Photo Credit: Right Wing News
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s recent directive reports, “The United States Government and the Government of Libya have normalized their relationship, and most of the restrictions and sanctions imposed by the United States and the United Nations toward Libya have been lifted.”
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Photo Credit: Reuters
U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and military officials have for months declined to discuss the possibility that Americans had joined the Islamic extremist group blamed for beheading 40-year-old New Hampshire journalist James Foley as well as atrocities against Iraqis. But they now acknowledge it is likely that one or more Americans – but no more than a “small handful” — have joined the fray.
The officials, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity on Wednesday, say they base that opinion on analysis and a string of recent arrests and investigations of U.S. citizens who have sought to join the group that is simultaneously fighting government forces in both Iraq and Syria.
“It stands to reason that one or some of those Americans who have gone to Syria may have linked up with ISIS. It would not be surprising,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official. “In general, we have found that Western fighters, not just those from the U.S., are joining the biggest game in town and the biggest game in town is ISIS.”
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Photo Credit: Hussein Malla/AP
“They are our own flesh and blood,” Mahdi said after regaining his composure. “Some of them have left for Sweden or Germany. Who does (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) think it is to drive out our fellow countrymen?”
The Asia TV program was aired in Iraq in late July, according to a video and translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
“This is one genuine Iraqi we have here,” another panelist commented at the sight of Mahdi in tears.
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Photo Credit: AFP / Zoom Dosso
Four residents were injured in the clashes that flared in Monrovia’s West Point slum which has been contained as part of new security measures aimed at containing the deadly virus.
The crackdown in Liberia comes as authorities around the world scramble to stem the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola, which has killed more than 1,200 people across west Africa this year.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf quarantined West Point and Dolo Town, to the east of the capital, and imposed a night-time curfew as part of new drastic measures to fight the disease.
Residents of West Point, where club-wielding youths stormed an Ebola medical facility on Saturday, reacted with fury to the crackdown, hurling stones and shouting at the security forces.
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Photo Credit: SkyNews
Soldiers stationed in Bomi and Grand Cape Mount counties, which border Sierra Leone, were to ‘shoot on sight’ any person trying to cross the border, said deputy chief of staff, Colonel Eric Dennis, according to local newspaper the Daily Observer.
The order comes after border officials reported people continued to cross the porous border illegally.
Grand Cape Mount county had 35 known ‘illegal entry points,’ according to immigration commander Colonel Samuel Mulbah.
Illegal crossings were a major health threat, said Mulbah, ‘because we don’t know the health status of those who cross at night’.
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Photo Credit: U.S. Central Command
As the U.N. scrambles to help tens of thousands of religious minority Iraqis displaced by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL), experts are warning that jihadists may have forced 1,500 Christians and Yazidis into sexual slavery.
“Atrocious accounts on the abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkomen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner,” two U.N. experts said in a statement released in Baghdad.
“We condemn, in the strongest terms, the explicit targeting of women and children and the barbaric acts [ISIS] has perpetrated on minorities in areas under its control,” said U.N. special representative for Iraq Nickolay Mladenov and special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Zainab Bangura.
“We remind all armed groups that acts of sexual violence are grave human rights violations that can be considered as war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Mladenov urged regional governments and the international community to help secure the release of the women and girls captured by the jihadists.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Coptic Bishop: Without Action, It’s Only a Matter of Time Before Islamic Fundamentalism “Infects the Entire World”
By Leah Barkoukis.
ISIS’ barbarism in Syria and Iraq has gotten so bad that even the Vatican has signaled that military action may be necessary. And Down Under, Bishop Anba Suriel, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the diocese of Melbourne, denounced the terrorist group in no uncertain terms and urged Australia, and the world, to act before “such fundamentalisms infects the entire world.”
“The world watches in silence as the last Christians are expelled from Mosul, Iraq in one of the most merciless and barbaric acts of genocide we have seen in the 21st Century,” Suriel, who was born in Egypt, said in a statement last week.
“Mosul, the cradle of Christianity in Iraq since the first centuries, is now purged of its entire Christian population,” he continued. “The ruthless and purposeful savagery of the attacks by the fundamentalist Muslim terrorist organization The Islamic State (IS) formerly known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is truly inconceivable.”
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Photo Credit: Reuters
By DAMIEN GAYLE and SOPHIE JANE EVANS FOR MAILONLINE and MAIL ON SUNDAY REPORTER.
