Warning, this video is harsh. Based on this excellent Phyllis Chesler article. Please click on over and read.
Category Archives: Pakistan
Terror in Mumbai
First, let me thank KitmanTV for the embed code for this profoundly significant and important documentary. Hell if I had a single wish, it might be to make Obama watch this documentary and understand it, and it’s implications.
Father and son connected to Mumbai massacre arrested in Italy
From The Globe and Mail
Two suspects in Mumbai attacks arrested in Italy
Father and son allegedly used their money-transfer business to help attackers set up untraceable phone network
Ariel David
Rome — The Associated Press Published on Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009 1:22PM EST Last updated on Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009 1:40PM EST
Italian police on Saturday arrested a Pakistani father and son who allegedly spent just over $200 to set up a reliable and untraceable phone network that was used by the militants who carried out last year’s terror attacks in Mumbai, India.
The two were arrested in an early morning raid in Brescia, where they ran a money transfer agency, and it is was not immediately clear if they were aware of the purpose their funds had served, police in the northern Italian city said.
The day before the attacks began on Nov. 26 they allegedly used a stolen identity to send money to a U.S. company to pay for Internet phone accounts used by the attackers and their handlers, said Stefano Fonsi, the head of anti-terror police in Brescia.
The transfer was just $229 but gave the militants five lines over the Internet, which are difficult to trace and allowed them to keep in touch even during the rampage, Mr. Fonsi said.
The arrests on the eve of the first anniversary of the attacks underscored the long-standing concern of experts and officials over the ease with which small sums can be channelled through money transfer agencies to fund deadly terror plots.
Italian police began the probe in December after being alerted by the FBI and Indian police about the transfer, Mr. Fonsi told The Associated Press by phone.
Ten militants, allegedly from Pakistan, killed 166 people in a three-day assault on luxury hotels, a Jewish centre and other sites in India’s financial capital. One Italian was among the 19 foreigners killed.
The money from Brescia was transferred under the identity of another Pakistani who had never been to Italy and was not involved in the attacks, Mr. Fonsi said.
He lives in Spain and his identity was probably stolen when he used another money transfer agency somewhere in the world, Mr. Fonsi told a news conference.
The order to open the accounts with the Callphonex company came from two men in Pakistan, he said. Mr. Fonsi added that Italian authorities had shared details of their identities with Pakistani officials.
The two suspects in Brescia, identified in a police statement as 60-year-old Mohammad Yaqub Janjua and 31-year-old Aamer Yaqub Janjua, are accused of aiding and abetting international terrorism as well as illegal financial activity. The Madina Trading agency, which operated on the Western Union money transfer circuit, was seized by police.
Callphonex and Western Union are not accused of any wrongdoing. The companies did not return messages seeking comment on Saturday. Western Union has said it co-operates fully in fighting terrorism and has spent millions worldwide in compliance efforts.
Early in the probe, suspicions focused on Iqbal Javaid, the man whose identity was used for the transfer, and the Janjuas told investigators and the media they didn’t remember him and didn’t know his whereabouts.
“They certainly sidetracked the investigation,” Mr. Fonsi said. “But we don’t have clear proof that they were aware of what the money was for.”
Though Jihadist propaganda leaflets were found in the home of one of those arrested Saturday, there was no evidence that the two, who have lived in Italy since 1992, were directly linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group blamed for the Mumbai attacks, he said.
Transferring funds using the identity of other people was a common practice at the agency in Brescia, and the Italian probe broke up a ring of people who used the system for various criminal aims, Mr. Fonsi said.
Two more Pakistanis were arrested in Saturday’s raids for allegedly committing fraud, money laundering and other crimes through the masked transfers, but they were not linked to the Mumbai attacks. A fifth Pakistani man escaped arrest and was still being sought.
An additional 12 people were flagged to prosecutors for possible investigation but were not arrested, Mr. Fonsi said.
Just by using Mr. Javaid’s stolen identity, the suspects had transferred some $590,000 U.S. between 2006 and 2008 to various countries. The network also used its contacts in Pakistan to help illegal immigrants enter Italy, Mr. Fonsi said.
Like other Western countries, Italy has shown concern over the use of money transfer agencies amid fears that funds to terror groups are being hidden in the flow of payments sent by immigrant workers back home.
The government has progressively cut the amount that can be sent by these means, but the small payment for the phone lines was still much lower than the current limit of $2,900 U.S. per week.
Many attacks in recent years have been funded on the cheap.
For example, the British government has said, the operation that blew up three London subways and a bus in July 2005, killing 52 commuters, used readily available materials and cost the equivalent of $15,000 U.S.
For the March 11, 2004 bombings on four Madrid trains that killed 191 commuters, some estimates say the perpetrators spent less than $1,400 U.S. of their own money.
