TonyGosling
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 Posted: Sat Dec 16, 2017 12:43 am Post subject: |
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ISIS was state-sponsored by US allies, says former government intelligence analyst (EXCLUSIVE)
By Nafeez Ahmed
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/isis-was-state-sponsored-by-us -allies-says-former-government-intelligence-analyst-exclusive-51a9e999 c437
Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.
A stunning new study authored by a former US government intelligence analyst and staff member for official investigations into the 9/11 attacks, concludes that the Islamic State (ISIS) received significant state-sponsorship up to 2016.
The study is corroborated by revelations from two former senior British intelligence officials in exclusive interviews with INSURGE.
The new evidence raises urgent questions about the material context of ISIS’ extraordinarily rapid growth, and its ability to inspire incidents such as the truck attack in New York.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the peer-reviewed paper published in the Routledge journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism in July, confirms not only that several regional states deliberately empowered al-Qaeda and ISIS foreign fighters for their geopolitical ends, but that many of these states are ostensibly US allies in the ‘war on terror’: including Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
How States Exploit Jihadist Foreign Fighters
Jihadist foreign fighters are frequently described as non-state actors whose prominence challenges the traditional…
www.tandfonline.com
Study author Professor Daniel Byman of Georgetown University’s Security Studies Programme was previously a Middle East analyst for the US intelligence community, and headed up the Center for Middle East Studies at the RAND Corporation — a major US government defence contractor.
Professor Daniel Byman, former 9/11 Commission staffer and US government intelligence analyst
He later went on to become a senior staffer at the 9/11 Commission and the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
‘Non-state’ terror is often state-sponsored
Flying in the face of much conventional wisdom on the ‘non-state’ nature of international Islamist terrorism, the study finds that:
“Some of the most important foreign fighter movements in the world today receive massive and explicit state support, while still others rely on states to tolerate their fund-raising, transit, recruitment, and other core activities.”
The study pinpoints the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad for facilitating the “transit of foreign fighters from its territory to Iraq” and nurturing “various anti-US Sunni groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State’s predecessor organization.”
It also lays out the expansion of Iranian power through proxy forces such as the Lebanese Hizballah, as well as Shi’a militias in Iraq.
Of course, the role of the Syrian and Iranian states in facilitating foreign fighters is well-known and widely reported.
Yet Byman’s most explosive allegations are against key US allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which he accuses of “complicity” in supporting ISIS:
“A number of US allies allowed their citizens to send money or volunteer with little interference, at times bordering on regime complicity. When the organization [IS] established itself in Syria a decade later, key US regional partners like Turkey facilitated the flow of fighters and logistical support in the hopes of expediting the overthrow of the Assad regime. Without the relatively permissive environments in these states, the Islamic State would have been far weaker and fighting it much easier.”
Byman’s analysis corroborates my previous reporting on evidence that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have at various times supported Islamist militant groups in Syria, including al-Qaeda in Iraq, which went on to metamorphose into ISIS.
Two years ago, a declassified Pentagon intelligence report from 2012 revealed not only that the US government had been aware of the policy of its allies at the time, but seemed to approve of the strategy despite anticipating that it might culminate in the appearance of an IS-type entity.
Turkey
In the Byman paper, however, Turkey comes in for the most detailed criticism. Noting that Turkey aggressively targeted al-Qaeda through 2012, the paper observes that “this policy changed as the Syrian civil war heated up and Ankara sought to both overthrow the government in Damascus and prevent the emergence of a strong Kurdish group.”
Byman asserts that Turkey under President Erdogan quite deliberately sponsored Islamist militant groups, including al-Qaeda, in its bid to oust Assad. In the early years of the war, Ankara “sought to bolster forces, including jihadists, seeking [Assad’s] overthrow. Turkey also encouraged jihadists to attack Kurdish forces in Syria.”
Of course, Turkey and other US allies supported a range of opposition fighters, including secular and Islamist groups which ideologically opposed disavowed al-Qaeda and IS. Unfortunately, the pressures of the war meant that these groups frequently ended up coordinating their anti-Assad offensives and sharing weapons.
