The Islamic State, the Indian Sub-Continent & its Neighbourhood

[SSridhar]

India, Maldives to finalise pact to fight Islamic State - Suhasini Haidar, The Hindu

India and the Maldives are in the process of finalising a “cross-border counter-terror mechanism” to deal with radicalisation, and to tackle the spread of citizens trying to join the terror group, the Islamic State, in particular, a senior Maldivian official said on Monday.

“Radicalisation is a big concern and a threat that we are extremely worried about,” said Foreign Secretary Ali Naseer Mohamed who met with his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar on Saturday, adding that it was now “commonly acknowledged” that information sharing was the best way to prevent people from travelling to the IS-controlled areas. As a result, the Maldives, which believes about 40 of its citizens are currently fighting with the terror group in Iraq and Syria, wants to work closely with India and Sri Lanka, two countries that Maldivian citizens most travel to. Mr. Ali Mohamed denied that figures of Maldivian IS fighters were much more, as had been alleged by former President Mohammad Nasheed, who quoted a figure of more than 200 in a recent press conference. “Even the figure of 40 is quite big for a country the size of the Maldives which has a population of just 3,50,000. Even one Maldivian becoming a terrorist and killing people is enough to shake our society,” he said.

Explaining that the mechanism between India and the Maldives would go beyond “intelligence sharing,” Maldivian High Commissioner to India Ahmed Mohamed said, “There is a discussion between the Indian government and the Maldives on establishing a cross-border mechanism to address this issue and already the Maldives has institutionalised the process.”

“Our biggest challenge is the potential returnees from IS training camps, who are trained in firearms,” said Mr. Ali Mohamed, detailing the discussions with India and other countries on sharing policies on deradicalisation, as well as working with communities on preventing youth from being recruited for the brutal terror organisation. Maldives shot to international attention on the issue after a video, purportedly made by men who claimed to belong to the IS, threatened “bomb attacks” in the tourist-bound islands after the arrest of Islamist leader Sheikh Imran Abdulla last year. Mr. Abdulla, who leads the opposition Adhaalath party, was sentenced in February 2016 to 12 years’ imprisonment for inciting violence, which has only deepened the political crisis in the country.

[Shanu]

Well Maldives should be very afraid..after all just a day earlier we had this news.

http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/67320

Saudi Arabia will donate USD50 million (MVR765 million) to the Maldives to build housing units for soldiers, government announced Monday.

In a statement, Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) said the aid was pledged during a meeting between Maldivian defence minister Adam Shareef and his Saudi Arabian counterpart during the former’s recent visit to the Islamic kingdom.

Now I know this is not a IS news, but as they say - follow the money trail. And Saudi money flowing directly to Maldivian army.. IS/AlQ types sprouting should not be far off. Running for cover now.

Added later : Sridhar ji, if you find this news inappropriate for this thread, kindly remove.

[SSridhar]

NIA arrests teenager in West Bengal for ISIS link - Madhuparna Das, Economic Times

As a apart of NIA's operation against the ISIS chapter in India, the central agency has today arrested Ashik Ahmed, an eighteen year old student of a private poly-technique college in Durgapur in Burdwan district. He was picked up by a special team of NIA on February 25 from his mess near Panagarh military base.

Ashik was staying in the mess introducing him as Raja Das, said sources.

During the course of interrogation, it was revealed that he had an active link with the ISIS (India chapter). He brought a senior leader of ISIS to Burdwan and traveled to some remote areas in Indo-Bangladesh border, that is dominated by Muslim population.

Ashik was trying to build a unit of ISIS in West Bengal that can easily sneak to Bangladesh and come back again. "Ashik had a mandate to set up a training and bomb making centre modeling on JMB's unit in Khagragarh. He has visited some of the unregistered Madrassas in the region too. Had he not been picked up by NIA, Bengal would have witnessed another Khagragarh like incident," said a senior police official.

Ashik's name cropped up during NIA's investigation in connection with the ISIS case. As of now, the central agency has picked up 25 youths who were allegedly involved in the ISIS case.

"Ashik was very much active in social media and he was establishing the ISIS propaganda in the social networking forums. He also tried to brain wash some of Muslim youths in the locality. A couple of his associates are also under scanner and we are maintaining a close vigil on them," added the official.

He is a first year student in a polytechnique college in Durgapur. He was residing with five of his friends at Gopalpur area in Burdwan, which is a kilometer away from the Panagarh Airforce base.

He has his own house at Dhaniakhali in Hooghly district. His father, Golam Rasul is a farmer. However, in the college, Ashik took admission with a fake address. The NIA interrogated his father Golam Rasul too .

Ashik is the second youth from Bengal who was arrested for his alleged link with ISIS. Mehdi Masroor Biswas is the first person from Bengal who was arrested for being a propagandist of ISIS.

[SSridhar]

Malaysia detains 13 suspected ISIS militants in major swoop - Straits Times

KUALA LUMPUR (The Star/Asia News Network) - A total of 13 suspected Islamic State (ISIS) militants were detained following a major swoop on Wednesday, Malaysia police chief Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said on Thursday (March 24).

The Inspector-General of Police tweeted that the suspects were arrested after the Bukit Aman Special Branch Counter Terrorism Division (E8) raided terror cells with ISIS links around the country.

“Congratulations to E8 after successfully raiding cells with links to ISIS yesterday.

"13 people were arrested and ISIS documents were also seized," he tweeted via his handle @KBAB51 on Thursday.

[SSridhar]

[Bengaluru] City churches pray for priest abducted by IS - The Hindu

On Good Friday, several churches in the city held prayers for Father Tom Uzhunnalil (58) who is believed to have been abducted in Aden, Yemen, by the Islamic State earlier this month. This in the wake of concerns following several websites reporting a threat to his life from the IS.

The Salesians’ Province of Bengaluru, with which Fr. Uzhunnalil worked, spent the day holding special prayers for his safety at their two churches in K.R. Puram and Lingarajapuram, apart from around 40 community centres across Karnataka.

The Archbishop of Bengaluru Bernard Moras also addressed the media after the Friday prayers and said while they had no credible information about Fr. Uzhunnalil, they pray for his safety.

Fr. Ittira Mondoth, a senior clergy of the Salesians’ Province of Bengaluru, told The Hindu that the community was in touch with another Salesian priest in Yemen who survived the attack over WhatsApp. He said he did not have any information about the threat to his life. “It was posted on Facebook by a religious group from South Africa, far removed from Yemen. The post and the page have subsequently been deleted. We think it is a rumour,” he said.

He moved to Yemen in 2010 - The Hindu

Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil hails from a village near Kottayam in Kerala. He spent a few years in Karnataka and served in Hassan, Shivamogga, KGF, and Bengaluru before moving to Yemen in 2010 to help out at a convent and hospital run by the Missionaries of Charity.

On March 4, 2016, the convent was attacked by gunmen who killed 16 people. Fr. Uzhunnalil was reportedly praying in a chapel during the attack, and has been missing since then.

Though none has claimed responsibility for the attack, authorities in Yemen claimed it was carried out by IS.

[SSridhar]

Fate of missing Kerala priest still unclear - George Jacob, The Hindu

Media reports about the crucifixion of Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, the Salesian priest, who was abducted from an old persons’ home run by the Missionaries of Charity in strife-torn Yemen, remains to be confirmed by official sources.

Confusion reigned on Monday over the priest’s fate, with conflicting versions being aired by different Church segments.

Father Paul Thelakkat, spokesperson of the Syro Malabar Church, the biggest Catholic church formation in Kerala, told The Hindu that the reports of Father Tom’s crucifixion have finally been confirmed by the Salesian Order based in Bengaluru to which Father Uzhunnalil belonged. Earlier in the day, Father Thelakkat had affirmed in a TV phone-in that he had enough reasons to believe that the crucifixion reports were true.

However, Fr. Joyce Francis, Provincial Superior of the Salesian Order, contested this. “I do not know from where Father Thelakkat got this information. I am the Provincial superior and I have not made any statement of this nature” he told The Hindu .

[SSridhar]

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says he tried to halt Isis's campaign of violence - The Independent

Spiritual leader, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, has revealed that he reached out to Isis in an effort to try and bring an end to its campaign of violence and killing.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who heads the Art of Living (AOL) Foundation, said he believed that dialogue alone with the Islamists would not succeed while the fighters believed "no-one else has a right to exist". He said he hoped their attitude would change if they were brought to justice.

In an interview with The Independent ahead of a recent record-breaking gathering of people outside of Delhi, the 59-year-old leader said his aim was to unite all cultures, religions and ideologies.

Asked how his peace-promoting philosophy could work to tackle such groups as Isis, he said: "Isis is very peculiar. I stretched my hand out to to have a dialogue, but when these people think no-one else has a right to exist, talks alone will not work."

He added: "But once they are in prison maybe then we will be able to change their minds."

[SSridhar]

I have included the following in the first post to understand the ways of IS.

I am posting it here for posterity and for the sake of completion. There are important lessons here for India.

How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze - RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, NY Times

The day he left Syria with instructions to carry out a terrorist attack in France, Reda Hame, a 29-year-old computer technician from Paris, had been a member of the Islamic State for just over a week.

His French passport and his background in information technology made him an ideal recruit for a rapidly expanding group within ISIS that was dedicated to terrorizing Europe. Over just a few days, he was rushed to a park, shown how to fire an assault rifle, handed a grenade and told to hurl it at a human silhouette. His accelerated course included how to use an encryption program called TrueCrypt, the first step in a process intended to mask communications with his ISIS handler back in Syria.

The handler, code-named Dad, drove Mr. Hame to the Turkish border and sent him off with advice to pick an easy target, shoot as many civilians as possible and hold hostages until the security forces made a martyr of him.

“Be brave,” Dad said, embracing him.

Mr. Hame was sent out by a body inside the Islamic State that was obsessed with striking Europe for at least two years before the deadly assaults in Paris last November and in Brussels this month. In that time, the group dispatched a string of operatives trained in Syria, aiming to carry out small attacks meant to test and stretch Europe’s security apparatus even as the most deadly assaults were in the works, according to court proceedings, interrogation transcripts and records of European wiretaps obtained by The New York Times.

Officials now say the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down.

“This didn’t all of a sudden pop up in the last six months,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. “They have been contemplating external attacks ever since the group moved into Syria in 2012.”

Mr. Hame was arrested in Paris last August, before he could strike, one of at least 21 trained operatives who succeeded in slipping back into Europe. Their interrogation records offer a window into the origins and evolution of an Islamic State branch responsible for killing hundreds of people in Paris, Brussels and beyond.

European officials now know that Dad, Mr. Hame’s handler, was none other than Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian operative who selected and trained fighters for plots in Europe and who returned himself to oversee the Paris attack, the deadliest terrorist strike on European soil in over a decade.

The people in Mr. Abaaoud’s external operations branch were also behind the Brussels attacks, as well as a foiled attack in a suburb of Paris last week, and others are urgently being sought, Belgian and French officials say.

“It’s a factory over there,” Mr. Hame warned his interlocutors from France’s intelligence service after his arrest. “They are doing everything possible to strike France, or else Europe.”

Missing the Connections

For much of 2012 and 2013, the jihadist group that eventually became the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, was putting down roots in Syria. Even as the group began aggressively recruiting foreigners, especially Europeans, policy makers in the United States and Europe continued to see it as a lower-profile branch of Al Qaeda that was mostly interested in gaining and governing territory.

One of the first clues that the Islamic State was getting into the business of international terrorism came at 12:10 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2014, when the Greek police pulled over a taxi in the town of Orestiada, less than four miles from the Turkish border. Inside was a 23-year-old French citizen named Ibrahim Boudina, who was returning from Syria. In his luggage, the officers found 1,500 euros, or almost $1,700, and a French document titled “How to Make Artisanal Bombs in the Name of Allah.”

