UK foiled 31 terror plots in past 4 years, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan
likely ‘emboldened’ lone-wolf extremists – MI5 chief
10 Sep, 2021 09:54
Taliban fighter in Afghanistan, September 9, 2021. © Wakil Kohsar/AFP
UK authorities foiled 31 terrorist plots in the past four years, the head of MI5 has said. He warned that the Taliban victory in Afghanistan likely served as a morale boost to domestic extremists.
“Even during the pandemic period we have all been enduring for most of the last two years, we have had to disrupt six late-stage attack plots,” Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security service, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today show.
McCallum said 31 late-stage attack plots had been foiled in the past four years. “That number includes mainly Islamist attack plots but also a growing number of attack plots from right-wing terrorists.”
So, the terrorist threat to the UK, I am sorry to say, is a real and enduring thing.
Speaking on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, McCallum warned that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last month had likely “emboldened” lone-wolf extremists in the UK.
While it takes time to build terrorist infrastructure, encouragement to act can come suddenly, he explained. “Overnight, you can have a psychological boost, a morale boost to extremists already here, or in other countries.”
The US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the group behind the 9/11 plot, whose leader Osama Bin Laden was killed in a raid in 2011.
The nearly two-decade-long occupation of the country by NATO member states, including the UK, failed to crush the militants and bring about peace and stability.
Do you think 8 years with Obama as President had a big influence on that?
The insurgent Taliban overran Afghanistan in a sweeping offensive that culminated in the capture of Kabul on August 15 and ran concurrent with the final stage of the withdrawal of US troops. The last American soldier left the country on August 30.
The Taliban’s victory has led to the resurgence of groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan that claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing outside Kabul’s airport that killed 13 US soldiers and more than 160 Afghan civilians last month amid the frantic evacuation from the capital.
The idea is that the Taliban can now proclaim that Allah is on their side and has made them victorious. They cannot lose but will fight for a global caliphate. Nato and the USA have given them a huge boost.
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Immigrant influx has led to barbarism in Swedish society,
Swedish lawmaker makes crushing allegation
By Pratyaksha Mitra
September 8, 2021
Stockholm: Swedish MP Adam Marttinen has said that the immigrant influx has fuelled organised crime and gang warfare in Sweden and has led to barbarism in Swedish society.
Marttinen wrote an article in an online Swedish daily entitled ‘Immigration-Created Barbarism’ and criticised the Swedish government’s refugee policy. A report released by the Swedish authorities a few days ago revealed that the proportion of refugees involved in criminal activities in the country is high.
A few years ago, former Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, made a sensational statement that ‘savage cruelty’ is a core part of Swedish society and that all other developments are caused by groups coming from outside. Combining the statement with a report on crime in Sweden, Sweden Democrat MP Adam Marttinen has sharply criticised the government’s policies. ‘Wildness has never been a part of Swedish society. But Reinfeldt and his successors laid the groundwork for the savagery of the refugees through uncontrolled influx and the ensuing violence,’ said Marttinen, lashing out at the government’s policy on immigrants.
Sweden has been one of the most tolerant countries regarding immigrants, in Europe, for decades. This has always been a concern for the Sweden Democrats. Liberal immigrant policies appear to have had a profound effect on other aspects of Swedish society.
The picture was that immigrants would benefit from multiculturalism, investment and other benefits. But in reality, rising unemployment, segregated society, and the culture of criminal gangs have been fuelled by this. There have been 192 incidents of violent crimes across the country in the last eight months, and 26 people have been killed in gang wars.’ Marttinen drew attention to the deteriorating situation in Sweden due to refugees in these words.
The lawmaker claimed that if this grim picture is to change, Sweden’s policy on refugees and crime will be overhauled. He also demanded that the perpetrators be punished more severely, with a complete ban on accepting refugees. Sweden has a population of over ten million, of which more than 25 per cent are citizens of foreign descent. Between 1995 and 2017, an estimated 1.8 million immigrants arrived in Sweden. In 2015 alone, Sweden sheltered more than 160 thousand immigrants. (More per capita than any other European country. Their pride and arrogance made them believe that this was a good thing.)