INSIGHT: Yet amidst this confusing situation, US allies also intentionally directed support to specific jihadist groups, including ISIS.
By 2015, Byman reports, “Turkey allowed foreign fighters to use the country as a logistics base for the war in Syria,” and that also meant “providing sanctuary, arms, and medical care” to jihadist groups. He cites former US Ambassador to Turkey, Francis Ricciardone, who said:
“The Turks frankly worked with groups for a period, including al-Nusra [al-Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria].”
Another approach was to turn a blind eye to foreign fighters coming into Syria through Turkey:
“Turkish security services ignored jihadists traveling to Syria from Chechnya and nearby areas via Turkey. Meanwhile, volunteers from all over the world would arrive in Turkey, where facilitators would help them get to the war zone.”
Most disturbingly, that policy of ignoring “the growing influx” of foreign fighters, many streaming to join ISIS, continued even after ISIS expanded into Syria in 2013 according to Byman. The Turkish military “even cooperated with the Islamic State, including allowing convoys to travel through Turkey, against one of their mutual enemies: the Kurds.”
It was only from around 2015 to 2016, Byman explains, that Turkey’s toleration for the flow of foreign fighters of all denominations into Syria “diminished considerably”, based on the changing “political calculus” — which included the escalating threat from IS and other jihadist groups to Turkish national security, among other factors.
INSIGHT: Byman’s analysis adds credibility to the detailed allegations of the highest-ranking whistleblower to have ever come on the record with claims of Turkish state-sponsorship of terrorism.
In September 2016, INSURGE ran an exclusive interview with Ahmet Sait Yayla, Chief of the Counter-Terrorism and Operations Division of Turkish National Police between 2010 and 2012, before becoming Chief of the Public Order and Crime Prevention Division until 2014.
Whistleblower exposes how NATO’s leading ally is arming and funding ISIS
“I am the police chief who was asked to guard ISIS terrorists”
medium.com
Yayla provided a shocking insider account of how he had personally witnessed evidence of high-level Turkish state sponsorship of ISIS during his police career, which eventually led him to resign.
Pakistan
Another government highlighted by the Byman study is Pakistan, described as a key example of how some states — caught between the pull of domestic constituencies and foreign pressures — end up swaying between “limited crackdowns and limited support.”
Despite working regularly with the United States to stop foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda, Byman observes that Pakistan simultaneously allows “weapons, money, recruits, and other support to go to an array of jihadist groups with foreign ties.”
INSIGHT: Although the Pakistani government cooperates with important arrests of al-Qaeda figures, it also permits powerful domestic groups like Jamaat-e Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam “to work with various militant groups, often in cooperation with Pakistani intelligence.”
According to Byman, such complicity is endemic at the highest levels:
“Pakistani intelligence works with Islamist groups in Pakistan that run religious schools and, together, raise thousands of recruits, including suicide bombers, to help both the Afghan Taliban in its fight against the US-backed government in Kabul and Lashkar-e-Taiba in its operations against India. The Pakistani government has deliberately afforded its intelligence service a high degree of autonomy, and the service itself gives its operatives considerable flexibility.”
Saudi Arabia
The third state most prominently featured in the Byman paper is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which stands out as an example of how some “US allies also may have close ties to and depend on institutions that support foreign fighters.”
INSIGHT: In Saudi Arabia’s case, the Kingdom “has long had an agreement with its own religious establishment to bolster its legitimacy,” which has included the practice of “allowing religious figures to raise money to defend Islam” — often by financing foreign fighters — and thus “honoring the contract of support in exchange for legitimacy.”
US intelligence has for some decades been aware that various senior members of the Saudi royal family have channelled hundreds of millions of dollars to extremist groups, many of whom aspire to overthrow the Kingdom itself, as a form of ‘protection money’.
To some extent — notwithstanding the reality of terror incidents inside Saudi Arabia (such as in 2003) — Byman argues that this strategy has succeeded, given that “the vast majority of Saudi foreign fighters embraced jihadist causes overseas but remained loyal, or at least not violently opposed, to the Saudi regime.”
