Defector reveals thousands of Islamic State internal documents
March 14, 2016 Leave a comment
Tens of thousands of classified documents belonging to the Islamic State have been released by a disillusioned former member of the organization, who says that the group has been taken over by secularists. According to British-based agency Sky News, the documents were provided on a memory stick stolen from the Islamic State by a Syrian former member of the organization, who goes by the name “Abu Hamed”. Hamed allegedly stole the documents from the Islamic State’s “internal security police”, which Sky News also refers to as “the group’s Security Service”. He took it with him when he defected from the organization, which he says he joined as a convert from the non-Islamist Free Syrian Army. He told Sky News’ Stuart Ramsay that he left the group after concluding that it had been “taken over” by former Iraqi soldiers belonging to Ba’ath, the secularist party that was at the heart of the regime led by the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. As a result, “Islamic rules […] have totally collapsed” inside the Islamic State, said Hamed.
The documents that Hamed gave Sky News are said to number in the “tens of thousands” and reportedly identify nationals from over 50 countries who are members of the Islamic State. Many of the documents contain the 23-question form that all prospective members of the Islamic State have to complete before being admitted into the organization. The questionnaires contain the prospective members’ names and aliases, contact information and family background, among other identifying data. Ramsay said he met Hamed “in a secret location in Turkey”, where the former Free Syrian Army soldier is now living after defecting from the Islamic State. According to the Sky News reporter, Hamed said he abandoned the Islamist organization because its current leadership consists almost exclusively of Ba’athists, who are not known for their religious views or lifestyle.
Ramsay reports that many of the names of Islamic State members that are contained in the documents are already “well-known” to Western and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. But the collection of members’ names contains several individuals from the Middle East, Northern Africa, Europe, as well as North America, who were allegedly not included in intelligence agencies’ lists. One file surrendered by Hamed is headlined “Martyrs”, and allegedly features the names of members of a brigade that consists “entirely of fighters who wanted to carry out suicide attacks and were trained to do so”. Hamed is also reported to have told Sky News that the Islamic State is gradually abandoning its self-described state capital of Raqqa in Syria and relocating to Iraq. Sky News said it had informed Western government agencies about the documents.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 14 March 2016 | Permalink
Dozens of cell phones belonging to senior government officials in South Korea were compromised by North Korean hackers who systematically targeted them with texts containing malicious codes, according to reports. The National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s primary intelligence agency, said the cell phone penetrations were part of a concerted campaign by North Korea to target smart phones belonging to South Korean senior government officials. Once they managed to compromise a cell phone, the hackers were able to access the call history stored on the device, the content of text messages exchanged with other users and, in some cases, the content of telephone calls placed on the compromised device. Moreover, according to the NIS, the hackers were able to access the contact lists stored on compromised cell phones, which means that more attacks may be taking place against cell phones belonging to South Korean government officials.
Authorities in a northern German town have called on the Israeli embassy in Berlin to pay for the cost of extricating a car belonging to two Israeli spies, which was stuck in a mud pit in a restricted area. According to the Hamburg-based television station NDR, the 
Frank Terpil, a former operative of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, who defected to Cuba in 1981 to avoid charges of criminal conspiracy, has died. He was 76. Terpil resigned from the CIA in 1970, allegedly after he was caught running a pyramid scheme in India, where he had been posted by the CIA. Soon after his forced resignation from the Agency, US federal prosecutors leveled criminal charges on Terpil and his business partner. The former CIA operative was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder, after it was found that he had helped facilitate the illegal transfer of over 20 tons of plastic explosives to the government of Libya.
French troops have reportedly killed a Spanish citizen who was a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), one of the most prolific al-Qaeda-linked groups in Africa. The Spaniard, Abu al-Nur al-Andalusi, 35, was from Melilla, a coastal Spanish enclave in northern Africa, which borders Morocco. Since 2014, al-Nur had operated as a military leader of AQIM, an armed Islamist group that aims to create a caliphate in northern Africa. AQIM emerged in the 1990s out of the brutal Algerian Civil War, which pitted the country’s secular but authoritarian government against a host of Islamist groups, including the Armed Islamic Group, known as GIA. In 1998 a band of GIA members left the group in protest against its indiscriminate killing of civilians, and formed a separate organization, which called itself Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. In2007 the group renamed itself AQIM and pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda’s co-founder Osama bin Laden.
