Turkey has arrested nine suspected members of the Islamic State group for allegedly plotting suicide attacks on a political party and an opposition newspaper, media reports said Wednesday.
Police detained two suspects after a car chase on Friday in the southeastern province of Gaziantep near the Syrian border and another seven accomplices were detained in later police raids, the Dogan news agency reported.
The suspects were acting on the orders of high-ranking IS members in Syria and had planned to create “an atmosphere of fear and chaos” ahead of last Sunday’s parliamentary election, the Gaziantep governor’s office said in a statement.
The nine, who were caught with grenades, explosives and suicide vests, were plotting suicide bomb attacks on the Istanbul headquarters of an unidentified party and the leading opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper.
Turkish police had boosted security at the paper’s offices in Istanbul and Ankara after a tip-off that it had been targeted by IS jihadists.
Security has been high in Turkey since a massive twin suicide bombing on a peace rally in Ankara on October 10 that killed 102 people in the worst such atrocity in the country’s history.
Turkish prosecutors said the attack was ordered by IS in Syria and that a sleeper cell in Gaziantep was planning further attacks on Turkish soil.
A large majority of Russia’s military strikes in Syria have not been aimed at the Islamic State group or jihadists tied to Al-Qaeda, and have instead targeted the moderate Syrian opposition, the State Department said Wednesday.
“Greater than 90 percent of the strikes that we’ve seen them take to date have not been against ISIL or Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
“They’ve been largely against opposition groups that want a better future for Syria and don’t want to see the Assad regime stay in power.”
It was the first time that American authorities have offered any specific figures about the impact of Russian air strikes in the war-torn country.
The accusation came as Moscow — which says it is going after “terrorist groups,” including IS — ramped up its bombardments in Syria.
Washington, which supports the moderate Syrian opposition, has consistently said that the Russian action will only add more fuel to the fire and will benefit the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“So whether they’re hit by a cruise missile from sea or a bomb from a Russian military aircraft, the result is the same, that Assad continues to get support from Russia,” added Kirby.
“Assad continues to be able to have at his, you know, at his hands the capability of striking his own people, including those who are opposed to his regime.
“And that’s not a good future for Syria. It’s also, as we’ve said before, we believe a mistake for Russia, because not only are they going to be exacerbating sectarian tensions there in Syria, but they’re potentially exacerbating sectarian tensions in Russia itself.
The Vatican’s ambassador to the United Nations has endorsed military action against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria — an unusual move because the Vatican traditionally has opposed force in the region.
In an interview with the US Catholic website Crux, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said IS fighters were committing atrocities on a huge scale and the world needed to intervene.
“We have to stop this kind of genocide,” the Italian archbishop told Crux. “Otherwise we’ll be crying out in the future about why we didn’t do something, why we allowed such a terrible tragedy to happen.”
Tomasi said a coordinated and “well-thought-out coalition” was needed to do everything possible to achieve a political settlement without violence.
“But if that’s not possible, then the use of force will be necessary,” he added.
Pope Francis has denounced the “intolerable brutality” being inflicted on Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria by IS group militants.
Last month, IS kidnapped 220 Assyrians in the Tal Tamr area of Syria where the extremist Islamist group has seized control of 10 Christian villages, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
And the pope expressed his dismay after the group’s Libyan branch released a video showing the gruesome beheading of 21 mostly Egyptian Coptic Christians.
The leader of Nigeria’s Boko Haram militants, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group in an audio recording released Saturday.
Abubakar Shekau
“We announce our allegiance to the Caliph of the Muslims, Ibrahim ibn Awad ibn Ibrahim al-Husseini al-Qurashi,” said the voice on the message, which was believed to be that of Shekau and was released through Boko Haram’s Twitter account.
Qurashi is better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the IS group which has proclaimed a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq.
Shekau spoke in Arabic, but the message contained French and English subtitles.
It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the message.
Shekau was not pictured, a contrast from most of Boko Haram’s past messages in which the Islamist leader has been shown, often in close up shots.
But Shekau did identify himself in the recording, which was accompanied by the subtitles and a graphic including an image of a radio microphone.
There have in recent months been signs of closer ties between the Nigerian militants and the IS group, with both using similar ways of communicating with the outside world. Boko Haram has notably begun releasing videos that resemble those made by IS.
Boko Haram has been waging a six-year uprising against the Nigerian state, which has claimed more than 13,000 lives.
Analysts have long debated the extent of Boko Haram’s ties to other jihadist groups, but the evidence was never clear.
Ibrahim Uwais gave his parents and everyone around him the impression that he hates Boko Haram because of the “damage” they are doing to Islam — but he has now gone to Syria apparently to join the Islamic State militants.
Justice Uwais
His distraught father, Mohammed Uwais (pictured) — who served as the chief justice of Nigeria from 1995 to 2006 — was still trying to come to terms with the news when he suffered a suspected armed robbery attack last weekend, although he was not hurt.
Ibrahim, described as a 41-year-old “reserved and committed Muslim”, has two wives and four children, TheCable learnt.
His elder wife was the head of a private school in Abuja while the younger worked with the Debt Management Office (DMO).
When he took the decision to go to Syria to team up with the “jihadists” of the Islamic State, he reportedly called his wives aside and told them they were free to return to their parents.
He went to report to the security agencies — who told him they would investigate the claim that his son might have gone to Syria.
TheCable could not confirm the airline or route Ibrahim flew out of Nigeria or the date he left, but sources said he travelled through Turkey, which shares border with the war-torn Syria.
Parts of Syria and Iraq are under the control of the Islamic State which carries out summary executions, including beheadings and death by stoning, of those accused of flouting its sharia law.
The Turkish embassy in Abuja was compelled to disclose the details of Ibrahim’s movement through a court injunction, TheCable learnt.