Another dimension of this strategy is to tolerate or sponsor individuals who promote violent ideologies, but stop short of directly advocating violence themselves.
“Saudi Arabia still sponsors religious leaders, mosques, media, and schools that embrace a theological disposition that matches many jihadist teachings,” writes Byman. In Kosovo, for instance, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states “poured money into religious institutions in the country” which promoted violence in the name of protecting Islam, but “did not directly fund travel to Syria”.
While Saudi Arabia has now established more robust counter-terrorism measures to target domestic financing mechanisms, “donors sending money to fighters in Syria often channelled their funds via Kuwait to avoid Saudi countermeasures.”
Yet little has been done to resolve the wider porous nature of Gulf financial institutions, which provides a carte blanche for such covert funding to continue with impunity: “States that adopt this relatively permissive approach often simply deny any form of support is occurring or dismiss it as an aberration.”
Blowback
While Byman’s paper focuses on the role of regional states in fuelling Islamist militant networks for their own ends, it also raises questions about the strategic rationale behind the US alliance with such states.
INSIGHT: Not a single US ally has received any meaningful coercive pressure to change these activities that support terrorism. For Byman, this is because such pressures might end up damaging alliances with these states in such a way that would “come with significant costs for US national interests.”
In the case of Saudi Arabia, he notes, if the US held the Kingdom “drastically more accountable for its continued toleration of some rhetorical and material support, it would likely either undermine the relationship and risk losing a critical US ally or compromise the stability of the country by forcing the Saudis to challenge pillars of their legitimacy.”
The US has faced similar dilemmas in relation to Turkey and Pakistan. The core dynamic is that as these states can threaten to reduce intelligence sharing and other cooperation, US pressure could lead them to accelerate support for terrorists, “making the problem worse.”
The end result is that some terrorism — namely, the terrorism of its own allies — is effectively deemed as acceptable, based on a dubious cost-benefit calculation:
“Thus, ultimately even the United States is willing to tolerate some other states’ toleration or support for jihadist foreign fighters because there are other more valuable benefits reaped by maintaining close relations.”
Byman’s explanation gives some context to what appears to be official awareness of Gulf state complicity, as evident from a secret memo written by then secretary of state Hillary Clinton in August 2014 to John Podesta, her campaign chairman.
In the memo, Podesta noted — citing Western intelligence sources — that the Saudi and Qatari governments:
“… are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State] and other radical Sunni groups in the region”.
What Byman does not say, is that by actively maintaining alliances with the very regimes that have sponsored ISIS, US foreign policy itself is undermining the ‘war on terror’, while indirectly aiding and abetting the official enemy.
From the question of moral culpability, does this not also amount to a form of complicity?
But there are other deeper, systemic issues plaguing the post war international system which explain why the Gulf states must be protected at almost any cost:
their role as ‘guardians’ of a Western-dominated regional petroleum architecture;
the massive contributions of these oil-rich regimes to the Western arms trade and financial system; and
the extent to which Western intelligence services have become institutionally, financially and even ideologically dependent on these governments for covert operations.
Controlling the oil order
As British historian Mark Curtis has documented in his book Web of Deceit, citing declassified Foreign Office and State Department files, it’s often all about oil.
AXIOM: Control of regional oil reserves has always been most fundamental interest behind US and British relations with the Gulf states. Intelligence issues alone have never been the driving force of these alliances.
In 1947, Curtis points out, British planners described oil as “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination”. US planners similarly acknowledged their “mutual recognition” with Britain that the two countries’ oil policy was based upon “control, at least for the moment, of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world”.
AXIOM: A second component of this, writes Curtis, is that the US and Britain expect oil profits to be invested in Western economies, either through the domination of Western companies, or by way of lubricating the wider world economy. Thirdly, and relatedly, Gulf elites are expected to invest substantively in Western arms.
“Repressive Middle Eastern elites understand these priorities, and also that it is their role in this system that helps keep them in power locally,” Curtis observes. “The West could withdraw its support for them if they got any wayward ideas” — which is, arguably, what happened with countries like Iran, once a staunch ally of the US under the brutal reign of the Shah.