But there was no warrant for his arrest in Europe, so the Greeks let him go, according to court records detailing the French investigation.

Mr. Boudina was already on France’s watch list, part of a cell of 22 men radicalized at a mosque in the resort city of Cannes. When French officials were notified about the Greek traffic stop, they were already wiretapping his friends and relatives. Several weeks later, Mr. Boudina’s mother received a call from a number in Syria. Before hanging up, the unknown caller informed her that her son had been “sent on a mission,” according to a partial transcript of the call.

The police set up a perimeter around the family’s apartment near Cannes, arresting Mr. Boudina on Feb. 11, 2014.

In a utility closet in the same building, they found three Red Bull soda cans filled with 600 grams of TATP, the temperamental peroxide-based explosive that would later be used to deadly effect in Paris and Brussels.

Triacetone triperoxide, which was used in the Paris attacks in November, has become the Islamic State's explosive of choice {How long before we find this in other regions as well because it seems easy to make rather than fertilizer-based explosives} in Europe.

It was not until nearly two years later, on Page 278 of a 359-page sealed court filing, that investigators revealed an important detail: Mr. Boudina’s Facebook chats placed him in Syria in late 2013, at the scene of a major battle fought by a group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

According to a brief by France’s domestic intelligence agency, he was the first European citizen known to have traveled to Syria, joined the Islamic State and returned with the aim of committing terrorism. Yet his ties to the group were buried in French paperwork and went unconnected to later cases.

Including Mr. Boudina, at least 21 fighters trained by the Islamic State in Syria have been dispatched back to Europe with the intention of causing mass murder, according to a Times count based on records from France’s domestic intelligence agency. The fighters arrived in a steady trickle, returning alone or in pairs at the rate of one every two to three months throughout 2014 and the first part of 2015.
Facebook Q. & A.

Like the killers in Paris and Brussels, all of these earlier operatives were French speakers — mostly French and Belgian citizens, alongside a handful of immigrants from former French colonies, including Morocco.

They were arrested in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon with plans to attack Jewish businesses, police stations and a carnival parade. They tried to open fire on packed train cars and on church congregations. In their possession were box cutters and automatic weapons, walkie-talkies and disposable cellphones, as well as the chemicals to make TATP.

Most of them failed. And in each instance, officials failed to catch — or at least to flag to colleagues — the men’s ties to the nascent Islamic State.

In one of the highest-profile instances, Mehdi Nemmouche returned from Syria via Frankfurt and made his way by car to Brussels, where on May 24, 2014, he opened fire inside the Jewish Museum of Belgium, killing four people. Even when the police found a video in his possession, in which he claimed responsibility for the attack next to a flag bearing the words “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” Belgium’s deputy prosecutor, Ine Van Wymersch, dismissed any connection.

“He probably acted alone,” she told reporters at the time.

Though the degree to which the operatives were being directed by the Islamic State might have been unclear at first, a name began to appear in each successive investigation: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen who counterterrorism officials say rose through the ranks to become a lieutenant of the Islamic State’s external operations efforts.

In the months before the Jewish museum attack, Mr. Nemmouche’s phone records reveal that he made a 24-minute call to Mr. Abaaoud, according to a 55-page report by the French National Police’s antiterror unit in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

“All of the signals were there,” said Michael S. Smith II, a counterterrorism analyst whose firm, Kronos Advisory, began briefing the United States government in 2013 on ISIS’ aspirations to strike Europe. “For anyone paying attention, these signals became deafening by mid-2014.”

It was in the summer of 2014 that the link to the terrorist organization’s hierarchy became explicit.

On June 22 of that year, a 24-year-old French citizen named Faiz Bouchrane, who had trained in Syria, was smuggled into neighboring Lebanon. He was planning to blow himself up at a Shiite target, and during interrogation, he let slip the name of the man who had ordered him to carry out the operation: Abu Muhammad al-Adnani.

Mr. Adnani is the spokesman for ISIS and is considered one of its most senior members. Just a few days after Mr. Bouchrane checked into a budget hotel in Beirut, Mr. Adnani released an audio recording announcing the establishment of the caliphate.

“Adnani reportedly leads the external operations planning of the Islamic State,” said Matthew G. Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Intelligence officials in the United States and Europe have confirmed the broad outlines of the external operations unit: It is a distinct body inside ISIS, with its command-and-control structure answering to Mr. Adnani, who reports to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.

The unit identifies recruits, provides training, hands out cash and arranges for the delivery of weapons once fighters are in position. Although the unit’s main focus has been Europe, external attacks directed by ISIS or those acting in its name have been even more deadly beyond Europe’s shores. At least 650 people have been killed in the group’s attacks on sites popular with Westerners, including in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, according to a Times analysis.

Within the hierarchy, Mr. Abaaoud was specifically tasked with mounting attacks in Europe, according to the French police report and intelligence brief.

“Abaaoud, known as Abou Omar, was the principal commander of future attacks in Europe,” Nicolas Moreau, a French jihadist who was arrested last year, told his French interrogators, according to the report by France’s antiterror police. “He was in charge of vetting the applications of future candidates.”

Pacing Attacks

In an audio recording released on Sept. 22, 2014, Mr. Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and chief of the external operations wing, addressed the West.

“We will strike you in your homeland,” he promised, calling on Muslims everywhere to kill Europeans, “especially the spiteful and filthy French.” And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.

In the months that followed, a man decapitated his employer near the French city of Lyon, sending a snapshot of the severed head to the Islamic State. Another man stormed a police station in Paris, carrying a butcher’s knife and a photocopy of the Islamic State’s flag.

These are among around two dozen plots linked to the Islamic State that were documented in the year after Mr. Adnani’s speech. In most, there were no direct operational ties back to Syria, but there were clear signs that the attacker had consumed the terrorist group’s propaganda online.

The low potency of these attacks, with single-digit death tolls, combined with the fact that many of the perpetrators had a history of mental illness, prompted analysts and officials to conclude that the Islamic State remained a distant second to Al Qaeda in its ability to carry out attacks on Western soil.

Experts now believe that the Islamic State was actually adopting a strategy first put forward by an earlier operations leader for Al Qaeda, who argued that the group would become obsolete if it worked only on 9/11-size plots that took months or years to mount. He instead called for Al Qaeda to also carry out a patter of small- and medium-size plots, and to use propaganda to inspire self-directed attacks by supporters overseas.

In a recent issue of its online magazine in French, Dar al-Islam, the Islamic State explained the approach. “The Islamic State has deployed its resources to generate three types of terrorist attacks,” the article states, specifying that they include large-scale plots coordinated by the group’s leaders, down to “isolated actions of self-radicalized people, who have absolutely no direct contact with ISIS, and yet who will consciously act in its name.”

The same article says the group’s method for carrying out jihad in Europe involves an adaptation of Auftragstaktik, a combat doctrine within the German Army in the 19th century. Those tactical guidelines call for commanders to give subordinates a goal and a time frame in which to accomplish it, but otherwise to give them the freedom to execute it.

The Islamic State explains in the article that it adopted the system to give recruits “complete tactical autonomy,” with few fingerprints that could be tracked back to the group, and “no micromanaging.”

The Recruit Pipeline

By early 2015, the Islamic State’s external operations branch had personnel dedicated to spending their days in Internet cafes in Syria pumping out propaganda, aimed both at inciting lone-wolf attacks and at luring new recruits.

Among the people who took the bait was Reda Hame, the young technology professional from Paris, who later told investigators that he had joined in hope of fighting to bring down President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Instead, upon arriving in Syria in June 2015, he walked directly into the Islamic State’s pipeline for foreign attacks.

During his intake interview in Raqqa, Syria, in June 2015, the Islamic State administrator taking notes on a computer across from him expressed satisfaction when he learned that Mr. Hame was from Paris and had a background in technology, according to his lengthy account to France’s domestic intelligence agency, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, or D.G.S.I. The details were recorded in more than 16 hours of questioning, according to a transcript obtained by The Times and first reported on by the French newspaper Le Monde.

Days later, a man wearing a mask called Mr. Hame outside, told him to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and covered him with a tarp. He was warned to keep his eyes lowered and not to look out.

They drove at high speed, and when the truck stopped, a fighter speaking Arabic directed him to a sport utility vehicle idling nearby, its tinted windows obscuring its occupants. When Mr. Hame opened the door to the back seat, the driver said, “Monte devant,” French for “Get in the front.”

The driver, Mr. Hame said, was Mr. Abaaoud, by then considered the most wanted terrorist in Europe. As they drove through the Syrian countryside, the future architect of the Paris attacks explained to Mr. Hame that if he faced the enemies of Islam alone, he would receive double the reward in heaven.

“He asked me if I was interested in going abroad,” Mr. Hame told investigators. “He said to imagine a rock concert in a European country — if you were given a weapon, would you be ready to open fire on the crowd?”

When Mr. Hame reiterated that he wanted to fight the Assad government instead, Mr. Abaaoud became terse. “He said he would show me those wounded in the war and buildings that had been destroyed, so that I would realize how lucky I was to be sent back to France rather than stay to fight here,” Mr. Hame recounted.

Videos released by the Islamic State after the Paris attacks in November included footage of eight of the 10 attackers while they were still in territory the terrorist group controlled in Iraq and Syria. They announced that they were acting on the orders of Mr. Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, and then proceeded to shoot or behead a captive, most of them in grotesquely choreographed scenes shot against a desert backdrop, according to the footage archived by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Officials have deduced that the footage was filmed between February and September 2015, suggesting the Paris attacks were being planned months before they took place. It is now known that at the same time Mr. Abaaoud was laying the groundwork for the devastating plot, he was recruiting, cajoling and training Mr. Hame and others for smaller, quick-hit attacks.

The night they met, Mr. Abaaoud dropped off Mr. Hame at a house in Raqqa with a white gate, according to the transcript. He said he would come for Mr. Hame the next morning, and warned him that if he did not agree to the mission, his passport, which was about to expire, would be given to another recruit who would go to Europe in his place.

When Mr. Abaaoud returned the next day, his face was covered with a brown scarf with slits for his eyes. He wore a holstered handgun. “He told me that he was now going to explain the mission to me,” Mr. Hame said after his arrest, describing how the discussion occurred in the senior operative’s speeding vehicle. “He told me I didn’t have a lot of time; he said he was just waiting for the confirmation of his emir. I told him that I would go.”

Accelerated Training

Mr. Hame said his training began about a 30-minute drive from Raqqa, in a villa that acted as Mr. Abaaoud’s classroom. There, the senior operative demonstrated how to load a Kalashnikov rifle. When Mr. Hame tried, he jammed his thumb in the metal, hurting himself. Mr. Abaaoud made him repeat the exercise again and again.

The next day, Mr. Abaaoud drove Mr. Hame to a park covered in dry grass for target practice. Throughout the lesson, Mr. Abaaoud repeatedly lost his temper, annoyed by his recruit’s lack of skill.

“He yelled at me because when I was shooting in volleys, it went into the air,” Mr. Hame recounted. “He made me practice a lot, to the point that the grass caught fire.”

The instructor appeared even more on edge during the third and final day of Mr. Hame’s military training, when he drew a silhouette on the wall of an abandoned building and demonstrated how to throw a grenade. Inexperienced and struggling in the suffocating heat, Mr. Hame did not throw it far enough and was cut by shrapnel. Only when Mr. Abaaoud saw him bleeding did he relent, driving his student to a nearby clinic to be bandaged.