The embassy confirmed that it issued visas to Ibrahim and members of his family.
The details of his arrival in Turkey were made available, while images of CCTV recordings were also said to have been analysed by the Turkish security agencies to establish their movement.
Hated Boko Haram
Ibrahim, who dropped out of the university and went into full-time business in his early 20s, is the unlikeliest man to volunteer for the Islamic State, according to family friends who spoke with TheCable.
“He hated everything Boko Haram stood for, and often queried why they would be killing innocent women and children in the name of Islam,” a source said.
“With the benefit of hindsight, he was probably trying to cover up his plans. There was no way you would have suspected that he was ever going to be a fundamentalist himself.”
He was a student of King’s College, Lagos, and went on to the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, “where he was radicalised”, according to a former student of Queen’s College, Lagos, who told TheCable that Ibrahim “was very popular with QC girls in those days”.
A family source confirmed that Ibrahim left Nigeria with his family early February “without a word”, keeping his extended family in the dark.
“The fact that he didn’t say goodbye to both parents, and the deafening silence from his end since then, seems to lend credence to this storyline (that he has joined ISIS),” he said, adding that “we are just praying for news of them, news of any sorts”.
Memories of AbdulFarouk
Ibrahim’s case has refreshed memories of AbdulFarouk AbdulMutallab, the fresh-faced engineering graduate of the University College, London, who attempted to bomb an American airliner in the US on December 25, 2009 having been radicalised by Al-Qaeda.
AbdulFarouk is the son of a very prominent Nigeria businessman and former minister, Umaru Mutallab. His mother is a Yemeni named Aisha.
He was believed to have been radicalised on a visit to Yemen in 2009, when he was thought to have come in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a suspected recruiter for the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was later killed in a US drone strike in 2011.
Read more at: http://www.thecable.ng/exclusive-justice-uwais-son-claims-hate-boko-haram-joined-isis-jihadists | TheCableMutallab reported his son to the US embassy in Nigeria when he refused to return from Yemen after withdrawing from the San’a Institute for the Arabic Language.
Likewise, Uwais reported his son to the Nigerian authorities on discovering the suspected mission of his son.
A growing trend?
Nigerian authorities are beginning to fret over what they now suspect to be a trend of radicalisation of northern youths by their exposure to fundamentalist ideology.
“We now have reasonable ground to suggest we have a big battle in our hands,” an intelligence officer told TheCable.
“One of the toughest nuts for us to crack is how Boko Haram has been able to recruit thousands of fighters. Given the number of Boko Haram fighters that have been killed by the military in north-east operations, the group should have been completely incapacitated by now, but they keep getting fresh recruits.”
While this category of recruits is believed to be ordinary people, the involvement of the children of the northern elite “is definitely new and a source of worry”, the officer said.
According to him, “It is not so much about the recruitment of fighters… but the source of funding for the terrorists. If the elite or children of the elite are sympathetic to them, it will be easy to get funding across to them because it would be very difficult to trace.”
A troubled man
Although there is strong evidence suggesting that Ibrahim is in Syria, the family has not given up hope of getting him to abandon his mission and return home.
“We have no idea how he got himself involved in this,” a friend of the family told TheCable. Meanwhile, Uwais himself was still battling to make sense of the “sad development” when he had a traumatic experience in the hands of suspected armed robbers at his Abuja home.
“Armed robbers put a gun to the head of this 79-year-old gentleman. Not satisfied with what they could get out of him, they proceeded to lock him up in a dusty, mosquito-ridden room,” a source said.
One of his wives reportedly discovered where he was locked up six hours after the robbers left.
Uwais has refused to comment on his son’s disappearance since the story was first reported by a newsite, TheWill, on Tuesday.
Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious centre of learning, expressed outrage at the Islamic State group for burning to death a captive Jordanian pilot, saying its militants deserve to be killed or crucified.
After a video was released showing the caged fighter pilot, Maaz al-Kassasbeh, dying engulfed in flames, the Cairo-based authority’s head, Ahmed al-Tayib, expressed his “strong dismay at this cowardly act”.
This “requires the punishment mentioned in the Koran for these corrupt oppressors who fight against God and his prophet: killing, crucifixion or chopping of the limbs.”
“Islam forbids killing of the innocent human soul… It forbids mutilating the human soul by burning or in any other way even during wars against an enemy that attacks you,” Tayib added in a statement.
IS itself has implemented such punishments against its own members for robbery at checkpoints or stealing funds from religious endowments in territories controlled by the group in Iraq and Syria.
Several Arab countries have offered to take part in air strikes against Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq, US officials say.
But any action is subject to approval from the Iraqi government, they add.
US Secretary of State John Kerry says he is “extremely encouraged” by promises of military assistance to tackle the extremist group.
He spoke in Paris after a whirlwind tour of the Middle East trying to drum up support for action against IS.
France is due to host an international conference on Monday about Iraqi security and tackling IS.
On Saturday, the militant group released a video showing the beheading of UK hostage and aid worker David Haines. The group has threatened to kill a second Briton, Alan Henning, who also appeared in the video.
“You cannot fight terrorism when you collaborate with those who created these terror groups including in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others,” Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad told me.
Those countries deny they’ve ever backed Islamic State. But Qatar and Saudi Arabia have provided weapons to Sunni rebel groups, some of whose members have moved to Islamic State.
Turkey has let Sunni fighters, including jihadists from al-Qaeda and IS across its border into Syria.
Mr Mekdad said that as well as Syria an effective coalition would also have to include Russia and Iran: the Assad regime’s key allies.
He repeated Syria’s view that any air strikes on its territory without its permission would be an act of war, a violation of the UN charter and a disaster not just for Syria but for the region.