This suggests that part of the problem is the fact that the US is convinced of the absolute and unquestionable necessity of maintaining alliances with these regimes, regardless of their sponsorship of terrorism — which appears merely as a sort of regrettable inconvenience, to be nevertheless routinely exploited to justify unmitigated military expansionism.
That in turn is because of a fundamentally flawed foreign policy approach — an approach which privileges the power of the arms and oil industries at the expense of real national security.
The blind eye of convenience
Byman’s analysis is complemented by two former British intelligence officers who spoke exclusively to INSURGE, drawing on their own expertise on how intelligence policies have often systematically undermined national security in the pursuit of narrow geopolitical goals.
Far from merely being caught up in its own unfortunate “dilemma” — being forced to rely on states that support terror to fight terror — they argue that the US policy of tolerating allied “support for jihadist foreign fighters” is due to dubious foreign policy interests.
INSIGHT: According to Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, British authorities failed to prevent UK citizens from “joining jihadist groups in Libya and Syria” not because of inadequate security powers, but due to their perceived geopolitical utility at the time.
Former UK counter-terrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge on BBC’s Crisis Control
The ‘blind eye’ policy, Shoebridge told me, was consistent with the UK government position at the time of supporting rebel groups in Libya and Syria in attempting to “topple Gaddafi and Assad.”
This was in spite of the fact that these Britons “made no secret on social media of the fact, even sometimes posting evidence of their participation in acts of terrorism and war crimes.” There was an “obvious risk of terrorism blowback were such trained and experienced extremists to return to Britain.”
It was only after 2013, “when groups such as IS started to harm US and UK interests in Syria and Iraq, and kill US and UK citizens, that any action at all was taken to stop British jihadists from travelling, or arresting and charging those who returned.”
The official defence for this failure is that before 2013, the legislation necessary to tackle travelling jihadists did not exist. Shoebridge dismisses this as nonsense: “First, it’s been illegal to take part in terrorist related activities abroad since 2006 and, second, the new legislation introduced since 2013 has itself barely been used.”
Collusion
This self-defeating strategy in Libya and Syria went well beyond simply turning a blind eye, however.
Alastair Crooke, a former 30 year senior MI6 officer who dealt with Islamist groups across the Muslim world, told INSURGE that, at the time, the US and Britain actively facilitated their allies’ sponsorship of militants in Syria.
Former 30-year MI6 veteran Alastair Crooke
“When the US and British militaries were working with the Turks to train various Syrian rebel groups, many military officers knew that among those we were training was the next round of jihadists,” said Crooke. “But the CIA was fixated on regime change. We knew that even if at any moment ISIS was eventually defeated, these Islamist groups would move against secular and moderate forces.”
This collusion between Western security services and Islamist extremism, Crooke told me, has very long roots in an intelligence culture that went back as far as the 1920s, “when in the attempt to gather control of the Arabian peninsula, King Abdulaziz told us that the key is Wahabism.”
This alliance culminated in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which was “the first clear use of fired-up Islamist radicals to provoke Russia into an invasion. This set the scene ever since. From then, our intelligence services have had a deeply entwined history with Islamist groups based on the belief that Saudi Arabia had the power to turn them on and off at will.”
INSIGHT: Islamist groups have been used by British and American intelligence services, said Crooke, essentially “to control and contain the Middle East” against different forces, Nasserism, nationalists, and more recently Ba’athists.
Outsourcing intelligence to terror sponsors
Perhaps Crooke’s most damning insight was how British intelligence became increasingly dependent on Gulf state intelligence services to conduct regional operations:
“In the 1980s, Saudi began paying for operations with large sums of money — which was considered acceptable in the interests of landing a blow on the USSR’s influence in the region. As a result, though, our intelligence services became increasingly dependent on Saudi funding. If they wanted to avoid Congressional or parliamentary oversight, and to continue expanding difficult and sensitive off-the-books operations, they would go instead to their Gulf partners.”