Islamic State militants today ‘massacred’ more than 300 Yazidi men – just one day after allegedly killing 82 others who refused to convert to Islam.
The insurgents stormed into the small village of Kocho in northern Iraq, where they spent five days trying to persuade villagers to take up their religion, local officials said.
When they refused, 82 male members of the ancient sect were reportedly rounded up and shot dead yesterday, while more than 100 women and girls were kidnapped.
And today, a further 312 Yazidis were allegedly murdered and their families abducted.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Rogers: Competing Terror Groups Multiply Danger to U.S.
By Patrick Goodenough.
The terrorist threat facing the United States is greater now than it was before 9/11 and the failure to address the jihadist problem as “an ecosystem” is helping it to spread and become more dangerous, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers warned Sunday.
“The difference here is that, before 9/11, there were single-level threat streams coming into the United States – some pretty serious,” the Michigan Republican said on CBS’ Face the Nation. “Obviously, they got in and conducted the attacks on 9/11.”
“Now you have multiple organizations, all al-Qaeda-minded, trying to accomplish the same thing,” he said, citing the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda affiliated such as the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
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Photo Credit: TownHall
Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital’s largest slum after residents raided a quarantine center for suspected patients and took items including bloody sheets and mattresses.
The violence in the West Point slum occurred late Saturday and was led by residents angry that patients were brought to the holding center from other parts of Monrovia, Tolbert Nyenswah, assistant health minister, said Sunday.
Up to 30 patients were staying at the center and many of them fled at the time of the raid, said Nyenswah. Once they are located they will be transferred to the Ebola center at Monrovia’s largest hospital, he said.
West Point residents went on a “looting spree,” stealing items from the clinic that were likely infected, said a senior police official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the press. The residents took medical equipment and mattresses and sheets that had bloodstains, he said. Ebola is spread through bodily fluids including blood, vomit, feces and sweat.
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Struggling Liberia creates “plague villages” in Ebola epicenter – potential refugee nightmare
By The Extinction Protocol.
To try to control the Ebola epidemic spreading through West Africa, Liberia has quarantined remote villages at the epicenter of the virus, evoking the “plague villages” of medieval Europe that were shut off from the outside world. With few food and medical supplies getting in, many abandoned villagers face a stark choice: stay where they are and risk death or skip quarantine, spreading the infection further in a country ill-equipped to cope. In Boya, in northern Liberia’s Lofa County, Joseph Gbembo, who caught Ebola and survived, says he is struggling to raise 10 children under five years old and support five widows after nine members of his family were killed by the virus. Fearful of catching Ebola themselves, the 30-year-old’s neighbors refuse to speak with him and blame him for bringing the virus to the village. “I am lonely,” he said. “Nobody will talk to me and people run away from me.” He says he has received no food or health care for the children and no help from government officials. Aid workers say that if support does not arrive soon, locals in villages like Boya, where the undergrowth is already spreading among the houses, will simply disappear down jungle footpaths. “If sufficient medication, food and water are not in place, the community will force their way out to fetch food and this could lead to further spread of the virus,” said Tarnue Karbbar, a worker for charity Plan International based in Lofa County/
Ebola has killed at least 1,145 people in four African nations, but in the week through to August 13, Lofa County recorded more new cases than anywhere else – 124 new cases of Ebola and 60 deaths. The World Health Organization and Liberian officials have warned that, with little access by healthcare workers to the remote areas hidden deep in rugged jungle zones, the actual toll may be far higher. Troops have been deployed under operation “White Shield” to stop people from abandoning homes and infecting others in a country where the majority of cases remain at large, either because clinics are full or because they are scared of hospitals regarded as ‘death traps.’ “There has to be concern that people in quarantined areas are left to fend for themselves,” said Mike Noyes, head of humanitarian response at ActionAid UK. “Who is going to be the police officer who goes to these places? There’s a risk that these places become plague villages.” Aid workers say the virus reminds them of the forces roaming Liberia during the civil war, making it a byword for brutality. “It was like the war. It was so desolate,” said Adolphus Scott, a worker for U.N. child agency UNICEF describing Zango Town in the jungles of northern Liberia, where most of the 2,000 residents had either died of Ebola or fled.
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By Kevin Boyd.