Related: read how Canada aids India in Mumbai massacre probe
Beautifull Indian girl doing some pretty awsome rap
This may be the very first rap tune I have actually liked.
h/t KitmanTV
Why Pakistan is winning ITS war against the Taliban
By way of a forward, I cant help but notice from the picture that perhaps if the Taliban didn’t watch as many cartoons they wouldn’t have such a warped world view. Does anyone in the photo in the story look familiar?
- Dumb Donald, Taliban fashion man
From The Daily Mail UK:
In Mingora, the city of 250,000 people that was until recently the headquarters of Pakistan’s Swat valley Taliban, the shopping centre is heaving.
‘Bloody Chowk’, the crossroads where the militants used to leave the butchered bodies of their victims every night, is once again merely a mini-roundabout, surrounded by camera and shoe shops.
Further up the valley, a scenically idyllic 100-mile seam of fertility dividing the Northwest Frontier mountains, the girls’ schools that were blown up by the Taliban are reopening, with lessons taking place in tents.
Further up the valley, a scenically idyllic 100-mile seam of fertility dividing the Northwest Frontier mountains, the girls’ schools that were blown up by the Taliban are reopening, with lessons taking place in tents.
Success: Pakistani army soldiers with captured militants at Lower Dir in the Swat valleyThe barbers ordered to stop shaving beards on pain of death are back in business, and Mullah FM, the radio station used by the Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah to broadcast his extremist sermons, is off the air.
Western leaders often insinuate that there is something half-hearted about Pakistan’s struggle against those responsible not only for bringing terror to Swat but providing safe havens for the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the series of devastating bombings in the big Pakistani cities.
Last month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that some in Pakistan’s government must know the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, still said by some to be hiding in the frontier’s tribal areas.
Gordon Brown has repeatedly urged the Pakistanis to ‘do more’, claiming that three-quarters of terrorist plots in Britain have links to Pakistan.
Yet last week he also admitted that, across the Afghan border, some of the territory the British Army took at such terrible cost last summer is already back under Taliban control.
As I walked unmolested through the alleys of Mingora’s bazaar, his comments provoked some uncomfortable thoughts.
First the good news: the Swat example shows that the Taliban are not invincible, and that it is possible to fight a counter-insurgency against them and win.
Unfortunately, however, the very reasons Pakistan appears to be doing quite well, both in Swat and in the current military operation further south in Waziristan, make the prospects of Nato success in Afghanistan more remote.
Moreover, one of the Pakistanis’ evident strengths – a clear strategic focus with operations of limited scope that tackle the enemy one area at a time – is woefully lacking in Afghanistan.
‘You have to recognise the limits of your power. When you try to attain too many objectives simultaneously, you end up attaining nothing,’ General Athar Abbas, the Pakistan army’s chief spokesman, told me.
‘If you don’t have clarity from the beginning, especially about what to do after you capture somewhere, you will run into serious problems – and that is what’s happening across the border.
‘You have to retain your successes, and the only way to do that is with popular support.’
Life in Mingora isn’t yet back to normal: the death and destruction have simply been too great. Fazlullah used to be a chairlift operator and one of the first things the Taliban did was to blow up the Swat valley’s ski facilities.
Skirmishes continue in outlying areas and there is still a curfew. But the progress is unmistakable.
When I last visited Pakistan in June, at the height of the Swat campaign, there were more than two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living on the scorching plains in camps and relatives’ spare rooms.
But a remarkably efficient army-led transport and reconstruction effort has meant more than 95 per cent of them have been back home for weeks.
More impressive is the fact that despite having been IDPs, and in many cases having once been in favour of the Taliban, few Swat people appear to want them back.
‘When Fazlullah started his broadcasts, he had a lot of support,’ said Shiraz Khan, a local TV cameraman. ‘Not now. Their methods have been exposed.’
One night, he said, he was woken by the shrieks of his next-door neighbour. ‘The Taliban had come to her house and, in front of her and the rest of the family, they were murdering her oldest son and her husband by cutting their throats.’
‘When you see a dead body, its cut-off head lying on its chest, it’s a truly terrible sight,’ said a local professor, who asked not to be named.
‘The people supported the Taliban because they felt the state was not giving them justice. But now they are finished.’
The army is still in Mingora, but responsibility for law and order is back with the police.
‘The community is helping us with information,’ said Qazi Farooq, the district chief.
He said that ‘regular police work’ had led to the capture of dozens of militants, 60 of whom have already been charged in the criminal courts with crimes including murder and blowing up bridges.
In the remoter areas, ‘lashkars’ – tribal militias – have been formed to root out the last Taliban. If only the British Army had encountered similar reactions in Helmand, Afghanistan.