At night, Mr. Hame was dropped off at an apartment in Raqqa that appeared to be a dormitory for members of the external operations branch. One room served as an arsenal, with stacks of suicide belts, jugs of explosives, body armor and combat boots. The other recruits were also French speakers, including a man who said he had been training for eight months. He and Mr. Hame were told to team up by Mr. Abaaoud, who decided to send them back to Europe the same day.

They were among the many pawns that Mr. Abaaoud was positioning across the Continent.

If Mr. Hame was not handy with weapons, he had other qualities that were attractive to the Islamic State: He had a French passport and had worked as a computer technician for Astrium, a subsidiary of the French aeronautics giant Airbus. It was at least the second time that Mr. Abaaoud had chosen a fighter with information technology credentials: Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who was dispatched last April to attack churches in France, was in the second year of a five-year computer science program, according to news reports.

The final phase of Mr. Hame’s training took place at an Internet cafe in Raqqa, where an Islamic State computer specialist handed him a USB key. It contained CCleaner, a program used to erase a user’s online history on a given computer, as well as TrueCrypt, an encryption program that was widely available at the time and that experts say has not yet been cracked.

The external operations unit was on a drive to improve its operational security after months of embarrassing failures.

Working on Security

More than a year and a half earlier, the would-be Cannes bomber, Ibrahim Boudina, had tried to erase the previous three days of his search history, according to details in his court record, but the police were still able to recover it. They found that Mr. Boudina had been researching how to connect to the Internet via a secure tunnel and how to change his I.P. address.

Though he may have been aware of the risk of discovery, perhaps he was not worried enough.

Mr. Boudina had been sloppy enough to keep using his Facebook account, and his voluminous chat history allowed French officials to determine his allegiance to the Islamic State. Wiretaps of his friends and relatives, later detailed in French court records obtained by The Times and confirmed by security officials, further outlined his plot, which officials believe was going to target the annual carnival on the French Riviera.

Mr. Hame, in contrast, was given strict instructions on how to communicate. After he used TrueCrypt, he was to upload the encrypted message folder onto a Turkish commercial data storage site, from where it would be downloaded by his handler in Syria. He was told not to send it by email, most likely to avoid generating the metadata that records details like the point of origin and destination, even if the content of the missive is illegible. Mr. Hame described the website as “basically a dead inbox.”

The ISIS technician told Mr. Hame one more thing: As soon as he made it back to Europe, he needed to buy a second USB key, and transfer the encryption program to it. USB keys are encoded with serial numbers, so the process was not unlike a robber switching getaway cars.

“He told me to copy what was on the key and then throw it away,” Mr. Hame explained. “That’s what I did when I reached Prague.”

Mr. Abaaoud was also fixated on cellphone security. He jotted down the number of a Turkish phone that he said would be left in a building in Syria, but close enough to the border to catch the Turkish cell network, according to Mr. Hame’s account. Mr. Abaaoud apparently figured investigators would be more likely to track calls from Europe to Syrian phone numbers, and might overlook calls to a Turkish one.

Next to the number, Mr. Abaaoud scribbled “Dad.”

Mr. Hame was instructed to make his way back to Paris, employing an itinerary that mimicked the journey of a backpacker on a summer holiday: He was to travel to Istanbul and spend a few days wandering the streets of the tourist district around Taksim Square.

Then he was to fly to Prague and buy a Czech SIM card. He would again check into a hotel, pretend to be a tourist and leave quick missed calls on Mr. Abaaoud’s Turkish phone number. The record of the call would be Mr. Abaaoud’s notification of his trainee’s progress. Mr. Hame was expected to repeat the procedure for each leg of his journey, including in Amsterdam and then Brussels, before returning by train to Paris.

Once Islamic State leaders knew that Mr. Hame had made it home, they would use the encryption and the Turkish drop box to coordinate further instructions, he said.

The mission began on the morning of June 12, when Mr. Abaaoud drove Mr. Hame and a second recruit to the Turkish border. Both had USB keys with TrueCrypt, and each was handed €2,000, in €500 bills, Mr. Hame said. Both had the same general agenda — to hit a soft target in Europe — but they were instructed to take separate paths, with Mr. Hame returning to France while the second recruit was headed to Spain.

But Mr. Hame’s comrade was picked up after he flew to Spain, and under interrogation, he divulged Mr. Hame’s plan as well. After being notified, the French police tracked Mr. Hame to his mother’s apartment in Paris. Behind a couch, they found his USB stick from the Islamic State, and in his bag a piece of paper showing his login credentials for TrueCrypt. They arrested and began interrogating him last August, almost three months to the day before the worst terrorist attack in French history.

In many ways, it was another clear failure for the Islamic State’s operational security. Mr. Hame agreed to cooperate with investigators, and confirmed that the group was bent on attacking in Europe and was already interested in picking out a concert hall to strike.

Yet many aspects of the group’s security protocol were working. In the end, Mr. Hame had few specifics he could share with the authorities. He did not know the names or even the nationalities of the other operatives he had met; they had been introduced to him only by their aliases.

Two of Mr. Abaaoud’s other small plots around the same time did not go any better. Sid Ahmed Ghlam was ordered by Mr. Abaaoud to open fire on a church in Villejuif, south of Paris, according to the report by France’s antiterrorism police. Instead, he shot himself in the leg. Ayoub El Khazzani, the other attacker sent by Mr. Abaaoud, was tackled by passengers after his weapon jammed while he tried to open fire inside a high-speed Thalys train last August, officials said.

Though they failed, the thwarted plots kept counter terrorism officials stretched thin in the months before the November attacks in Paris.

“It served to put all of our agencies on edge,” said France’s chief antiterrorism judge, Marc Trévidic, who debriefed Mr. Hame, Mr. Ghlam and Mr. Khazzani before retiring last summer. “Just like a smoke screen, it allowed them to calmly prepare.”

A Signature Explosive

Among the clearest signs of the Islamic State’s growing capacity for terrorist attacks is its progress in making and deploying bombs containing triacetone triperoxide, or TATP.

The white explosive powder was found in the suicide belts of the Paris attackers and in the suitcases of the Brussels bombers, as well as in two other ISIS-led plots in 2014 and 2015.

Before ISIS, Al Qaeda repeatedly tried, but mostly failed, to deploy TATP bombs, starting in 2001 when Richard Reid tried to destroy an American Airlines flight by sneaking TATP onboard in the sole of his shoe. He was thwarted when the fuse failed to ignite.

TATP has become terrorists’ go-to explosive in Europe because the main ingredients, acetone and hydrogen peroxide, can be found in common household goods like nail polish remover and hair bleach, experts say.

But while the building blocks are easy to come by, TATP is difficult to make, because the ingredients are unstable once combined and can easily detonate if they are mishandled. Over at least two years, Islamic State operatives were working to get it right.

The three bombs found in Mr. Boudina’s building near Cannes in 2014 were beverage cans filled with the explosive powder and wrapped in black tape, according to the French court filing in the case.

Though he had successfully cooked the explosive, Mr. Boudina was still struggling to set it off. He had jammed a filament into a cavity in the body of each can, most likely to use as a crude fuse, investigators concluded. However, the online searches he had conducted on his laptop just before his arrest indicated that he did not know how to make the final component. He searched “how to make a remote detonator,” “detonation by cellphone,” and finally “where to buy firecrackers?”

By comparison, the team sent from Syria to carry out the Paris assaults in November had ironed out the final details.

Two months before those attacks, the man suspected of handling logistics for the assailants, Salah Abdeslam, stopped by a fireworks shop northeast of Paris to buy a mechanism used to detonate fireworks from a distance, according to the French prosecutor. The Firework Magician shop’s in-house lawyer, Frédéric Zajac, remembered little about the young man with a Belgian accent, except that “unlike other clients, he didn’t ask questions about how it all worked.”

Mr. Abdeslam is believed to be the only direct participant in the assaults to have survived, and he was arrested last week in Belgium after a continentwide manhunt.

The attackers he had been helping successfully detonated their suicide belts in seven locations in Paris, indicating that the group had mastered both how to mix the compound and how to set it off.

“To be able to assemble it safely, and to detonate it repeatedly, suggests a more organized effort,” said Michael Marks, a retired Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who was the post-blast investigator on the Navy destroyer Cole. “It suggests a network.”

That network stretched like a web across Europe to at least a dozen other accomplices, including a cell holed up in an apartment in the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek, where two other teams of Islamic State fighters prepared the bombs detonated last week in Brussels Airport and a metro station.

The overpowering odor that comes with refining and storing TATP was noticed by the building’s owner weeks before the bombings, Belgian officials said, but he did not report it until after the attacks.

While each of the explosive vests used in Paris in November had about a pound of finished TATP, the bombs used at the departure terminal of the airport and inside a subway car in Brussels are estimated to have weighed 30 to 60 pounds each, according to Claude Moniquet, a veteran of France’s intelligence service who now heads the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.

That marked another level of achievement in making the explosive: The higher the volume of TATP, the more volatile it becomes.

The attacks last week could have been worse: Inside the attackers’ apartment were more of the precursor ingredients used to make the explosive — nearly 40 gallons of acetone and eight gallons of hydrogen peroxide — as well as a suitcase containing over 30 pounds of ready-to-go TATP, according to the Belgian police.

The one thing the attackers had not thought of was that the taxi they called to take them to the airport had room for only three suitcases, so they abandoned the fourth upstairs, Mr. Moniquet said.

Their taxi driver told the Belgian newspaper DH that the customers had refused to let him help them load the heavy bags, and that during the drive to the airport, they sat in tense silence.

The driver could not help but notice a strong odor wafting into the taxi from the sealed trunk.

[SSridhar]

I have included the following in the first post to understand the ways of IS.

I am posting it here for posterity and for the sake of completion. There are important lessons here for India.

How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze - RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, NY Times

The day he left Syria with instructions to carry out a terrorist attack in France, Reda Hame, a 29-year-old computer technician from Paris, had been a member of the Islamic State for just over a week.

His French passport and his background in information technology made him an ideal recruit for a rapidly expanding group within ISIS that was dedicated to terrorizing Europe. Over just a few days, he was rushed to a park, shown how to fire an assault rifle, handed a grenade and told to hurl it at a human silhouette. His accelerated course included how to use an encryption program called TrueCrypt, the first step in a process intended to mask communications with his ISIS handler back in Syria.

The handler, code-named Dad, drove Mr. Hame to the Turkish border and sent him off with advice to pick an easy target, shoot as many civilians as possible and hold hostages until the security forces made a martyr of him.

“Be brave,” Dad said, embracing him.

Mr. Hame was sent out by a body inside the Islamic State that was obsessed with striking Europe for at least two years before the deadly assaults in Paris last November and in Brussels this month. In that time, the group dispatched a string of operatives trained in Syria, aiming to carry out small attacks meant to test and stretch Europe’s security apparatus even as the most deadly assaults were in the works, according to court proceedings, interrogation transcripts and records of European wiretaps obtained by The New York Times.

Officials now say the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down.

“This didn’t all of a sudden pop up in the last six months,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. “They have been contemplating external attacks ever since the group moved into Syria in 2012.”

Mr. Hame was arrested in Paris last August, before he could strike, one of at least 21 trained operatives who succeeded in slipping back into Europe. Their interrogation records offer a window into the origins and evolution of an Islamic State branch responsible for killing hundreds of people in Paris, Brussels and beyond.

European officials now know that Dad, Mr. Hame’s handler, was none other than Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian operative who selected and trained fighters for plots in Europe and who returned himself to oversee the Paris attack, the deadliest terrorist strike on European soil in over a decade.

The people in Mr. Abaaoud’s external operations branch were also behind the Brussels attacks, as well as a foiled attack in a suburb of Paris last week, and others are urgently being sought, Belgian and French officials say.

“It’s a factory over there,” Mr. Hame warned his interlocutors from France’s intelligence service after his arrest. “They are doing everything possible to strike France, or else Europe.”