Most of us have seen or read the appalling stories about the atrocities of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. However, a recent story covered by the Daily Mail – and verified by other media outlets – probably takes the cake.
Khaled Sharrouf is a Muslim from Australia who went to Syria to join ISIS and took his sons with him. After a Syrian soldier was beheaded (presumably by Sharrouf or a fellow fighter), he and his seven-year-old son posed with it for pictures:
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Pure Evil: ISIS Is Burying Alive And Crucifying Young Christian Children
By F. Peter Brown.
ISIS is now beheading children and crucifying youths in their genocidal war against Christians, Yazidis, and whomever else is standing in the way of the caliphate.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: WND
By Bob Unruh. The images of atrocities by Muslim fighters in Iraq – and Syria – against their soldier and civilian enemies have been have circulating for some time already. There have been reports, many documented in images and even videos, of ISIS crucifixions, executions, mass burials and worse.
But now Americans collectively are being left gasping by a flood of new reports and photographs depicting such horrors being inflicted on children.
One such report came recently from the Anglican Communion News Service, which said the son, age 5, of a founder of Baghdad’s Anglican church was “cut in half during an attack by the Islamic State,” a name by which ISIS also is known.
“An emotional Canon Andrew White told ACNS that he christened the boy several years ago, and that the child’s parents had named the lad Andrew after him,” the report said.
“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” he said. “I baptized his child in my church in Baghdad. This little boy, they named him after me – he was called Andrew,” White told the agency.
Image of child’s decapitated body (image courtesy Catholic.org)
Read more from “Children murdered by ISIS” HERE.
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Photo Credit: AP
By Lauretta Brown. An Iraqi Christian who fled for his life from Mosul says that his Muslim neighbors welcomed the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) and told him “this land belongs to Islam.”
“We left Mosul because ISIS came to the city. The (Sunni) people of Mosul embraced ISIS, and drove the Christians out of the city,” the unnamed Christian refugee, who reportedly fled from Mosul to Lebanon, told Lebanese LBC/LDC TV in a July 30 interview translated by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
When ISIS entered Mosul, the people hailed them and drove out the Christians,” he said in the video interview with a young child sitting on his lap. “Why did they expel just the Christians from Mosul? There are many sects in Mosul. Why just the Christians? ”he asked.
“This is nothing new,” he added. “Even before, the Christians could not go anywhere. The Christians have faced threats of murder, kidnapping, jizya (a tax imposed on non-Muslims).”
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Photo Credit: Interdependent
An intelligence official warned Thursday that the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria “sees conflict with the U.S. as inevitable,” The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported in his latest column.
The columnist, known for his extensive sourcing in the intelligence community, summarized an intelligence briefing he attended:
In a briefing for journalists Thursday, a panel of five U.S. intelligence officials summed up their assessment of an organization that has shown a remarkable durability because it is “patient,” “well-organized,” “opportunistic” and “flexible.” Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group has rebounded from about 1,500 fighters in 2010 to more than 10,000 today — becoming a global jihadist organization that communicates in many languages.
“We don’t assess this as something that will collapse on its own,” said one of the officials, who commented based on an agreement that their remarks would not be attributed. “But with pressure and alternatives [that might draw away its Sunni supporters], it could collapse over time.” The intelligence experts cautioned that counterterrorist tools, such as drone strikes and other air attacks, wouldn’t be sufficient “to defeat it rather than just ratchet it back.”
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US conducts new airstrikes as ISIS kills dozens of Yazidis in Iraq town, officials say
By Fox News.
The U.S. military conducted new airstrikes against Islamic militants Friday as sources tell Fox News members of the group killed at least 90 male members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority in a northern village and kidnapped “dozens” of women and children.
A senior U.S. defense official told Fox News that U.S. surveillance drones saw evidence of the massacre of dozens of Yazidi men. The U.S. military later struck two militant targets, killing some of those involved in the killings, the source said.
The U.S. military said in a statement Friday that the U.S. forces conducted the airstrikes on Islamic State vehicles in the village of Kawju. The village is located south of the village of Sinjar.
The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnic and religious group which numbers in the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, has been persecuted in the north by Islamic State militants, with at least 500 killed prior to Friday’s news, according to Iraq’s human rights minister.
Sources told Fox News it appears residents in the village did not comply with the militants’ demands to convert to Islam.
Read more from this story HERE.