1. Russia: Russian Spetsnaz (special purpose forces) kill Caucasus Emirate leader
A police insider has revealed sickening details about the alleged Anzac Day terror plot, claiming the accused men planned to run over a police officer and then kill him with a knife.
According to the ABC, a security official close to the ongoing investigation said the group of five men intended to take the officer’s gun and embark on a shooting rampage on the streets of Melbourne.
The shocking plans mirror those of Islamic preachers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who ran down 25-year-old soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich south-east London in May 2013 before ‘butchering him’ to death.
3. Big tobacco quietly battling religious opposition to smoking in key Muslim markets: Canadian study
(To paraphrase one US general during a previous Iran-Iraq war, ‘This is one of those conflicts you hope both sides lose’)
The tobacco industry has been embroiled for decades in a pitched battle to counter the Muslim opposition to smoking, recruiting sympathetic Islamic scholars and crafting theological arguments to defend the habit, a new, Canadian-co-authored study suggests.
Those efforts included approaching Muslim experts at McGill University, and portraying the religious objections as a form of extremism — at odds with freedom and modernism generally, the analysis of years of industry documents reveals.
With smoking on the decline in the West, Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia are among the most important markets for the sector, notes Kelley Lee, a global health-policy expert at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University and one of the authors of the study.
Yet for at least three decades, companies have fretted about the threat posed by Muslim leaders in those places, memos and reports unearthed by Prof. Lee and her colleagues indicate. A 1996 British American Tobacco (BAT) document, for instance, describes the “Islamic threat,” including rising fundamentalism, as a real danger to the industry.
Two jihadi brides have escaped from Islamic State’s female police force and revealed the horrifying punishments they used to inflict on other women.
Doaa and Umm, whose names have been changed to conceal their identities, were smuggled from Raqqa, in Syria, to southern Turkey after leaving the al-Khansa Brigade earlier this year.
The pair said they used to be heavily involved in punishing others who did not obey the group’s rules – including giving 60 lashes to those who tried to flee.
Could be anyone anywhere. Even the couch has a burka
Doaa and Umm (above), whose names have been changed to conceal their identities have revealed what life was like working for the brutal al-Khansa Brigade
In an interview with Sky News Doaa, who left after her Saudi Arabian husband blew himself up in a suicide attack, said women also received a ‘standard’ 40 lashes if they did not wear proper Islamic dress.
5. Tunisian official: 12,000 militants blocked from joining jihadist groups abroad
(It is quite refreshing to see the headline read, “jihadist groups” and not, militant, rebel, freedom fighters or those seeking jobs etc.)
Flaunting the Tunisian’s government achievement in the fight against militant Islam, on Saturday Tunisia’s Interior Minister claimed that his government has prevented some 12, 490 nationals from “leaving Tunisian territory to combat zones” in Iraq, Libya and Syria in the last two years.
According to AFP, speaking to a parliamentary committee, Interior Minister Najem Gharsalli also told Tunisian officials that in the first quarter of 2015, some 1,000 suspects have been tried in courts for alleged links to terrorist organizations.
6. Yemen: Dozens feared dead in air strike on arms depot
7. Woman in Iran shows defiance to the state laws on wearing a head cloth by not wearing one and waving the one she is mandated by law to wear.
Thank you M., Buck, Shabnam, and all who sent in materials. Readers who want more straight geopolitical news about the global conflict with Islam etc. should look at the daily comment stump post where there is a great deal more material.
Also more to come in the next post.
The Russians are supporting the Caliphate in the Middle East but opposing it in the Caucus. Hopefully once Obama is out of office we won’t be doing things like this.