Missing the Connections

For much of 2012 and 2013, the jihadist group that eventually became the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, was putting down roots in Syria. Even as the group began aggressively recruiting foreigners, especially Europeans, policy makers in the United States and Europe continued to see it as a lower-profile branch of Al Qaeda that was mostly interested in gaining and governing territory.

One of the first clues that the Islamic State was getting into the business of international terrorism came at 12:10 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2014, when the Greek police pulled over a taxi in the town of Orestiada, less than four miles from the Turkish border. Inside was a 23-year-old French citizen named Ibrahim Boudina, who was returning from Syria. In his luggage, the officers found 1,500 euros, or almost $1,700, and a French document titled “How to Make Artisanal Bombs in the Name of Allah.”

But there was no warrant for his arrest in Europe, so the Greeks let him go, according to court records detailing the French investigation.

Mr. Boudina was already on France’s watch list, part of a cell of 22 men radicalized at a mosque in the resort city of Cannes. When French officials were notified about the Greek traffic stop, they were already wiretapping his friends and relatives. Several weeks later, Mr. Boudina’s mother received a call from a number in Syria. Before hanging up, the unknown caller informed her that her son had been “sent on a mission,” according to a partial transcript of the call.

The police set up a perimeter around the family’s apartment near Cannes, arresting Mr. Boudina on Feb. 11, 2014.

In a utility closet in the same building, they found three Red Bull soda cans filled with 600 grams of TATP, the temperamental peroxide-based explosive that would later be used to deadly effect in Paris and Brussels.

Triacetone triperoxide, which was used in the Paris attacks in November, has become the Islamic State's explosive of choice {How long before we find this in other regions as well because it seems easy to make rather than fertilizer-based explosives} in Europe.

It was not until nearly two years later, on Page 278 of a 359-page sealed court filing, that investigators revealed an important detail: Mr. Boudina’s Facebook chats placed him in Syria in late 2013, at the scene of a major battle fought by a group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

According to a brief by France’s domestic intelligence agency, he was the first European citizen known to have traveled to Syria, joined the Islamic State and returned with the aim of committing terrorism. Yet his ties to the group were buried in French paperwork and went unconnected to later cases.

Including Mr. Boudina, at least 21 fighters trained by the Islamic State in Syria have been dispatched back to Europe with the intention of causing mass murder, according to a Times count based on records from France’s domestic intelligence agency. The fighters arrived in a steady trickle, returning alone or in pairs at the rate of one every two to three months throughout 2014 and the first part of 2015.
Facebook Q. & A.

Like the killers in Paris and Brussels, all of these earlier operatives were French speakers — mostly French and Belgian citizens, alongside a handful of immigrants from former French colonies, including Morocco.

They were arrested in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon with plans to attack Jewish businesses, police stations and a carnival parade. They tried to open fire on packed train cars and on church congregations. In their possession were box cutters and automatic weapons, walkie-talkies and disposable cellphones, as well as the chemicals to make TATP.

Most of them failed. And in each instance, officials failed to catch — or at least to flag to colleagues — the men’s ties to the nascent Islamic State.

In one of the highest-profile instances, Mehdi Nemmouche returned from Syria via Frankfurt and made his way by car to Brussels, where on May 24, 2014, he opened fire inside the Jewish Museum of Belgium, killing four people. Even when the police found a video in his possession, in which he claimed responsibility for the attack next to a flag bearing the words “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” Belgium’s deputy prosecutor, Ine Van Wymersch, dismissed any connection.

“He probably acted alone,” she told reporters at the time.

Though the degree to which the operatives were being directed by the Islamic State might have been unclear at first, a name began to appear in each successive investigation: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen who counterterrorism officials say rose through the ranks to become a lieutenant of the Islamic State’s external operations efforts.

In the months before the Jewish museum attack, Mr. Nemmouche’s phone records reveal that he made a 24-minute call to Mr. Abaaoud, according to a 55-page report by the French National Police’s antiterror unit in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

“All of the signals were there,” said Michael S. Smith II, a counterterrorism analyst whose firm, Kronos Advisory, began briefing the United States government in 2013 on ISIS’ aspirations to strike Europe. “For anyone paying attention, these signals became deafening by mid-2014.”

It was in the summer of 2014 that the link to the terrorist organization’s hierarchy became explicit.

On June 22 of that year, a 24-year-old French citizen named Faiz Bouchrane, who had trained in Syria, was smuggled into neighboring Lebanon. He was planning to blow himself up at a Shiite target, and during interrogation, he let slip the name of the man who had ordered him to carry out the operation: Abu Muhammad al-Adnani.

Mr. Adnani is the spokesman for ISIS and is considered one of its most senior members. Just a few days after Mr. Bouchrane checked into a budget hotel in Beirut, Mr. Adnani released an audio recording announcing the establishment of the caliphate.

“Adnani reportedly leads the external operations planning of the Islamic State,” said Matthew G. Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Intelligence officials in the United States and Europe have confirmed the broad outlines of the external operations unit: It is a distinct body inside ISIS, with its command-and-control structure answering to Mr. Adnani, who reports to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.

The unit identifies recruits, provides training, hands out cash and arranges for the delivery of weapons once fighters are in position. Although the unit’s main focus has been Europe, external attacks directed by ISIS or those acting in its name have been even more deadly beyond Europe’s shores. At least 650 people have been killed in the group’s attacks on sites popular with Westerners, including in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, according to a Times analysis.

Within the hierarchy, Mr. Abaaoud was specifically tasked with mounting attacks in Europe, according to the French police report and intelligence brief.

“Abaaoud, known as Abou Omar, was the principal commander of future attacks in Europe,” Nicolas Moreau, a French jihadist who was arrested last year, told his French interrogators, according to the report by France’s antiterror police. “He was in charge of vetting the applications of future candidates.”

Pacing Attacks

In an audio recording released on Sept. 22, 2014, Mr. Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and chief of the external operations wing, addressed the West.

“We will strike you in your homeland,” he promised, calling on Muslims everywhere to kill Europeans, “especially the spiteful and filthy French.” And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.

In the months that followed, a man decapitated his employer near the French city of Lyon, sending a snapshot of the severed head to the Islamic State. Another man stormed a police station in Paris, carrying a butcher’s knife and a photocopy of the Islamic State’s flag.

These are among around two dozen plots linked to the Islamic State that were documented in the year after Mr. Adnani’s speech. In most, there were no direct operational ties back to Syria, but there were clear signs that the attacker had consumed the terrorist group’s propaganda online.

The low potency of these attacks, with single-digit death tolls, combined with the fact that many of the perpetrators had a history of mental illness, prompted analysts and officials to conclude that the Islamic State remained a distant second to Al Qaeda in its ability to carry out attacks on Western soil.

Experts now believe that the Islamic State was actually adopting a strategy first put forward by an earlier operations leader for Al Qaeda, who argued that the group would become obsolete if it worked only on 9/11-size plots that took months or years to mount. He instead called for Al Qaeda to also carry out a patter of small- and medium-size plots, and to use propaganda to inspire self-directed attacks by supporters overseas.

In a recent issue of its online magazine in French, Dar al-Islam, the Islamic State explained the approach. “The Islamic State has deployed its resources to generate three types of terrorist attacks,” the article states, specifying that they include large-scale plots coordinated by the group’s leaders, down to “isolated actions of self-radicalized people, who have absolutely no direct contact with ISIS, and yet who will consciously act in its name.”

The same article says the group’s method for carrying out jihad in Europe involves an adaptation of Auftragstaktik, a combat doctrine within the German Army in the 19th century. Those tactical guidelines call for commanders to give subordinates a goal and a time frame in which to accomplish it, but otherwise to give them the freedom to execute it.

The Islamic State explains in the article that it adopted the system to give recruits “complete tactical autonomy,” with few fingerprints that could be tracked back to the group, and “no micromanaging.”

The Recruit Pipeline

By early 2015, the Islamic State’s external operations branch had personnel dedicated to spending their days in Internet cafes in Syria pumping out propaganda, aimed both at inciting lone-wolf attacks and at luring new recruits.

Among the people who took the bait was Reda Hame, the young technology professional from Paris, who later told investigators that he had joined in hope of fighting to bring down President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Instead, upon arriving in Syria in June 2015, he walked directly into the Islamic State’s pipeline for foreign attacks.

During his intake interview in Raqqa, Syria, in June 2015, the Islamic State administrator taking notes on a computer across from him expressed satisfaction when he learned that Mr. Hame was from Paris and had a background in technology, according to his lengthy account to France’s domestic intelligence agency, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, or D.G.S.I. The details were recorded in more than 16 hours of questioning, according to a transcript obtained by The Times and first reported on by the French newspaper Le Monde.

Days later, a man wearing a mask called Mr. Hame outside, told him to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and covered him with a tarp. He was warned to keep his eyes lowered and not to look out.

They drove at high speed, and when the truck stopped, a fighter speaking Arabic directed him to a sport utility vehicle idling nearby, its tinted windows obscuring its occupants. When Mr. Hame opened the door to the back seat, the driver said, “Monte devant,” French for “Get in the front.”

The driver, Mr. Hame said, was Mr. Abaaoud, by then considered the most wanted terrorist in Europe. As they drove through the Syrian countryside, the future architect of the Paris attacks explained to Mr. Hame that if he faced the enemies of Islam alone, he would receive double the reward in heaven.

“He asked me if I was interested in going abroad,” Mr. Hame told investigators. “He said to imagine a rock concert in a European country — if you were given a weapon, would you be ready to open fire on the crowd?”

When Mr. Hame reiterated that he wanted to fight the Assad government instead, Mr. Abaaoud became terse. “He said he would show me those wounded in the war and buildings that had been destroyed, so that I would realize how lucky I was to be sent back to France rather than stay to fight here,” Mr. Hame recounted.

Videos released by the Islamic State after the Paris attacks in November included footage of eight of the 10 attackers while they were still in territory the terrorist group controlled in Iraq and Syria. They announced that they were acting on the orders of Mr. Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, and then proceeded to shoot or behead a captive, most of them in grotesquely choreographed scenes shot against a desert backdrop, according to the footage archived by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Officials have deduced that the footage was filmed between February and September 2015, suggesting the Paris attacks were being planned months before they took place. It is now known that at the same time Mr. Abaaoud was laying the groundwork for the devastating plot, he was recruiting, cajoling and training Mr. Hame and others for smaller, quick-hit attacks.

The night they met, Mr. Abaaoud dropped off Mr. Hame at a house in Raqqa with a white gate, according to the transcript. He said he would come for Mr. Hame the next morning, and warned him that if he did not agree to the mission, his passport, which was about to expire, would be given to another recruit who would go to Europe in his place.

When Mr. Abaaoud returned the next day, his face was covered with a brown scarf with slits for his eyes. He wore a holstered handgun. “He told me that he was now going to explain the mission to me,” Mr. Hame said after his arrest, describing how the discussion occurred in the senior operative’s speeding vehicle. “He told me I didn’t have a lot of time; he said he was just waiting for the confirmation of his emir. I told him that I would go.”

Accelerated Training

Mr. Hame said his training began about a 30-minute drive from Raqqa, in a villa that acted as Mr. Abaaoud’s classroom. There, the senior operative demonstrated how to load a Kalashnikov rifle. When Mr. Hame tried, he jammed his thumb in the metal, hurting himself. Mr. Abaaoud made him repeat the exercise again and again.

The next day, Mr. Abaaoud drove Mr. Hame to a park covered in dry grass for target practice. Throughout the lesson, Mr. Abaaoud repeatedly lost his temper, annoyed by his recruit’s lack of skill.