INSIGHT: In other words, British intelligence services have increasingly outsourced funding for British covert operations to Saudi and Gulf state money. Rather than simply privatising intelligence to fund off-the books operations, they have compartmentalised them under the rubric of foreign repressive regimes.
The impact of this on the integrity of the US and British intelligence community has been devastating:
“The assumption is that this doesn’t affect the integrity of intelligence, but clearly it does. The Gulf states have become paymasters for increasing expenditures on intelligence operations that the security services would prefer not be disclosed.”
The impact of this can be seen in the way the CIA ‘vetted’ rebels in Syria by largely outsourcing the most critical components of the vetting process to the very same allies who have been sponsored extremists, as I reported previously for Middle East Eye.
War on Islamic State: A New Cold War fiction
Russia is bombing "terrorists" in Syria, and the US is understandably peeved. A day after the bombing began, Obama's…
www.middleeasteye.net
I asked Crooke what should be done to resolve this problem. “We should start by surfacing these matters into consciousness,” he said. “Only then can we begin the conversations needed to resolve them. We need to understand that the tension between fighting a ‘war on terror’ while at the same time in some ways being in bed with terrorists, has produced a disaster.”
Action: While we may feel overwhelmed by the sheer secrecy and power of this unaccountable national security system, it functions in this unaccountable way precisely because its operations escape public scrutiny. It is the job of journalists, analysts and citizens to pry open these matters so that they become more widely understood and debated.
In this context, whatever its limitations, Byman’s analysis has done a critical public service in bringing some of these matters into the light of day.
US and British regional alliances with various Muslim regimes have functioned systematically to undermine national security. It is long past time to re-evaluate these alliances.
This INSURGE story was enabled by crowdfunding: Pay as little or as much as you like to keep alive our independent journalism for people and planet, via www.patreon.com/nafeez
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award-winning 16-year investigative journalist and creator of INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project. He is ‘System Shift’ columnist at VICE’s Motherboard.
His work has been published in The Guardian, VICE, Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, Raw Story, New Internationalist, Huffington Post UK, Al-Arabiya English, AlterNet, The Ecologist, and Asia Times, among other places.
Nafeez has twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s ‘Top 1,000’ list of most influential people in London and was awarded the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in 2015, the Routledge-GCSP Essay Prize in 2010, and the Premio Napoli (Naples Prize — Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by decree of the President) in 2003. His work has been used by the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
His latest book, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017) is a scientific study of how climate, energy, food and economic crises are driving state failures around the world.
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TonyGosling
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Joined: 25 Jul 2005
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Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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| Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2018 1:14 am Post subject: |
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How a Scottish ambulance helped piece together the mystery of an ISIS commander's filmed call to arms to Brits in Syria
http://www.itv.com/news/2018-10-11/how-a-scottish-ambulance-helped-pie ce-together-the-mystery-of-an-isis-commanders-filmed-call-to-arms-to-b rits-in-syria/
ITV News investigation by Security Editor Rohit Kachroo and Security Producer Dan Howells
"This could be the last thing we do in life."
They're the words of an Islamic State commander to a group of European men in rare, raw footage obtained by ITV News.
The video was filmed in 2013, notably before the caliphate was declared and at a point when Isis recruitment was on the rise.
Many questions arose from the footage: where was it filmed, who is the man speaking and who are the crowd listening? Plus - most curiously - why is a British ambulance at the scene?
An ITV News investigation answered them all.
Firstly, what is said in the video?
The speech was filmed from a window at the property.
The speech was filmed from a window at the property. Credit: ITV News
The commander, who ITV News would come to identify, sets up the plan to build a new "Dawlat al-Islam" - an Islamic State in Syria.
"We know the place, have times, have Shilkas [an anti-aircraft weapon], have bullets, have weapons, like no other place," he tells the group in English as he is filmed from a nearby window at the property.
"This is a perfect place, a perfect spot to hit to build a new Dawlat al-Islam (Islamic State)."
Why does his message matter?
For the timing and the tactics. In 2013, it's a clear call-to-arms for the Europeans to play a key role in the soon-to-be established caliphate.
