ‘separatism’ face closure as French govt launches 'massive' offensive against religious extremism
3 Dec 2020 14:21
FILE PHOTO: A mosque in Creteil near Paris, France. © REUTERS / Gonzalo Fuentes
The French government has threatened to close dozens of mosques that have been flagged as potential security threats. The measures are part of an aggressive campaign to weed out Islamic extremism in the country.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Thursday that authorities were targeting 76 mosques suspected of promoting “separatism.”
In an interview with RTL radio, he claimed that in “some concentrated areas” of the country, mosques are “clearly anti-Republican.” He said France’s intelligence services have “followed” imams who preach ideas “counter to our values.” Darmanin stressed, however, that the institutions that have been identified as potential risks are just a fraction of the more than 2,600 Muslim places of worship in France.
“In the coming days, checks will be carried out on these places of worship. If ever these doubts are confirmed, I will ask for their closure,” he wrote in a tweet commenting on the interview.
He also announced that 66 illegal migrants suspected of “radicalization” had been deported.
The crackdown is part of a “massive and unprecedented” set of government measures designed to curtail religious “extremism” in the country, Darmanin said.
The government initiative follows a string of recent Islamist attacks in France, beginning with the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in October. Paty was targeted by a radicalized Chechen refugee after showing his class caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed as part of a lesson on free speech. Nearly two weeks later, three people were killed in a knife attack in Nice. The suspect is a Tunisian migrant who was reportedly radicalized.
A mosque accused of inciting the hate that led to Paty’s murder was shuttered at the end of October.
In response to Paty’s killing and subsequent incidents attributed to religious extremism, the French government plans to roll out a wide-ranging law aimed at stopping separatism. Under legislation submitted by President Emmanuel Macron, each child in France would be given an identification number that would be used to ensure that they are attending school. Parents who keep their children at home could face fines and even jail time. However, the measures would apply to all children, not just those from Muslim households.
The proposed law will be reviewed by the country’s cabinet next week.
Macron has already taken steps to rein in extremism. At his urging, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) has agreed to create an organization that will issue accreditation to imams. The accreditation can be withdrawn if religious leaders espouse extremist views.
Saudi court sentences man to death for killing security officers
11 others jailed on terror charges including illegal possession of weapons
Published: December 04, 2020 11:11
Ramadan Al Sherbini, Correspondent, Gulf News
Cairo: A Saudi court had sentenced one man to death for killing two security personnel on the border with Yemen, according to Saudi media.
The Disciplinary Court said that the defendant had been convicted of “deliberately” shooting dead the two security personnel while they were on duty on the southern border where they tried to stop him and other members of his terrorist group.
The defendants had planned to illegally cross the kingdom’s southern border into Yemen to get engaged into the fight there and join terror groups.
The court also gave 11 others jail terms ranging from 25 to eight years on charges of illegal possession of weapons and funding terrorism in the same case.
Rulings can be appealed
The convicts were also charged with setting up an armed terror group. The court said that the convicts had failed to abide by their earlier pledges to act in line with law when they were released in previous militancy cases. All the rulings can be appealed.
The case was related to the convicts’ attack, using machine guns, on a border guard patrol in the Saudi region of Najran, killing two security men more than eight years ago, Okaz newspaper reported.
Investigations revealed that the culprits had been previously arrested over links to radical groups.
And you let them loose after they promised to be nice? Good grief!
Trump orders all US troops out of Somalia
By Helene Cooper New York Times,
Updated December 4, 2020, 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON — President Trump, continuing his end-of-term troop withdrawals from conflicts around the world, will pull American troops out of Somalia, where they have been involved in trying to push back advances by Islamist insurgents in the Horn of Africa.
The Pentagon announced on Friday that virtually all of the approximately 700 troops in Somalia — most Special Operations troops who have been conducting training and counterterrorism missions — will be leaving by Jan. 15, five days before President-elect Joe Biden is scheduled to be inaugurated.
Many of the troops will be “repositioned” to nearby Kenya, a Defense Department official said Friday. It was not immediately clear whether other parts of the American presence in Somalia — such as CIA officers, the ambassador, and other State Department diplomats who are based at a heavily fortified bunker at the airport in Mogadishu, the Somali capital — will also withdraw from Somali territory along with the military.
The withdrawal from Somalia followed Trump’s orders to reduce the American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and reflected the president’s longstanding desire to end long-running military engagements against Islamist insurgencies in failed and fragile countries in Africa and the Middle East, a grinding mission that has spread since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.
The Pentagon pledged that efforts to safeguard American interests would continue.
“The US is not withdrawing or disengaging from Africa,” it said in a statement. “We remain committed to our African partners and enduring support through a whole-of-government approach.”
The United States will retain the ability to conduct counterterrorism operations in Somalia, especially drone strikes, and to collect early warnings and indicators regarding threats to the United States and allies from militant forces in the country.
The mission in Somalia was in the spotlight in recent days, after it was reported that a veteran CIA officer was killed in combat in Somalia, according to current and former American officials. The death already has rekindled debate over American intelligence’s counterterrorism operations in Africa. The officer was a member of the CIA’s paramilitary division, the Special Activities Center, and a former member of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6.
The troop withdrawal from Somalia comes just two weeks after Trump ordered the military to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, halving the number there to just over 2,000. Reductions in the American troop presence in Iraq also are underway.
Also this week, the Pentagon policy official overseeing the military’s efforts to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was fired after a White House appointee told him that the United States had won that war and that his office had been disbanded. The ouster of the official, Christopher P. Maier, the head of the Pentagon’s Defeat ISIS Task Force since March 2017, came just three weeks after Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and three other Pentagon officials and replaced them with loyalists.
"Loyalists", read, not warmongers! Wars are never over in Deep State economies. There's always room to move weapons to someone.
Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller, who has been carrying out Trump’s purge at the Pentagon since he took over from Esper last month, characterized the moves as reflecting the success of the American-led effort to crush the terrorist state that the Islamic State created in large sections of Iraq and Syria.
Defense Department officials familiar with internal deliberations said the Somalia pullout would not apply to American forces stationed in nearby Kenya and Djibouti, where American drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based.
Keeping those airbases would mean retaining the military’s ability to use drones to attack militants with the Shabab, a Qaeda-linked terrorist group — at least those deemed to pose a threat to American interests.
Exiting foreign conflicts has been a central component of Trump’s “America First” agenda since he ran for office in 2016. That appeal has particularly animated his base of populist voters, many of them veterans who have grown weary of their roles in longstanding wars. The president views his record on this issue as important to any political future he might pursue.
Somalia has faced civil war, droughts, and violence from Islamist extremists for years. The United States intervened in the country as peacekeepers, but abandoned it not long after the “Black Hawk Down” battle in 1993, which killed 18 Americans and hundreds of militia fighters.
The Shabab, an Islamist terrorist group whose name means “the youth,” emerged around 2007 and have violently vied for control of Somalia with occasional attacks outside its borders, including an attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2013 that killed more than five dozen civilians and a deadly assault on an American air base at Manda Bay, Kenya, in January.
Shabab leaders pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2012. In 2016, shortly before leaving office, the Obama administration deemed them part of the congressionally authorized war against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. Under the Trump administration, the military sharply increased airstrikes targeting Shabab militants.
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