Showing posts with label Jihadists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jihadists. Show all posts

Monday 26 January 2015

Abdelhamid Abaaoud brain of Molenbeek's network dismantled in their hideaway at Verviers

Verviers (Belgium), the "Grand'Poste"...
Verviers (Belgium), the "Grand'Poste" (1904/1909 - Architect: Van Hoecke). Nederlands: Verviers (België), de "Grand'Poste" (1904/1909 - Architect: Van Hoecke). Walon: Vèrvî (Bèljike), li Grand'Poste (1904/1909 - Âchitèke: Van Hoecke). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The last few days we have seen more pictures of the horror things Abdelhamid Abaaoud did. Already some months ago we could see him driving a car with some bodies hanging on it being carried over the ground when  this Belgian-born son of an immigrant shopkeeper from Morocco, was laughing with them in Syria.

After one year having been in Syria it seems he is now back in Europe, but nobody seems to know where he went to after he was last seen in Greece. In any case he has earned pages in the international press, cause of his actions and the raid in Verviers last week. He has emerged as a prime suspect in what Belgian authorities say was an imminent terrorist operation thwarted by raids on Jan. 15 on an extremist hideaway in the east of Belgium and nine homes in Molenbeek, after the terrorist attacks in France on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

It is known that about 450 people left Belgium to go to fight in Syria for the Jihad and to support ISIS.
Estimates of the number of foreigners in the Islamic State, or ISIS, vary, but of the more than 31,000 fighters the C.I.A. estimated in September to be active, as many as half came from foreign countries, according to the International Center for the Study of Radicalization in London and the Soufan Group in New York. The overwhelming majority are men from Arab and other Muslim countries, drawn to jihad by religious zeal, a chance to fight the decadent West and the lure of excitement in otherwise dreary lives. But the flow of non-Muslim or non-religious recruits from the West, and their use in some of the most grisly actions, is a new and worrying phenomenon.(NYT)

For moths there where investigations going, already before the Paris attack, and as a result of the findings Belgian investigators knew that the terrorist where going to attack several police stations in Belgium and that it was time to act. Therefore on  January 15 the Belgian police raided a house in the eastern city of Verviers, near the German border. The two terrorist suspects killed in that police raid were both from Molenbeek, Belgium’s second poorest area with a youth unemployment rate of 40 percent, and a place where next to the nearby Vilvoorde, lots of Muslim have found sympathy for the Islamic cause.
In Molenbeek, a Brussels district, a heavily immigrant borough with 22 mosques known to the local officials — more than four times the number of churches — could be found the origins of the network dismantled in their hideaway at Verviers.

Sunday January 25 it was also decided that the refugees who were taken in to Belgium would not be welcome again after they would have gone to fight in Syria and would loose all their rights which were freely given to them, on their return form the battlefield. 

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Read more: 
Belgium Confronts the Jihadist Danger Within
Being Charlie 2Being Charlie 3Being Charlie 4Being Charlie 5Being Charlie 6,Being Charlie 7Being Charlie 8Being Charlie 9Being Charlie 10Being Charlie 11
It’s beautiful to watch the spread of #JeSuisCharlie across the world,
Where do we stand in the backdrop of Charlie Hebdo Massacre ?,
Charlie Hebdo, offensive satire and why ‘Freedom of Speech’ needs more discussion
NYTimes.com Special Series: Inside the Jihad
When Jihadists Come Home
Islamic State Praise Paris Attackers as 'Heroic Jihadists'
The Danger of Foreign JihadistsAmericans wrongly informed about situation in Europe

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Wednesday 21 May 2014

Abu Hamza is gone, but Britain is still a hotbed of radical hatred

Britain: The real threat to our security is not Vladimir Putin or Chinese cyber-warriors, but the new breed of jihadists
 
The one thing you can count on when dealing with Islamist extremists who freely ply their trade from the sanctuary of the British Isles is that they are fully aware of their human and legal rights. Whether it is through the useful advice provided by civil liberties activists – who more often than not are funded at British taxpayers’ expense – or the result of studying al-Qaeda’s manual on waging judicial jihad against the West, the leaders of British-based Islamist groups know only too well how to protect themselves against unwelcome scrutiny of their activities.
The extensive support network available to terrorists such as the Egyptian-born Abu Hamza al-Masri would certainly help to explain how the radical cleric from north London managed to avoid extradition to America for a decade or more, thereby making a mockery of British justice, as well as undermining the efforts of successive British governments to protect the public from attack.
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The life sentence that is likely to be imposed on Abu Hamza in September will symbolise the end of a generation of British-based Islamist radicals who openly rejoiced in the horrors of the September 11 attacks in 2001. But it is unlikely that this will deter the modern breed of jihadists, who arguably pose far more of a threat to our national security than Abu Hamza ever did.
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Tuesday’s conviction of a 31-year-old Portsmouth man for attending a terrorist training camp in Syria shows how seriously the security authorities are treating this challenge. A number of other suspects, including Moazzem Begg, the former Guantanamo detainee and darling of BBC current affairs programmes, are now awaiting trial on similar charges. Add to this all the other radical Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, that are using Britain as a base from which to campaign for the overthrow of pro-Western regimes – often through the use of violence – in countries such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and you get some idea of the scale of the security nightmare our hitherto tolerant approach to Islamist extremism has created.

Read the full article: Abu Hamza is gone, but Britain is still a hotbed of radical hatred
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