"Daesh, they couldn’t attack," the leader tells them. "So the Emir of Dawlat al Islam said 'we might take out the Turkish group and take in the European group'."
The words are unmistakable. But with only the footage to go on, many questions remained.
Where was the video filmed?
The three-domed building towards the top left of the picture provided an invaluable locator in the search.
The three-domed building towards the top left of the picture provided an invaluable locator in the search. Credit: ITV News
We were confident the group were in the Syrian city of Aleppo but had no idea of the property.
Tracking down the exact location meant following the on-screen clues.
We compared a domed building in the distance and other structures to satellite images from 2013.
The domed roof and isolated buildings used as reference points in satellite imagery.
The domed roof and isolated buildings used as reference points in satellite imagery. Credit: ITV News
Then we scanned the network of dusty roads for a property with a view of the buildings and which had a fountain in the courtyard.
Soon, a clear location emerged.
So we are sure the filming took place at a suburban villa in a small town called Hraytan.
But it was another thing on screen that drew our keenest attention: the British ambulance beyond the walls.
What identified it as British?
A close-up of the vehicle showed it was a Scottish ambulance.
A close-up of the vehicle showed it was a Scottish ambulance. Credit: ITV News
There was no number plate visible on the vehicle, but a closer look at the peeled signage on high-resolution images showed it had originally read: Scottish Ambulance Service.
A search for footage of ambulances in Syria at the time, which were used in aid convoys, delivered a match to one vehicle.
An ambulance featured in a YouTube video from a convoy in Syria showed the writing peeled over the same lettering, confirming it as the vehicle.
An ambulance featured in a YouTube video from a convoy in Syria showed the writing peeled over the same lettering, confirming it as the vehicle. Credit: ITV News
Its signage was peeled in exactly the same places.
And that footage gave us a number plate to trace.
What was it doing there?
The decommissioned ambulance was part of a legitimate aid convoy and had been bought earlier in the year in an auction.
It was reported to have arrived in Syria the week before our obtained video was filmed.
The ambulance in use in East Kilbride prior to being decommissioned and auctioned.
The ambulance in use in East Kilbride prior to being decommissioned and auctioned. Credit: ITV News
Using the registration, we also found an image of it still in operation in the streets of East Kilbride 10 months earlier.
The Scottish Ambulance Service confirmed to ITV News: "This A&E Ambulance, which spent most of its operational life in the Wishaw area, was owned by The Scottish Ambulance Service until decommissioned in 2013 when it was sold through public auction."
Are all the men in the video militants?
Islamic State commander Hassan al-Mandlawi is now jailed.
Islamic State commander Hassan al-Mandlawi is now jailed. Credit: ITV News
It's clear the speaker giving the tactical instructions is a militant leader.
He's a Swede, Hassan al-Mandlawi, who left Syria to return home to Gothenburg.
Fellow Swede Abu Bakr was among the crowd listening to the tactics.
Fellow Swede Abu Bakr was among the crowd listening to the tactics. Credit: ITV News
Al-Mandlawi was later arrested and then jailed for taking part in an execution video.
A second man was easy to identify.
He's another Swedish militant, known as Abu Bakr, which drew our investigation's first clear link to Britain.
What was the link?
Abu Bakr and Khadijah Dare's young son later appeared in an Isis propaganda video.
Abu Bakr and Khadijah Dare's young son later appeared in an Isis propaganda video.
Bakr had married a British woman, Khadijah Dare, from London.
Formerly known as Grace, her connection to Isis is well known; her mother even publicly appealed for her to return home on a programme called Jihadi Brides.
Bakr and Dare's son would also later feature in an Isis video.
Is Bakr's family the only British link to this video?
The little girl in the blue and yellow dress is heard crying out for her father in English.
The little girl in the blue and yellow dress is heard crying out for her father in English. Credit: ITV News
We didn't think so. There appeared to be other pointers in the footage too.
The young girl, who becomes bored, seeks out her father with a call of "daddy" in what appears to be an English accent.