“He yelled at me because when I was shooting in volleys, it went into the air,” Mr. Hame recounted. “He made me practice a lot, to the point that the grass caught fire.”

The instructor appeared even more on edge during the third and final day of Mr. Hame’s military training, when he drew a silhouette on the wall of an abandoned building and demonstrated how to throw a grenade. Inexperienced and struggling in the suffocating heat, Mr. Hame did not throw it far enough and was cut by shrapnel. Only when Mr. Abaaoud saw him bleeding did he relent, driving his student to a nearby clinic to be bandaged.

At night, Mr. Hame was dropped off at an apartment in Raqqa that appeared to be a dormitory for members of the external operations branch. One room served as an arsenal, with stacks of suicide belts, jugs of explosives, body armor and combat boots. The other recruits were also French speakers, including a man who said he had been training for eight months. He and Mr. Hame were told to team up by Mr. Abaaoud, who decided to send them back to Europe the same day.

They were among the many pawns that Mr. Abaaoud was positioning across the Continent.

If Mr. Hame was not handy with weapons, he had other qualities that were attractive to the Islamic State: He had a French passport and had worked as a computer technician for Astrium, a subsidiary of the French aeronautics giant Airbus. It was at least the second time that Mr. Abaaoud had chosen a fighter with information technology credentials: Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who was dispatched last April to attack churches in France, was in the second year of a five-year computer science program, according to news reports.

The final phase of Mr. Hame’s training took place at an Internet cafe in Raqqa, where an Islamic State computer specialist handed him a USB key. It contained CCleaner, a program used to erase a user’s online history on a given computer, as well as TrueCrypt, an encryption program that was widely available at the time and that experts say has not yet been cracked.

The external operations unit was on a drive to improve its operational security after months of embarrassing failures.

Working on Security

More than a year and a half earlier, the would-be Cannes bomber, Ibrahim Boudina, had tried to erase the previous three days of his search history, according to details in his court record, but the police were still able to recover it. They found that Mr. Boudina had been researching how to connect to the Internet via a secure tunnel and how to change his I.P. address.

Though he may have been aware of the risk of discovery, perhaps he was not worried enough.

Mr. Boudina had been sloppy enough to keep using his Facebook account, and his voluminous chat history allowed French officials to determine his allegiance to the Islamic State. Wiretaps of his friends and relatives, later detailed in French court records obtained by The Times and confirmed by security officials, further outlined his plot, which officials believe was going to target the annual carnival on the French Riviera.

Mr. Hame, in contrast, was given strict instructions on how to communicate. After he used TrueCrypt, he was to upload the encrypted message folder onto a Turkish commercial data storage site, from where it would be downloaded by his handler in Syria. He was told not to send it by email, most likely to avoid generating the metadata that records details like the point of origin and destination, even if the content of the missive is illegible. Mr. Hame described the website as “basically a dead inbox.”

The ISIS technician told Mr. Hame one more thing: As soon as he made it back to Europe, he needed to buy a second USB key, and transfer the encryption program to it. USB keys are encoded with serial numbers, so the process was not unlike a robber switching getaway cars.

“He told me to copy what was on the key and then throw it away,” Mr. Hame explained. “That’s what I did when I reached Prague.”

Mr. Abaaoud was also fixated on cellphone security. He jotted down the number of a Turkish phone that he said would be left in a building in Syria, but close enough to the border to catch the Turkish cell network, according to Mr. Hame’s account. Mr. Abaaoud apparently figured investigators would be more likely to track calls from Europe to Syrian phone numbers, and might overlook calls to a Turkish one.

Next to the number, Mr. Abaaoud scribbled “Dad.”

Mr. Hame was instructed to make his way back to Paris, employing an itinerary that mimicked the journey of a backpacker on a summer holiday: He was to travel to Istanbul and spend a few days wandering the streets of the tourist district around Taksim Square.

Then he was to fly to Prague and buy a Czech SIM card. He would again check into a hotel, pretend to be a tourist and leave quick missed calls on Mr. Abaaoud’s Turkish phone number. The record of the call would be Mr. Abaaoud’s notification of his trainee’s progress. Mr. Hame was expected to repeat the procedure for each leg of his journey, including in Amsterdam and then Brussels, before returning by train to Paris.

Once Islamic State leaders knew that Mr. Hame had made it home, they would use the encryption and the Turkish drop box to coordinate further instructions, he said.

The mission began on the morning of June 12, when Mr. Abaaoud drove Mr. Hame and a second recruit to the Turkish border. Both had USB keys with TrueCrypt, and each was handed €2,000, in €500 bills, Mr. Hame said. Both had the same general agenda — to hit a soft target in Europe — but they were instructed to take separate paths, with Mr. Hame returning to France while the second recruit was headed to Spain.

But Mr. Hame’s comrade was picked up after he flew to Spain, and under interrogation, he divulged Mr. Hame’s plan as well. After being notified, the French police tracked Mr. Hame to his mother’s apartment in Paris. Behind a couch, they found his USB stick from the Islamic State, and in his bag a piece of paper showing his login credentials for TrueCrypt. They arrested and began interrogating him last August, almost three months to the day before the worst terrorist attack in French history.

In many ways, it was another clear failure for the Islamic State’s operational security. Mr. Hame agreed to cooperate with investigators, and confirmed that the group was bent on attacking in Europe and was already interested in picking out a concert hall to strike.

Yet many aspects of the group’s security protocol were working. In the end, Mr. Hame had few specifics he could share with the authorities. He did not know the names or even the nationalities of the other operatives he had met; they had been introduced to him only by their aliases.

Two of Mr. Abaaoud’s other small plots around the same time did not go any better. Sid Ahmed Ghlam was ordered by Mr. Abaaoud to open fire on a church in Villejuif, south of Paris, according to the report by France’s antiterrorism police. Instead, he shot himself in the leg. Ayoub El Khazzani, the other attacker sent by Mr. Abaaoud, was tackled by passengers after his weapon jammed while he tried to open fire inside a high-speed Thalys train last August, officials said.

Though they failed, the thwarted plots kept counter terrorism officials stretched thin in the months before the November attacks in Paris.

“It served to put all of our agencies on edge,” said France’s chief antiterrorism judge, Marc Trévidic, who debriefed Mr. Hame, Mr. Ghlam and Mr. Khazzani before retiring last summer. “Just like a smoke screen, it allowed them to calmly prepare.”

A Signature Explosive

Among the clearest signs of the Islamic State’s growing capacity for terrorist attacks is its progress in making and deploying bombs containing triacetone triperoxide, or TATP.

The white explosive powder was found in the suicide belts of the Paris attackers and in the suitcases of the Brussels bombers, as well as in two other ISIS-led plots in 2014 and 2015.

Before ISIS, Al Qaeda repeatedly tried, but mostly failed, to deploy TATP bombs, starting in 2001 when Richard Reid tried to destroy an American Airlines flight by sneaking TATP onboard in the sole of his shoe. He was thwarted when the fuse failed to ignite.

TATP has become terrorists’ go-to explosive in Europe because the main ingredients, acetone and hydrogen peroxide, can be found in common household goods like nail polish remover and hair bleach, experts say.

But while the building blocks are easy to come by, TATP is difficult to make, because the ingredients are unstable once combined and can easily detonate if they are mishandled. Over at least two years, Islamic State operatives were working to get it right.

The three bombs found in Mr. Boudina’s building near Cannes in 2014 were beverage cans filled with the explosive powder and wrapped in black tape, according to the French court filing in the case.

Though he had successfully cooked the explosive, Mr. Boudina was still struggling to set it off. He had jammed a filament into a cavity in the body of each can, most likely to use as a crude fuse, investigators concluded. However, the online searches he had conducted on his laptop just before his arrest indicated that he did not know how to make the final component. He searched “how to make a remote detonator,” “detonation by cellphone,” and finally “where to buy firecrackers?”

By comparison, the team sent from Syria to carry out the Paris assaults in November had ironed out the final details.

Two months before those attacks, the man suspected of handling logistics for the assailants, Salah Abdeslam, stopped by a fireworks shop northeast of Paris to buy a mechanism used to detonate fireworks from a distance, according to the French prosecutor. The Firework Magician shop’s in-house lawyer, Frédéric Zajac, remembered little about the young man with a Belgian accent, except that “unlike other clients, he didn’t ask questions about how it all worked.”

Mr. Abdeslam is believed to be the only direct participant in the assaults to have survived, and he was arrested last week in Belgium after a continentwide manhunt.

The attackers he had been helping successfully detonated their suicide belts in seven locations in Paris, indicating that the group had mastered both how to mix the compound and how to set it off.

“To be able to assemble it safely, and to detonate it repeatedly, suggests a more organized effort,” said Michael Marks, a retired Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who was the post-blast investigator on the Navy destroyer Cole. “It suggests a network.”

That network stretched like a web across Europe to at least a dozen other accomplices, including a cell holed up in an apartment in the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek, where two other teams of Islamic State fighters prepared the bombs detonated last week in Brussels Airport and a metro station.

The overpowering odor that comes with refining and storing TATP was noticed by the building’s owner weeks before the bombings, Belgian officials said, but he did not report it until after the attacks.

While each of the explosive vests used in Paris in November had about a pound of finished TATP, the bombs used at the departure terminal of the airport and inside a subway car in Brussels are estimated to have weighed 30 to 60 pounds each, according to Claude Moniquet, a veteran of France’s intelligence service who now heads the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center.

That marked another level of achievement in making the explosive: The higher the volume of TATP, the more volatile it becomes.

The attacks last week could have been worse: Inside the attackers’ apartment were more of the precursor ingredients used to make the explosive — nearly 40 gallons of acetone and eight gallons of hydrogen peroxide — as well as a suitcase containing over 30 pounds of ready-to-go TATP, according to the Belgian police.

The one thing the attackers had not thought of was that the taxi they called to take them to the airport had room for only three suitcases, so they abandoned the fourth upstairs, Mr. Moniquet said.

Their taxi driver told the Belgian newspaper DH that the customers had refused to let him help them load the heavy bags, and that during the drive to the airport, they sat in tense silence.

The driver could not help but notice a strong odor wafting into the taxi from the sealed trunk.

[wig]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 84489.html
the methodology behind the attacks in Brussels show that Islamic State has built up a sophisticated network of terrorists that goes well beyond al-Qaida's capabilities. It is now able to strike using sleepers who have not yet been identified by security officials.

They chose the perfect moment. Just as Europe was letting out a sigh of relief, having captured one of the Paris terrorists after months of pursuit, the bombers detonated their explosives. The signal sent by the arrest was that Islamic State (IS) is defeatable. But the Brussels attack tells us that isn't the case. Just when you think you've beaten us, we'll strike you right in the heart.
Investigators and intelligence agencies both agree that preparations for the attacks in Brussels must have begun long ago. The Belgian bombs thus heralded a new approach for Islamic State in Europe -- one that does not bode well for those trying to prevent acts of terrorism -- because the threat is no longer limited to individuals known to the police or already on wanted lists, but also comes from those in the shadows in the second or third rank. Even jihadists who have not yet been identified by officials are now capable of striking.

This approach reflects the one used in IS' main battle grounds of Syria and Iraq. For some time there, unsuspected aggressors, who have been discreetly trained, have infiltrated targeted circles and built up long-term sleeper cells. Or men from regions neighboring a target are recruited to wait and attack at the right moment.

Surprisingly Farsighted

This is a modus operandi that has been employed by terrorists against prominent and often well-defended opponents multiple times -- it's how Abu Khalid al Suri, the Syrian emissary for al-Qaida boss Aiman al-Zawahiri, was betrayed by one of his own employees and killed in early 2014 by IS despite all possible protective measures being taken at his top secret hideout.