Israel reveals secret Iran base used to train terrorist to operate drones
September 12, 2021
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Defense Minister Benny Gantz revealed during a conference Sunday the presence of a secret training base in Iran whose specialty is teaching terrorists throughout the region how to fly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Speaking at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), Gantz said, “The Kashan base located north of the city of Isfahan is used to train terrorists from Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. These terrorists are trained to employ UAVs produced by Iran. This base is a key point from which Iranian aerial terrorism is exported to the region.”
According to the defense minister, dozens of the “deadly, accurate weapons that, like a ballistic missile or airplane, can cross thousands of kilometers,” have been already exported to Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon. In another point of direct concern to Israel, “Iran is also attempting to transfer the know-how needed for UAV production to Gaza,” both to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), he said. The PIJ is under Iran’s direct control, while Hamas, being Sunni Moslem, is more of an ally with convergent interests.
The aerial terror threat that Iran is honing is region-wide, Gantz stressed. Dozens of the UAVs have also gone to its Houthi proxies in Yemen, who have used them in recent months against Saudi Arabia. Hundreds more have been sent to the groups that the Islamic Republic backs in Syria, which is still divided into regions controlled by diverse and opposing forces such as Turkey, Russia and the Syrian government, and the United States.
Dozens more are in the hands of Iran-backed forces in Iraq as well, according to Gantz. This is a threat to American forces and those of its allies that has already been realized in the country’s Kurdistan region, as they have been the target of drones allegedly operated by such proxies for the past several months.
Just on Saturday night, the regional government’s foreign media spokesperson wrote that the capital Erbil’s “international airport has been attacked with a drone tonight,” which is where allied troops are stationed. Several local news reports had multiple explosions being been heard in the area, including the air defense measures taken by the soldiers on the ground. No casualties were reported in this latest incident.
Iran’s malign influence will only get stronger unless the world unites against it, said Gantz, because it is “callously breaching the [nuclear] agreement to which it is still obligated and…is closer than ever before to an amount of enriched uranium that will bring it to the brink of becoming a nuclear state.” This will lead to a global arms race and an even greater increase in the threat of terrorism, and “is a threat to the whole world, and to the region, that must not be allowed in any way.”
“Iran does not honor the agreements it has signed,” he warned, “and there is no reason to believe that it will honor any future agreements. The time has come for action. I call on the countries that are still members of the nuclear agreement to impose the sanctions set out in the agreement.”
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Afghanistan's universities now officially segregated by sex
Taliban announce new rules for classrooms, including a dress code
Thomson Reuters ·
Posted: Sep 12, 2021 9:33 AM ET
Students attend class under new classroom conditions at Avicenna University in Kabul on Sept. 6.
(Social media handout/Reuters)
Women in Afghanistan will be allowed to study in universities as the country seeks to rebuild after decades of war — but segregation by sex and a dress code will be mandatory, the Taliban's new higher education minister said on Sunday.
This is actually good news, to a point. Just last week it was doubtful that any woman over 18 would be allowed to pursue their education. So, we can rejoice that they can continue their education after high school even if they have to remain largely invisible and not distract the boys.
The minister, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, said the new Taliban government, named last week, would "start building the country on what exists today" and did not want to turn the clock back 20 years to when the movement was last in power.
He said female students would be taught by women wherever possible and classrooms would remain separated, in accordance with the movement's interpretation of Shariah law.
"Thanks to God we have a high number of women teachers. We will not face any problems in this. All efforts will be made to find and provide women teachers for female students," he told a news conference in Kabul.
Of course, such wouldn't be the case if the Taliban had been in power for the past 20 years.
The issue of women's education has been one of the central questions facing the Taliban as they seek to persuade the world that they have changed since the harsh fundamentalist rule they imposed in the 1990s when women were largely banned from studying or working outside the home.
