In a recent confidential note, Europol expressed concern about Daesh’s logistics networks, identified several months ago, which are involved in major movements of trafficking and storage of explosives in several Central European countries and the Balkans.
Can you openly finance the ‘brain’ of the most spectacular and lethal terrorist attack in History, one that shook the foundations of the first world power and caused nearly 3,000 victims, and manage to avoid any prosecution or indictment?Even worse, can you be on the blacklists of the UN and the US Treasury and continue surreptitiously accessing your supposedly frozen assets to take out the tidy sum of 120 million dollars per year, i.e. $10,000 per month?
The Wall Street Journal’s recent revelations about failures and inadequacies of the UN sanctions program against the financing of terrorism, have made break out what many UN experts and officials knew and have denounced for many years.
The ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a propaganda video published by the mediatic arm of the organization Al-Furqan. An outbreak that marks a turning point in the operating mode of the terrorist organization that his boss described as “war of attrition”.
More and more sources within the European intelligence community cite sustained attempts by jihadist groups aiming to carry out chemical attacks in Europe. To this end, a quite specific source of concern requires the attention of the antiterrorist services. It concerns the ammunition from Gaddafi’s chemical arsenal, previously stored in secret military centres in Sabha, the capital of Fezzan.
According to a report by a major European intelligence centre, the various Libyan militias have raised more than €520 million in one year by organising or facilitating the smuggling of African migrants to Europe.
American journalist and essayist, Theo Padnos was abducted and imprisoned for 22 months by the jihadists of the Al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. During his captivity, he was subjected to various forms of torture, including waterboarding, as made famous by the CIA’s “intense interrogations” carried out in Guantanamo, and gruesome staged scenes aimed at making him believe that he would be hung or buried alive. Yet he remained hopeful, convinced that he would be freed: as he understood Arabic, he got into the habit of discreetly listening to his jailers’ conversations. He thus came to understand that his captors had previously concluded a secret agreement with the Qataris aimed at obtaining financing under the guise of getting Doha to pay a ransom for his release!
While it is clear that the fire is still smoldering under the ashes of the Islamic State Organization (ISIS), one of the major questions facing counter-terrorism experts is the survival strategy that the ISIS will adopt following the collapse of the proto-state of the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The ISIS’s intelligence service known as the AMNI is at the heart of this survival strategy…