A rebel commander who had fled after Islamic State had taken over Raqqa was abducted by his own driver in Turkey, who was working under the orders of IS. And the founder of the secret activist network Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently was massacred in his apartment in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa by an IS agent who had infiltrated the opponents months before, posing as a supporter.

The people behind this terror are proving to be surprisingly farsighted, patient planners and not rash actors -- and this applies in both Europe and Syria. This is the new and long underestimated side of IS.

The length Islamic State goes to in order to install sleeper cells is illustrated by a lesser-known case -- one in which IS attempted to infiltrate opposition forces.

Jamil Mahmoud, a young Kurdish man from Afrin who worked as a furniture painter in Beirut, was selected to be inserted into the ranks of the People's Protection Units (YPG) in the northern Syrian district where he had come from. Once his recruiters were confident enough that he would act in their interests, Mahmoud was smuggled through the harbor in Tripoli into Turkey, without ever having to show his passport.

From the sea, he was driven inland for four hours, the Kurd later told SPIEGEL. "Until we got to a large, isolated farmhouse. There were around 25 men there, Arabs and Turks. We were trained in the use of Kalashnikovs and Glock pistols."

They never left their camp. But the area of Gaziantep came up often in conversation. After two months, he was assigned to join the YPG militia in Afrin (a group close to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK) and told to await further orders. "They said simply they would always be nearby and that they would get in contact when it was time to take action." Mahmoud was driven to the border, whereupon he traveled to Afrin and joined the militia, as ordered. After a few months, however, he handed himself in to to the Kurdish authorities -- before the order to strike came through.

Sleeper Cells in Europe

IS' behavior is in many ways more like that of a secret service than of animated fanatics. Al-Qaida committed its attacks as its raison d'etre, the result being that there were no subsequent attacks far outside their usual theaters of war following their acts of violence on New York and Washington in 2001, on Casablanca, Madrid, Amman and elsewhere. Al-Qaida had acted, not reacted. But IS appears capable of doing so.



Testimony from deserters suggests the terror organization began establishing sleeper cells in multiple European countries early on, in Turkey in particular. According to the former IS fighters, they are made up of men who aren't on any watch lists. This enables IS to elude the vulnerability suffered by many based in Europe -- namely that they are known terrorists. The biographies of many terrorists are very similar: an early period of radicalization precedes a period of preparation just before an attack. By this point, however, many are already known to the authorities as dangerous and are subsequently often placed under surveillance. This included the Belgians who, in January 2015 wanted to attack police stations in Brussels immediately after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Apartments, telephones and cars were bugged -- the authorities always had a clear picture of what was going on.

Attacks could repeatedly be thwarted mostly because the aggressors had left behind traces. Just after the July 2005 attacks on London, a British investigator warned that investigations placed too little emphasis on terrorists acting below the security services' radar. At that time, most of the attention had been focused on "homegrown terrorists," young men who radicalized themselves without even coming into contact with the al-Qaida leadership or prominent hate preachers. This category applied to each of the four men who blew themselves up in London.

Terrorism has become more professional since then. IS' masterminds now build up sleeper cell networks from an early stage in order to attack without hindrance at any chosen moment. That they are doing so in Syria is well documented. And that they are doing the same in Europe is very probable.

[ramana]

Wig, Muhammad setup an intelligence agency right when he started called Mukhabarat. Muwaiyya used it in his battles with Ali and his sons.
So ISIS acting like Caliphate, it will go whole hog.

[ramana]

Very few people have studied the Mukhabarat. Not much published in popular studies.

[SSridhar]

No indication of broader IS planning to acquire nukes: US - PTI

There is no indication of the IS planning to acquire nuclear material, the US has said ahead of the Nuclear Security Summit here [Washington] during which world leaders are expected to discuss ways and means to prevent terrorists from obtaining and using atomic weapons.

"We don't have any indications that it was part of a broader planning to acquire nuclear materials, and we don't have any information that a broader plot exists," said Laura Holgate, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for WMD Terrorism and Threat Reduction.

The US has seen reports about Brussels attack terrorists targeting nuclear facilities as part of a broader plot. The video footage is of concern and suggests that there is at least some interest by the Islamic State, she said.

"We've been working closely with Belgium over the years on nuclear security issues. We've worked with them to reduce the amount of highly enriched uranium at that particular site where that manager worked," Holgate said.

"There's extensive cooperation between our regulatory bodies that includes discussions of nuclear security and related issues. And we stand ready to help the Belgians in any way should they require or wish to cooperate more deeply with us on these issues," she said.

According to Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes the nuclear security summit provides an opportunity both to look at securing nuclear materials so that terrorists are not able to acquire them because of security arrangements.

"And also how we are also targeting ISIL and countering IS more broadly. So, again, both looking at denying access to the most dangerous materials and going on offense against IS broadly.

"We've seen over the year's different terrorist organisations have ambitions related to acquiring nuclear materials. We've seen that in their public statements. We've seen that in different cases in terms of their monitoring of nuclear facilities," he said.

The Nuclear Security Summit aims to bring countries up to a high standard of nuclear security, whether that's through information-sharing, or centers of excellence, or ratification and implementation of relevant treaties.

"We want to be essentially raising the global norm related to nuclear security so that it's difficult for anybody to have any access to those materials," he said.

"At the same time, we are engaged in a counter-IS campaign and nearly all of the countries who will be participating at the summit are part of that effort in one way or another. So we'll have the opportunity both to address the security of materials and to address the counter-IS effort more broadly," Rhodes said.

Holgate reiterated that at this point, the US doesn't have explicit indications that ISIL is looking to achieve either type of a nuclear or a radiological capability.

[vishvak]

Isn't EU a TFTA place where question of safety of nukes doesn't arise, OR, that nuke chain of command is in safe hands of high IQ people especially in la la lands of neo-lib countries.

[SSridhar]

Lessons from Europe’s amnesia - MK. Narayanan, The Hindu

Given this, India cannot remain complacent that it will remain unaffected by the IS as it is heir to a unique civilisational heritage. In December 2015, the IS issued a manifesto which claimed India as part of the Islamic Caliphate. It referred to a growing Hindu movement in the country directed against Muslims. The latest manifesto is a sequel to an earlier one, of June 2015, which had declared IS’s ambition to expand its jihad into India. This is reason enough for India to avoid the kind of amnesia that has engulfed Europe.

[SSridhar]

Isn't EU a TFTA place where question of safety of nukes doesn't arise, OR, that nuke chain of command is in safe hands of high IQ people especially in la la lands of neo-lib countries.

vishvak, please do read the above MKN op-ed and the comments therein.

[SSridhar]

Alarm in Kurram over IS lairs in Paktia - DAWN

Presence of terrorists from the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the militant Islamic State group on the Afghan side of the border near Kurram Agency has caused security concerns, prompting authorities to mobilise tribes against the impending threat.

According to locals, the security forces had been firing heavy artillery from their base in Parachinar on the other side of the border, adding that the administration had asked people living in the area to be vigilant at night.

“Barrage of artillery starts after 9pm. It sets off a wave of terror across the region,” said a resident of Parachinar.

Sources said that the IS and TTP (Sajna group) had set up sanctuaries in Keymati area of Afghanistan’s Paktia province, from where they launched attacks on border posts in Pakistan.

Recently two Pakistani pickets were attacked in Borki and Kherlachi areas adjacent to Paktia.

The IS already has a presence in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, which lies to the north of Kurram Agency, and it has established control in some districts.

A security official in Peshawar confirmed the attack on pickets of the Frontier Corps in Kurram.

“Officials say that IS and TTP’s fighters were involved in attacks on the security posts,” said an elder from Borki.

He said people in Borki and Kherlachi had been keeping vigil at night for the past one month after receiving an advice from the administration.

“People are not only keeping vigil during night, but elders of Borki and Kherlachi have also provided four heavy machineguns and ammunition to the paramilitary forces as a gesture of support,” he said.

Sources said that the assistant political agent and the commandant of Kurram Militia met elders of Turi, Bangash and Mangal tribes near Parachinar on Saturday to mobilise tribal people against the threat.

A jirga of elders from Kurram and Afghanistan is likely to be held on Monday to discuss the situation and work out a joint strategy to prevent infiltration from across the border. The jirga is also likely to discuss kidnapping of four residents of Kurram in Afghanistan.

Assistant Political Agent Shahid Ali Khan and Additional Political Agent Naeemuullah were reluctant to offer comments on the issue.

[SSridhar]

On the NIA officer, DSP Tanzil Ahmed's assassination, India Today channel hints at IS angle and the investigating agencies are tracking 53 phone numbers.

I strongly feel that it is IM/AuT [Ansar-ul-Tawhid Fi Bilad Al Hind (AuT), suspected to be the new outfit of the Bhatkals and based in Af-Pak region with allegiance to IS] which is behind the attack. It had already announced its intention to avenge the Batala House incident.

Apparently, the officer was instrumental in smashing the recruitment for IS in Western UP & Roorkee. See the series of posts in Jan 2016 starting from here.

It must be so traumatizing for the two young children of Shri Tanzil Ahmed to have witnessed all that and to see their mother battling her life. My heart goes out to them. I pray for the recovery for Mrs. Farzana Ahmed.Apparently, the assailants waited for the officer to board the car because earlier on, the same car had ferried other relatives but they didn't attack.

[devesh]

Lessons from Europe’s amnesia - MK. Narayanan, The Hindu

Given this, India cannot remain complacent that it will remain unaffected by the IS as it is heir to a unique civilisational heritage. In December 2015, the IS issued a manifesto which claimed India as part of the Islamic Caliphate. It referred to a growing Hindu movement in the country directed against Muslims. The latest manifesto is a sequel to an earlier one, of June 2015, which had declared IS’s ambition to expand its jihad into India. This is reason enough for India to avoid the kind of amnesia that has engulfed Europe.

these are strange days.

MK Narayanan is lecturing on terrorism, perceptions of strength and weakness, containing Islamic Jihad, etc.

should we laugh or cry?

[Sachin]

MK Narayanan is lecturing on terrorism, perceptions of strength and weakness, containing Islamic Jihad, etc.

Now that these folks are sitting idle, nothing suits them than to sit and lecture about various things under the sun. Things which they could have controlled, but they ignored it when they were in office .

[SSridhar]

Bhatkal man held at Pune airport - The Hindu

A 34-year-old man from Bhatkal in Karnataka was detained at the Pune airport on Tuesday when he was about to board a flight to Dubai for onward journey to Syria to join the Islamic State terrorist outfit.

Officials identified the man as Ismail Musab Raoof Ahmed, a resident of Bhatkal in north Karnataka. He was to board an Air India flight to Dubai, when he was detained by intelligence officials at the Pune airport.

Security agencies have been keeping a strict vigil after his name cropped up during Internet chats with members of the IS {Why wasn't he detained at Immigration itself or even earlier and why after he boarded the flight?}, which is being monitored to look for possible followers of the terror group, active in parts of Syria and Iraq.

They said Ahmed was detained as the Union Home Ministry had issued a Look Out Circular against him sometime ago.

[Sachin]

{Why wasn't he detained at Immigration itself or even earlier and why after he boarded the flight?}[/b]

Perhaps to check if he was actually part of a larger gang, who would check-in separately, but feeling that all of them have escaped reach the air-side and join up. Or could be to see if he is also a carrier involved in smuggling (with a few conniving staff also involved). Also an arrest/detention right at the desk of the Immigration check official may cause un-neccessary tensions. More people actually seeing the chap getting detained, may be even putting up a fight. And last but not the least - "secularism" etc. being used as an excuse to allege harassment. Much more easier would be to allow the passengers to queue up, ask the concerned chap to just wait for a little while (while the rest of the passengers board), and with minimal fuss pull him aside.