But we had our suspicions confirmed having already found one of the other men in the footage.
Who is he?
One of the men in the video agreed to talk to ITV News but wanted to remain anonymous.
One of the men in the video agreed to talk to ITV News but wanted to remain anonymous. Credit: ITV News
We tracked him down to his homeland in Finland.
After returning home from Syria, terrorism offences against him were dropped.
He agreed to talk to us but wanted to remain anonymous. So we travelled to Helsinki and met him.
What did he say?
The Finn, blurred above, was among the group of men listening to Hassan al-Mandlawi.
The Finn, blurred above, was among the group of men listening to Hassan al-Mandlawi. Credit: ITV News
He remembers the day that footage was filmed - but claims not all the listeners in front of the fountain were militants.
Some of the people are aid workers, who like him - he says - were there for humanitarian purposes.
And, yes, he remembers the Scottish ambulance.
"(It) was brought by British aid workers," he says. "At some point they gave me that ambulance... and (we) went to refugee camps."
The Finn also confirmed the presence of British-based fighters in the video straight away.
How did he know them?
Because, it turns out, he used to be a student in Manchester so it was easy for him to spot the Brits.
He says he became interested in the suffering of Syrians during his Bachelors degree course.
He remembers his local mosque talking a lot about what was happening in Syria during Friday sermons.
Play Video
So who did he identify as British based?
He named the father of the young girl in the footage as Ibn Ajam and said he was from the UK, but we couldn't find out more about him.
But he notably named another as Abu Yaqoob, describing him as one of the "first foreign fighters".
Speaking of Yaqoob, he says: "I didn’t like his personality and his attitude."
He remembers him being "aggressive" and humiliating locals in Syria.
And, he says, Yaqoob was the connection to more recruitment from Britain.
"Later on, some of his friends came from England," he said.
Who is Abu Yaqoob?
Nero Saraiva is a known close friend to the four British executioners commonly known as 'The Beatles'.
Nero Saraiva is a known close friend to the four British executioners commonly known as 'The Beatles'. Credit: ITV News
We believe Abu Yaqoob is Nero Saraiva, who we identified from images taken before he left for Syria.
Angolan-born Saraiva moved to London from Lisbon with his family and is a known close friend to the four British executioners commonly known as 'The Beatles'.
On Twitter he even previewed one of their infamous beheading videos.
Saraiva left east London six years ago.
It's not clear whether he’s still alive, but some family members have said, if he is, they fear he might return to Britain.
What have we learned?
Saraiva's fate remains one of the questions still without an answer.
He and others who appear in the footage would clearly go on to follow their leader's words into action.
Yet it came at a time of blurred interests and roles of foreigners within the country, from delivering aid, supporting the uprising or joining the IS cause.
The group listening to Hassan al-Mandlawi.
The group listening to Hassan al-Mandlawi. Credit: ITV News
Not all those listening can be identified as recruited violent extremists.
But our investigation into the grainy call-to-arms filmed in Syria five years ago has brought one thing into sharper focus.
It's more visual proof of the wide international spread and early British connections to Islamic State's era-defining hate call to arms.
And why does it still matter what was happening in 2013?
Because, with Islamic State now in retreat, those who managed to survive are potentially now heading back to - or already living in - Britain.
Last updated Thu 11 Oct 2018
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http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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TonyGosling
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| Posted: Thu Nov 21, 2019 11:59 pm Post subject: |
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ISIS Secrets Spilled In Rare On-Camera Interviews: "We Just Walked Into Syria"
by Tyler Durden Tue, 11/19/2019 - 15:10
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/secrets-spilled-rare-camera-isi s-interviews-we-just-walked-syria
Over the years of the war in Syria, an overwhelming amount of evidence has amassed documenting that the so-called 'Islamic State' caliphate was established after tens of thousands of ISIS and other foreign fighters were allowed to pour across Turkey's southern border into Syria.
That NATO's second largest military with the help of its allies such as the US, Britain, France, and Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar facilitated what the State Department in 2014 described as the largest mass movement of jihadist terrorists in modern history should be a scandal of monumental importance, yet the mainstream media predictably ignored it and "moved on".