An Argentine former senior intelligence official has claimed in court testimony that the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner murdered a state prosecutor who had accused senior officials of having colluded with Iran to bomb Israeli targets in Buenos Aires. In January 2015, the prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, prompted international headlines by launching a criminal complaint against President Kirchner and several other notable personalities of Argentine political life. Nisman accused them of having colluded with the government of Iran to obstruct an investigation into the bombings of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s. A dozen people died in the bombing of the embassy, while another 85 were killed two years later, when the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina community center in the Argentine capital was bombed. Nisman was 
The leading lawmaker in the United States Congressional intelligence committee has accused the Department of Defense of resisting his efforts to investigate claims that intelligence products on the Islamic State were manipulated. Representative Devin Nunes (R-Ca.), who chairs the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said last week that he and his staffers were experiencing a “lack of cooperation” from the military during the course of an official probe into intelligence products. Nunes was referring to 
Russia is being “very aggressive” toward the United States, but cooperation on counter-terrorism between Moscow and Washington is “highly active” despite the differences between them, according to the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. John Brennan, a longtime CIA career officer, who has led the Agency for nearly three years, 
Two teams of international experts will examine the exhumed remains of Chilean Nobel Laureate poet Pablo Neruda, who some say was deliberately injected with poison by the Chilean intelligence services. The literary icon died on September 23, 1973, less than two weeks after a coup d’état, led by General Augusto Pinochet, toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a Marxist who was a close friend of Neruda. The death of the internationally acclaimed poet, who was 69 at the time, was officially attributed to prostate cancer and the effects of acute mental stress caused by the military coup. In 2013, however, an 
Europe’s highest human rights court has ruled against Italy in the case of an Egyptian man who was abducted from Milan in 2003 by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, is a former member of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamist group founded in the 1970s, which aimed to overthrow the Egyptian government and replace it with an Islamic regime. Members of the group have been implicated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, as well as in numerous attacks on tourist facilities in Egypt in the 1990s. Once al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya was declared illegal in Egypt, Italian authorities offered Nasr political asylum, after he successfully argued that he would be subject to torture if arrested in Egypt.
Authorities in Israel said on Sunday that they foiled a plan to smuggle dozens of spy drones from Israel into the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Ministry of Defense said in a statement late on Sunday that the drones had been detected by members of the Shin Bet, Israel’s security police. The incident reportedly took place at Kerem Shalom, a major border crossing in to Gaza, a Palestinian enclave that is controlled by Hamas. The Defense Ministry statement also said that Sunday’s incident was only the latest in a string of recent attempts to smuggle spy drones into Gaza, all of which had been stopped by the Shin Bet since January.
An American-registered airplane carrying large quantities of cash on behalf of a South African bank was impounded by authorities in Zimbabwe after a dead body was found on board. Zimbabwean media said police was notified after human blood was seen dripping from the plane’s cargo area during an emergency refueling stop. Authorities 
A debate on information security measures in the European Union was prompted last week after some officials voiced concerns that the proceedings of a closed-door meeting were secretly monitored by Israel. The meeting took place on January 15 as part of regular proceedings by the EU’s Political and Security Committee (PSC). The main item on the agenda was the EU’s Middle Eastern policy. According to some meeting participants, Israeli diplomats appeared to be aware of a statement discussed during the PSC meeting “in real time”, which prompted a wider debate on EU information security policies.
Syrian and American media are reporting that Russian engineers, employed by a Moscow-based contractor with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, are working at a Syrian gas plant under the control of the Islamic State. The facility in question is the so-called Tuweinan gas plant, which is located in central Syria, approximately 60 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of the city of Raqqa. The Islamic State declared Raqqa its capital shortly after occupying it, in June 2013, and the city has since served as the militant group’s administrative headquarters. The nearby Tuweinan gas plant is believed to be the largest of its kind in Syria. In 2013, it was occupied by an alliance of factions operating under the banner of the Al-Nusra Front, the primary al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. But in early 2014, Islamic State forces took control of the plant following a military offensive against Al-Nusra.
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Malaysia foiled Islamic State plan to kidnap prime minister, senior officials
March 16, 2016 by Ian Allen Leave a comment
According to Hamid, 13 individuals with direct ties to the Islamic State were behind the plot to kidnap three senior members of the Malaysian government on the same day. The targets were the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, the Defense Minister Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, and Hamid himself, who informed the parliament on Tuesday. He said that the Islamic State members were planning to ask for a large amount of money in return for delivering the three politicians to the authorities unharmed. Along with the kidnappings, the Islamic State members had planned to raid military facilities and steal weapons, then plant explosions throughout the country. They also wanted to conduct a series of armed robberies in order to acquire funds for the militant organization.
Hamid told the parliament that intelligence agencies had not been able to establish proof of the existence of an independent network belonging to the Islamic State in Malaysia. Instead, Islamic State members and sympathizers in the country are being handled from abroad, primarily from Syria, he said. Speaking on Tuesday about the alleged plot, Defense Minister Hussein said that security had been increased at all military bases and that the personal protection detail of senior cabinet officials had been augmented as a result of the plot.
► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 16 March 2016 | Permalink
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