[SSridhar]

‘IS suspect’ released - Imran Gowhar, The Hindu

The anxious family of 34-year-old Mohammed Ismail, who was detained on Tuesday at Pune by NIA investigators, suspecting him of being an ‘IS recruiter’, heaved a sigh of relief after he informed the family of his release.

Confirming this to The Hindu over phone from Bhatkal, Ismail’s father Rauf Ahmed said that he received a call from his son around 11 p.m. on Wednesday that he had been released and that he was in Mumbai.

“He spoke to me for about five minutes and told me that he would be reaching home soon. The line got disconnected after about five minutes of conversation and our repeated attempts to reach him went in vain as his phone has been switched off,” an elated Mr. Rauf said.

Mr. Rauf said that Ismail had informed him that though he had been released by the NIA, he had been asked to report before the agency whenever required.

Earlier in the day, a senior government official said in New Delhi that Mr. Ismail’s detention could have been a case of ‘mistaken identity.’

A shoe salesman, Mr. Ismail was on his way to board an Air India flight to Dubai on Tuesday morning when he was detained.

In January, the NIA arrested 24 young men who allegedly wanted to establish an “IS-backed caliphate” in the country. One of the main suspects was Mudabbir Sheikh and during his interrogation, the name of one “Raoof” had surfaced.

“The person detained at the Pune airport also had Raoof in his name and since he is from Bhatkal {that is the fierce reputation that the Bhatkal brothers and their associates have created. I hope that the residents of Bhatkal fight such terrorists and clear the sullied name} ,the intelligence agencies could have mistaken him for a terror suspect,” the official said.

[SSridhar]

It seems that 'all clear' is not sounded for the Bhatkal boy!

Link - The Hindu

A hunt for the cheapest ticket to reach his place of work in Dubai landed Ismail Bhatkal in trouble at the Pune airport on Monday evening. The nightmare that followed lasted for two whole days.

“Ye zulm ho raha hai hum par, ye galat hai [This is injustice and whatever happened was not right],” says a distraught Abdul Raoof, father of Ismail Musab Raoof Ahmed, who was detained at the airport by intelligence agencies, who suspected he was travelling to Syria to join the Islamic State. Ismail was released by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday night after agencies verified his antecedents.
Daily wage earner

Abdul Raoof, Ismail’s father, told The Hindu on the phone from Mumbai: “My son has been released but has been asked to be in Mumbai for now. He was on his way to Dubai to earn money. He got his visa only 10 days ago. They have not said why he was arrested.” Raoof sells raw sevai (sweet dish) in Bhatkal, Karnataka. His son is a daily wage labourer. This was not the first time that Ismail had flown out of the country.

He got his passport in 2015 and first went to Dubai 10 months ago.

A senior NIA official said a look out circular (LOC) had been issued in Ismail’s name and as soon as he reached the immigration desk at the Pune airport, he was handed over to the agencies.

Raoof said his son chose to travel to Pune to catch a flight to Dubai as he was getting cheaper tickets there. “We checked the air fare at the Bangalore and Mumbai airports. It was anywhere between Rs.22,000 and Rs.25,000. The ticket was cheapest at the Pune airport: Rs. 12,000 for an Air India flight to Dubai. It made sense to board the flight there.”

The NIA official declined to say Ismail’s detention was a case of mistaken identity. “There is a thin line between being a suspect and a witness. For now, we have released him but we might make him a witness in our case. Since the LOC was issued in his name and details matched, we are still verifying his claims,” said an NIA official.

S.K. Singh, Inspector-General, NIA, however, said on Friday: “Ismail has been released.”

An NIA official explained that the LOC against Ismail was issued as his name had cropped up during the interrogation of Mudabbir Sheikh, a Mumbra resident, who was arrested in January during the nationwide raids to unearth an alleged plot to establish an Islamic State-backed caliphate here. Sheikh had received hawala money on two occasions. The funds were to be used to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and bombs to target places of importance, politicians and policemen. Investigators said that during his interrogation, the name of one Raoof had surfaced, and based on information provided by a ground source, Ismail’s name was put on that list.

“Had they wanted to arrest him, they could have arrested him at Bhatkal itself; they had his name and address. Why did they wait for him to reach the Pune airport,” asked a friend.

Responding to this, an NIA official said: “We had gone to Bhatkal to trace him, but he was nowhere to be found. This is why, we opened an LOC against him so that he did not leave the country.”

[SSridhar]

India may sign pact against terror with the Maldives - The Hindu

A crucial counter-terror pact is likely to be among the list of agreements that the President of the Maldives, Abdullah Yameen, may conclude during his visit to India on Sunday and Monday, a high-level Maldivian diplomatic source told The Hindu on Saturday.

The Maldives has been seeking regional support to deal with extremism as 40 of its citizens are reportedly fighting alongside the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The issue was discussed between India and the Maldives during the March visit of Maldivian Foreign Secretary Ali Naseer Mohammed and Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar when both sides agreed on “information sharing” to counter terror. “Our biggest challenge is the potential returnees from the IS terror camps who are trained in firearms, Mr. Ali Mohammed had told The Hindu during his visit.

Please see this posted about a month back here.

[SSridhar]

India seeks China's help to unravel ISIS plot to expand in country - PTI

India has sought Chinese help to unravel the conspiracy of ISIS to spread its tentacles in the sub-continent and asked for details of the 'chat conversation' an alleged Islamic State recruit from Maharashtra had with his handlers in Syria and Iraq.

The NIA has sent Letters Rogatory to China requesting for the chat details of Areeb Majeed, arrested by the anti-terror agency in December 2014, with his handlers, official sources said on Monday.

Once the authorities in Beijing send in the details including location of his handlers in Syria and Iraq, the NIA will file a supplementary chargesheet in the 'open case' it has registered against the terror group which controls vast swathes of land and population in the two countries and declared a Caliphate, the sources said.

Majeed used 'WeChat' messaging service for allegedly chatting with his handlers and the server was located in China.

The 24-year-old man from Kalyan landed in Mumbai on November 28, 2014 after spending nearly six months in Iraq, following which he was detained by the security agencies and later arrested.

A case under Unlawful Assembly Prevention Act (UAPA) and a section of IPC which deals with waging war against any Asiatic country, which has friendly ties with India, was registered against ISIS, Majeed and three other young men from Kalyan near Mumbai.

In May 2014, the four had left the country to visit holy places in West Asia but disappeared. They were alleged to have joined ISIS. Majeed, however, returned.

Majeed is the only alleged ISIS member arrested in India so far who was claimed to have gone to Syria and fought alongside the outfit against the forces of Bashar al-Assad regime. The NIA has so far arrested over 35 people who were allegedly trying to spread the tentacles of ISIS in India.

NIA has already filed a chargesheet against four people including Majeed.

According to the NIA chargesheet, Majeed and his three associates -- Saheem Farooque Tanki, Fahad Tanweer Shaikh and Aman Nayeem Tandel -- allegedly entered into a criminal conspiracy between January and November 2014 with the common objective and intention of joining Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) or ISIS, a banned international terrorist organisation.

They intended to participate in terrorist acts not only in Iraq and Syria but also in India, among other countries, the chargesheet said.

[devesh]

^^^
NIA is writing letters to PRC asking for their help in fighting Jihadis....Indian Babudom. no point in even commiserating anymore.

[SSridhar]

India monitoring gurdwara blast probe’ - PTI

India on Friday said it was closely monitoring the investigation into the explosion at a gurdwara in Germany’s western city of Essen which was possibly carried out by Islamic State.

“We assume this to be an act of terrorism...the police had held a press conference in which it announced arrest of one Yusuf T who reportedly surrendered after a manhunt was launched,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He said the police claimed to have got a confession that suggested that he had possible links with the IS.

“Investigation is going on and more details are awaited. We are closely monitoring the situation,” Mr. Swarup added.

A 60-year-old Sikh priest was among three persons who were injured when the bomb went off in the entrance hall of Gurdwara Nanaksar at the end of a wedding ceremony on Saturday last. — PTI

[SSridhar]

Bangladesh professor hacked to death by alleged ISIS militants - PTI

An English professor on way to his university in northwestern Bangladesh was today hacked to death by ISIS militants near his home, the latest in a series of brutal attacks on bloggers, intellectuals and activists by the dreaded group in the Muslim-majority country.

Rajshahi University professor AFM Rezaul Karim Siddiquee, 58, was attacked by motorbike-borne assailants within 50 metres of his residence in Rajshahi city as the militants slit his throat using sharp weapons and left him to die, police said.

"The miscreants attacked him from behind with machetes as he walked to the university campus from his home around 7.30am," local police station in-charge Shahdat Hossain told PTI over phone.

He said the professor of English literature died instantly and the assailants fled the scene after his death.

Eyewitnesses said Siddiquee's body was found lying face down in a pool of blood, and a local media report quoted one of them as saying that she saw two persons leaving on a motorbike from the spot.

US-based private SITE Intelligence Group said the Islamic State has claimed the killing.

"ISIS' Amaq Agency reported the group's responsibility for killing Rajshahi University professor Rezaul Karim for "calling to atheism" in Bangladesh," it said in a tweet.

Earlier, Rajshahi's police commissioner Mohammad Shamsuddin told reporters at the scene that the "technique of the murder suggested it could be an act of Islamist terrorists."

The professor's neck was hacked at least three times and was 70-80 per cent slit, he said, adding that the nature of the attack shows it was carried out by extremist groups.

[SSridhar]

Bangladesh police arrest student over professor's murder - ToI

Bangladesh police arrested an Islamist student on Sunday over the hacking to death of a professor one day earlier, the latest such killing claimed by the Islamic State group.

He said the unidentified student of public administration is a member of Islami Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of Bangladesh's largest Islamist opposition party the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Siddique was the fourth professor from Rajshahi University to be killed by suspected Islamists in recent years.

Do we conclude that JI is now supporting IS?

[SSridhar]

Islamic State's chief India recruiter killed in US drone strike - Neeraj Chauhan, ToI

Mohammad Shafi Armar, the head and principal recruiter of Islamic State (IS) in India, Shafi Armar, died a few days ago in a US drone strike in Syria, sources said.

Shafi, also known as Yousuf, had reportedly become an important ally of IS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and was helping establish the outfit in India. He is learnt to have recruited at least 30 men for the group. According to 23 IS recruits arrested over the past year and a half by the NIA, Delhi Police and police forces of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, Shafi planned to establish an IS unit in every Indian state.

According to top government sources, the death of 26-year-old Shafi, a native of Bhatkal in Karnataka, may have left the Indian unit of IS "headless" for now. His elder brother Sultan Armar, who was heading the outfit's India franchise till last year, died in March 2015 in the same manner. TOI confirmed Shafi's death from three top government and intelligence sources. The agencies are ascertaining the exact circumstances under which he was killed.

Listed on the Interpol website, Shafi had recently formed Junud al Khalifa-e-Hind (Soldiers of the Indian Caliphate) by dismantling the Ansar-ul-Tauhid (AuT). AuT was born out of Indian Mujahideen (IM) after Shafi and Sultan developed differences with Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal, the Pakistan-based chiefs of IM, over misuse of funds received for terror activities. AuT had pledged loyalty to IS and Shafi conducted talent-scouting from his Syrian base.

It is suspected that Shafi was in touch with at least 600-700 Indian youngsters on closed Facebook groups and messaging platforms like Trillion, Surespot, WhatsApp and Skype over the past one year, and may have recruited some men for the outfit. He even arranged funds - through transfers and hawala transactions - for IS recruits here. He sent some Rs 6 lakh to the module of Mudabbir Mushtaq Shaikh, whom Shafi made the 'amir' of IS in India while keeping the larger 'head' designation with himself. Sources said very few IS recruits have managed to travel to Syria as security agencies have been keeping a close watch on their activities in India.