And now more bombshell proof of state sponsorship behind the prior rapid rise of ISIS: below are details exposed during unprecedented on-camera interviews of imprisoned ISIS members in Syria spilling all. They confess openly that Turkish military and intelligence simply let them "just walk into Syria".
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Award-winning journalist Lindsey Snell, who's been widely published in outlets ranging from MSNBC to ABC to Foreign Policy and others, gained unprecedented access to ISIS prisoners at a facility administered by the Kurdish-led SDF in Hasakah province in northeast Syria:
Abdullah granted us access to a prison in Hasakah that holds around 5,000 ISIS members from 28 different countries. We were able to spend five hours there, touring the various sections and interviewing ISIS militants. Abdullah’s first request to us was that we refrain from telling the prisoners that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’ leader, had recently been killed in Idlib. “They don’t know. And no good will come from them knowing,” he said.
Those interviewed confessed that their arrival in Syria years prior without doubt had the cooperation of Turkish authorities. Watch the interviews and video report here:
The Investigative Journal
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“Turkey let all of these jihadis cross its border into Syria, and now, Turkey is giving [ISIS] the chance to start again.” Read @lindseysnell’s report from an ISIS prison and the al-Hol camp in Northeast Syria: http://bit.ly/2rRXPpL
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One captured militant, a Turkish ISIS member identified as Murat Kaymak expressed his initial shock at how easy it was to just walk across the border at the city of Gaziantep.
“I thought it was a joke,” he said. “How can such a large portion of the Turkish border be open? With no police or military? We just walked into Syria.”
As journalist Lindsey Snell describes in her report for The Investigative Journal, over a dozen among those interviewed confessed the same thing:
Over the last few months, we have interviewed more than a dozen ISIS members and ISIS wives in Northeastern Syria. Nearly all of them, including those who are not Turkish nationals, said they want to leave Syria and go to Turkey. Most don’t believe they will face any legal consequences for joining ISIS in Turkey. All of them said that when they crossed the border illegally from Turkey to Syria, no Turkish police or military attempted to stop them.
Another named Faisal Demir explained that even the network of ISIS 'safe-houses' on the Turkish side of the border was likely run by Turkish intelligence.
ISIS prisoners in Hasakah, Image source: InvestigativeJournal.org. Photo by: Cory Popp
“There were people from so many different countries in this house. Men and families,” he said. “Turkish Intelligence is strong. ISIS rented that house, and I am sure Turkey knew ISIS rented that house.”
“They knew the foreigners staying in the house were in Turkey to cross to Syria and join ISIS. They knew, I am sure,” he admitted. And in separate testimony included in the report:
“Turkey let all of these jihadis cross their border into Syria,” Abdullah said, shaking his head. “And now, Turkey is giving them the chance to start again..”
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The other common theme to the interviews is that the ISIS militants believe that if they can make it out of Syria, Turkey will let them go free once on the other side.
When asked if he wanted to return to Turkey, he grinned and said he did. He said he heard about other Turkish ISIS members returning to Turkey, being detained and investigated for a period of weeks, and then simply released. He believes that, although he stayed with ISIS for more than four years, his case would be the same in the eyes of the Turkish government.
“They all want to go to Turkey,” one Kurdish YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) prison guard additionally explained as part of the report. “ISIS started because of Turkey. ISIS is still active in Turkey. And the women here tell us they all want to go and will try to cross at Tel Abyad when they escape.”
And further, according to the report: “A Chechen woman who had been married to an ISIS fighter and living in Syria since 2013 said that she had no desire to return to Chechnya, and that Turkey seemed like a good option for her and her young daughter. She didn’t think she’d be arrested there, because she didn’t believe she’d done anything wrong.”
It must be remembered and bears repeating that Turkey is NATO's second largest military, and throughout the early years of the war US intelligence worked closely with the Turks in pursuit of regime change in Syria.
Thus the "jihadi highway" across the Turkish border, at least in the early years before and during the rise of the Islamic State, appeared willful, intentional policy.
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