Taliban officials have said women will be able to study and work in accordance with Shariah law and local cultural traditions but strict dress rules will apply. Haqqani said hijab religious veils would be mandatory for all female students but did not specify if this meant headscarves or compulsory face coverings.
On Saturday, a group, apparently made up of female students in black robes that covered them completely from head to foot, demonstrated in Kabul in support of the rules on dress and separate classrooms.
On the other hand, it might have been a group of men dressed in hijabs. Who's to know?
Veiled women hold Taliban flags as they listen to a speaker before a pro-Taliban rally at the Shaheed Rabbani Education University in Kabul on Saturday. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty Images)
It took a little effort to determine whether these girls are facing the camera or facing away from the camera; the difference is negligible. The women are basically invisible either way. This is Islam!
Haqqani said where no women teachers were available special measures would be adopted to ensure separation.
"When there is really a need, men can also teach [women] but in accordance with Shariah, they should observe the veil," he said. Classrooms would be curtained off to divide male and female students where necessary and teaching could also be done through streaming or closed circuit TV, he said.
Classrooms divided by curtains have already been seen in many places since the Western-backed government collapse and the Taliban seized Kabul last month.
Haqqani told reporters that segregation by sex would be enforced across Afghanistan and all subjects taught at colleges would also be reviewed in the coming months.
Reviewed for what?
‘Terrorism defeated?’ Merkel says ‘not all goals’ reached after 9/11
as intel head warns of 2,000 dangerous extremists in Germany
12 Sep, 2021 10:05
FILE PHOTO. © Reuters / Heiko Becker
The US and its allies have failed to achieve all their goals after 9/11 but did “defeat terrorism,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said as her own intelligence warned about thousands of Islamists in the country.
“We have now had to recognize that although we have been able to defeat terrorism, which is endangering our security, at the present time we have not achieved all our goals,” Merkel said on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
The chancellor then suggested focusing on safeguarding those few accomplishments, including education for girls in Afghanistan while admitting “this will not be easy with the Taliban” in power. Merkel also said that bringing people in need of protection to Germany should be one of the nation’s top priorities since that was something Berlin felt it had “a moral obligation to do.”
Yet, it seems that not all German officials would agree with their chancellor that the war on terror was that victorious. The head of the nation’s domestic security service, the BfV, which is tasked with tackling the threat of terrorism in particular, painted a much grimmer picture.
Germany’s domestic intelligence has classified some 2,000 Islamists living in the country as “particularly dangerous,” the BfV head, Thomas Haldenwang, told Tagesspeiegel daily in an interview published earlier on Saturday.
“These are all that we, as an intelligence service, believe could be potentially engaged in terrorist activities up to committing [terrorist] attacks,” Haldenwang said.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police reported 551 existing Islamist ‘threats’ and 536 people that could potentially be supporters of terrorists, according to the German media. Haldenwang explained that his agency’s number is higher since some of the persons on the list have no prior criminal records and are thus likely unknown to the criminal police.
The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan could be used by such extremist groups to launch a “propaganda offensive” and start a recruitment drive, Haldenwang warns, adding that this development could be portrayed as a victory for Islamists all over the world.
Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that the nation’s security services have managed to thwart 23 terrorist attacks since 2000. The minister believes, though, that the danger is far from over.
“We prevented terrorist attacks, but the risk of an attack still exists today,” he told Germany’s Funke media group on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Seehofer then called on the BfV to be granted powers to covertly access computers, smartphones and other IT devices to be able to study their content to better prevent terrorist threats.
Such provision was removed from a controversial amendment to the Federal Constitution Protection Act, which granted the security service broader powers in the field of telecommunication surveillance. Adopted by the German parliament in June, the amendment allowed the BfV to monitor encrypted messages sent via WhatsApp, for example, but only in strictly regulated individual cases.
Seehofer, however, hopes that the next government, which would take office following the general elections later in September, will continue the work he started.
The real solution to this problem is to declare radical Muslims as legally insane, which they are, and then write new laws allowing for the permanent detention of anyone who is legally insane and is a threat to the security of German society.
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