"We have learnt about his death. We are gathering more details. The final confirmation and details may take time as it is difficult to get information from Syria, where IS has presence, but it's big news," said a top official.

Officials said Shafi was the common link between several IS suspects caught or questioned by different agencies. Sultan Armar, who headed AuT before his death, allegedly appeared in many videos (now blocked) with his face digitally masked, asking Indian Muslims to join AuT and wage a war in the name of jihad. In one of the videos, he reportedly exhorted, "Rise like Ahmad Shah Abdali and Muhammad ibn-Qasim, like Syed Ahmad the martyr, like the Prophet and his companions, take the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other, and head to the fields of jihad." He also asked IS recruits to "teach Brahmins and worshippers of cows, as well as the whole world of unbelievers, that the Indian Muslim is no coward".

The Armar brothers' links to the IS first emerged during the interrogation of Yasin Bhatkal, who headed IM and was arrested in 2013.

[SSridhar]

Teens who bombed gurudwara in Germany were IS sympathisers, report says - PTI

Two secondary school students accused of carrying out a bomb attack on a Gurudwara in the German city of Essen nearly two weeks ago are radical Islamists and sympathisers of the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda, authorities said.

The two allegedly detonated a fire extinguisher filled with explosives at the entrance of the Nanaksar Satsang Sabha Gurudwara on the evening of April 16.

Before setting off the explosion, the two 16-year-old secondary school students unsuccessfully tried to break into the gurudwara through the entrance door, North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger said on Thursday in a report presented to the home affairs committee of the State parliament in Duesseldorf.

They have admitted to carrying out the attack, but denied that the operation was motivated by religion, the report said.

They told their investigators that they did it “just for the kick of building fireworks.”

The two from Essen and the neighbouring town of Gelsenkirchen are known to police as members of the Salafist sect of Islam, the report said.

One of them was interrogated by police in connection with his involvement in cases of causing grievous bodily harm and attempted burglary.

He had also expressed his sympathy for IS and Al Qaeda, the report said.

His accomplice has been participating in a special programme by the interior ministry for Salafists who have a tendency to get involved in violence and are in danger of being drawn to IS and other terror organisations.

He came under the police radar after threatening a Jewish fellow-student and attempting to obtain firearms, the report said.

They were arrested four days after an explosion ripped through the entrance hall of the gurudwara, which hosted a wedding ceremony. Most of the guests had left to a nearby hall for a reception when the bomb was detonated.

A priest of the gurudwara was seriously injured in the blast and had to be admitted to a hospital while two others were treated for minor injuries by emergency medical teams at the scene of the blast.

The explosion caused severe damage to the gurudwara building.

[SSridhar]

IS claims responsibility for Hindu tailor killed in Bangladesh - The Hindu

The Islamic State (IS) terror group has claimed responsibility of killing a Hindu tailor in Bangladesh’s Tangail district.

According to jihadi threat monitoring portal SITE Intelligence Group, Nikhil Chandra Joarder (50), was hacked to death in Gopalpur on Saturday, bdnews24 reported.

Police said unidentified assailants on motorbikes killed Joarder in front of his tailoring shop at around 12.30 p.m.

“Three youths arrived at the shop of Nikhil. They took him to a nearby road saying they need to talk to him. Then they hacked him indiscriminately and fled after confirming his death,” a police official said.

He was killed in a manner similar to that of several bloggers, rights activists and university teachers.

Nikhil earlier served three-month in jail in a case over slandering of Prophet Muhammad.

Several people including, foreign nationals, bloggers, human rights activists and university teachers were hacked to death in the last one year.

In most of the cases, Al-Qaeda or the IS have claimed responsibility.

[SSridhar]

Siddhartha Dhar a senior commander of ISIS: Report - PTI

Indian-origin Islamic State terrorist from Britain Siddhartha Dhar, dubbed as the " New Jihadi John", is a senior commander of the dreaded outfit, according to a media report.

Nihad Barakat, a Yazidi teenager held as a sex slave by the group, was quoted as saying by the Independent that she was kidnapped and trafficked by Siddhartha, who is now based in Mosul, the group's Iraqi stronghold.

Siddhartha, a British Hindu who converted to Islam and now goes by the name Abu Rumaysah, had skipped police bail in the UK to travel to Syria with his wife and young children in 2014.

In an interview for a new documentary series for UK-based British Muslim TV about life on the frontline in Iraq, Barakat said Siddhartha was among the foreign fighters who enslaved her.

"When I was captured near Kirkuk, they took me to another leader from Mosul. His name was Abu Dhar. He also took Yazidi girls for himself. Every day he would tell me that I had to marry another man," she said.

The newspaper admits that while it is difficult to verify whether "Abu Dhar" is the same man as the most-wanted British terror suspect, the documentary's presenter said he was "very confident" Barakat was referring to Siddhartha.

"From the information I have, Siddhartha is deemed a leader in Mosul now, and she was very insistent on that name. When we showed her pictures of Siddhartha she recognised them but went very cold. She didn't want to go further and got very agitated," said presenter Joseph Hayat.

Londoner Siddhartha is believed to have replaced Mohammed Emwazi, known as 'Jihadi John' before he was killed in a drone strike, as the masked apparent executioner of western hostages in ISIS propaganda videos.

His sister, Konika Dhar, had appeared before a House of Commons Home Affairs Committee hearing earlier this year which was trying to establish the possibility of Siddhartha being the masked man who appeared in an ISIS propaganda video showing "British spies" being executed.

"I'm still holding to the firm belief that what I'm seeing is not him - and I haven't had verification otherwise. It's sort of the realisation that 'is he really my brother that has done this? and I can't accept that he would ever do that. I can't accept it, {Oh yeah, this is what relatives of all jihadists say}" the London-based law student had said.

Siddhartha had six previous arrests while in the UK and was free on bail when he was able to escape from the UK via Paris.

British police reportedly wrote to Siddhartha UK address to remind him of the need to surrender his passport, by which point he was already in Syria.

"What a shoddy security system Britain must have to allow me to breeze through Europe to (ISIS)," he tweeted on his arrival in ISIS territories.

[uddu]

Notice how they use his previous name rather than his current name.

[Aditya_V]

Siddartha Dhar a.k.a Abu whatever is a typical secular Hindu? I .e basially how the secular Hindus will behave tomorrow once the numbers are favourable to them, this has happened before in Paki Punjab etc.

[Arjun]

So what kind of force has the power to transform a Kashmiri Brahmin Pandit, from a race too gentle to even protest forced eviction from their ancient homeland - into this vile murderous beast and face of pure evil ?? Something for the world to ponder...

[SSridhar]

Identity of key IS recruiter remains a mystery - Vijaita Singh, The Hindu

Three months after Indian agencies busted a widespread Islamic State network with many members in India, its key recruiter’s identity still remains a mystery.

Security agencies believe that Shafi Armar alias Yousuf al Hindi operates from Syria but are not fully convinced if all communications in his name are from this former Indian Mujahideen member.

Eight of the 25 suspects in the custody of the National Investigation Agency who were allegedly recruited by Armar have told interrogators that they had never seen Armar as he never communicated with them through video calls. Armar was cautious enough to only use web-based applications- ‘We Chat’, ‘Kick’ and audio messaging service on Skype, the men have told the NIA.

Request sent to U.S.

The answer to Armar’s location and that he indeed posted messages from Syria, now lies in requests sent to countries like the U.S., Canada, China and Hong Kong .

“At this point of time, the NIA cannot conclusively say that Armar is based in Syria. He was in touch with eight men who were arrested on terror charges but none of them has seen him. Until and unless we know whether the messages originated from, it will be difficult to conclude that he is in Syria,” said a senior NIA official.

Security agencies believe that Armar, a key member of Ansar ul Tawhid, an offshoot of Indian Mujahideen, which later on pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, reportedly operates from Syria. A resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka, Armar left for Pakistan via Dubai along with his brother Mohammad Sultan Armar in 2008 when the security agencies began a crackdown against IM members.

[SSridhar]

Five ‘ISIS-link terrorists’ arrested in Bahawalpur - DT

A terror bid was foiled by the Counter-Terrorism Department as they arrested five people from Bahawalpur early on Tuesday suspected of being associated to the Islamic State, a Middle East-based militant group.

Further investigations showed that the arrested suspects were affiliated with the global terror outfit. Different kinds of ammunition were also recovered including five bombs and a laptop, police said. According to CTD, the suspects were planning to target a railway bridge on the River Sutlej.

Intelligence Bureau Director General Aftab Sultan said that the Islamic State was an emerging threat in Pakistan because several other banned militant outfits appear to have an inclination towards it and specifically quoted the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as such group.

He also said that a network of the Islamic State was captured in Pakistan and that the terrorist group also works in coordination with the Tehreek-e-Taliban. However, the government maintains its stand that the global terrorist organisation has no foothold or operations in the country.

[SSridhar]

Islamic State asked us to infiltrate Kanhaiya stir, set fire to vehicles: Recruits - Neeraj Chauhan, ToI

Islamic State ( ISIS ) recruits in India wanted to take advantage of the student movement that broke out in several cities after the arrest of JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar.

On February 19, when Kanhaiya was in Tihar jail on sedition charges and students of several universities were holding demonstrations demanding his release, ISIS's Ahmad Ali asked 19-year-old Ashiq Ahmad alias Raja of Hooghly, West Bengal, to infiltrate the movement and burn vehicles and oil tankers using petrol.

This has been revealed in the statements of three recruits of India's ISIS wing — Junud al Khalifa-e-Hind (JKH) — Ashiq Ahmad alias Raja, Mohammad Abdul Ahad and Mohammad Afzal.

The NIA says the idea was to further agitate the students so that it creates disorder in the country.

Their statements, made under Section 164 of CrPC, was exclusively accessed by TOI . The statements of three IS members have been recorded for the first time by any agency. Their testimony proves the creation of JKH and their meetings in Tumukur and Bengaluru (Karnataka), West Bengal and Punjab.

In his statement, Ashiq said Ahmed Ali, who claimed that he was the boss of Ansar-ut Tawhid fi Bilad al-Hind (AuT), contacted him on February 19 through his ID on Trillion app. Some 14 members of the IS had been caught by the NIA by this time. "He told me that agencies are keeping a tab on us. He told me that a student movement is happening in the country and that we should enter and put vehicles, oil tankers on fire," Ashiq said.

Agencies suspect that Ali is none other than Shafi Armar, the head of ISIS in India who is learnt to have died in a recent US drone attack. Ashiq was caught by the NIA on February 22. AuT is connected to ISIS and the outfit opened JKH in India and planned to have a unit in every state, as claimed by Bengaluru- based Ahad.

Ashiq said he was asked to "learn spying, swimming and drawing maps", and that their first target would be "Shias", while they also planned to "free former IM chief Yasin Bhatkal from jail".

"When I asked Ali for a pistol and sent him a picture of a temple near my place (in Hooghly) where we could have carried out a blast to impress him, he told me that we will not do anything small," Ashiq added. Ashiq, who was doing his mechanical engineering, said he was especially drawn towards "jihad" after breaking up with his Hindu girlfriend as she told him that she couldn't leave her religion for him. "I was thinking of changing my religion and then going to her parents," he said.

Ahad said he "was against the idea of jihad as he wanted to help poor people of Muslim community, which was not JKH's plan". A science graduate from the US, Ahad worked in Singapore, Saudi Arabia and UAE before he came in touch with ISIS members. "In December 2014, I visited Turkey as I wanted to go to Syria and see the reality on the ground. I was looking at the possibility of opening an NGO to help the victims of war but I was deported to India," he added.