Last Friday, when I visited a new IDP centre established at a cricket ground in Dera Ismail Khan on the South Waziristan border, I heard the main reason why starkly expressed.
The IDPs there come from the same Pathan tribe, the Mehsuds, which is also the main source of the local Taliban.
But having been brutalised in a similar fashion to the people of Swat, several men told me they were ready to work with the army to ensure that its gains were maintained once they went home.
‘The thing is this,’ said Mohammed Qasar, a farmer from the district of Lada. ‘If the army treat us well, we will co-exist with them, because ultimately we are Pakistanis. The soldiers are our people, too.’
And there, alas, is the rub. The new counter-insurgency buzzword for Gordon Brown and Nato’s commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, is ‘protecting the population’ in order to consolidate gains.
But honorable as that intention may be, no Afghan Pathan will ever describe the British or US troops as ‘our people’. Whatever their avowed policy, Nato troops will always look like occupiers.
In Pakistan, the fact that the army is being deployed inside its own country is a possible source of weakness.
This imposes a delicacy that is often not appreciated: it is, in the words of one general, ‘a pretty big deal’, and in order to rely on public support, it has had to wait until the Taliban’s outrages have become manifest before launching operations.
But having got that backing, it has become a source of strength.
Meanwhile, General Abbas cited a further stupefying sign of Nato’s apparent absence of strategic co-ordination.
In the name of the new ‘protection’ strategy, the US has this autumn been withdrawing from its posts on the Afghan side of the frontier, including those in Paktika, the province next to South Waziristan.
‘It will create a vacuum,’ he said, ‘and if militants escape from Waziristan, what can we do? We cannot fire on them when they cross the border.’
For years, Nato chiefs have accused Pakistan of failing to deal with the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistani territory. Now, in one of the more bitter ironies of this ever-lengthening war, that role has been reversed.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1227826/Why-Pakistan-winning-ITS-war-Taliban.html#ixzz0WwNRoRSe
Repost: Woman shoots attacker, kills him, wins award from government.
I am re-posting this because it bears noticing, that the western world for decades now has been teaching us to submit to violent criminals and not to fight back theoretically to minimize any damage criminals may wish to do to us. Clearly it is the wrong strategy. The answer is always resist terrorists, extortionists, criminals and all who would do you harm even your own governments when they are acting unjustly to you and your genuine human rights as an individual using any and all means at your disposal. This woman’s brave actions will give pause to the next bunch of thugs that wish and expect “kingly” treatment from the next home invasion they do.
Please let us all follow her magnificent example. And the next time the police give a lecture on how to submit to criminals and hope they go away, remember they have guns and in Canada at least, forbid those of us who pay the police from having them. So its easy for them to say.
Eeyore
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 10:02PM BST 29 Sep 2009
Rukhsana Kauser with the gun she snatched from one of the militants.
Rukhsana Kausar, 21, was with her parents and brother in Jammu and Kashmir when three gunmen, believed to be Pakistani militants, forced their way in and demanded food and beds for the night.
Their house in Shahdra Sharief, Rajouri district, is about 20 miles from the ceasefire line between Indian and Pakistani forces.
It is close to dense forests known as hiding places for fighters from the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, which carried out the Mumbai terrorist attack last November.
Militants often demand food and lodging in nearby villages.
When they forced their way into Miss Kausar’s home, her father Noor Mohammad refused their demands and was attacked.
His daughter was hiding under a bed when she heard him crying as the gunmen thrashed him with sticks. According to police, she ran towards her father’s attacker and struck him with an axe. As he collapsed, she snatched his AK47 and shot him dead. Continue Reading →
Canadian arrested in Danish newspaper plot
TORONTO — The FBI has arrested a Canadian for his role in an alleged terrorist plot against the Danish newspaper that published the controversial Muhamad cartoons.
Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, owner of First World Immigration Services, was charged with aiding a conspiracy to attack the Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen.
In an indictment unsealed this morning, the U.S. Justice Department said Mr. Rana had worked with David Coleman Headley and three Pakistani terrorists to organize the attack.
Mr. Rana, a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan, has been living in Chicago, where he operates an immigration firm and grocery store. He also owns a halal meat business in Kinsman, Ill., that was raided by FBI agents last week.
“The criminal complaints unsealed today have exposed a serious plot against overseas targets by two Chicago-based men working with Pakistani-based terrorist organizations,” said David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security.
Muslim extremists rioted around the world after the newspaper published a dozen editorial cartoons of Muhamad in 2005 that some considered blasphemous.
Police arrests man whipping Swat girl publicly
I’m sure, even after this arrest, Muslims will continue to claim the video is Indian, anti Pakistan propaganda.
DI KHAN: The man whipping a girl publicly in Swat, as shown in a video footage on media some months ago, has been arrested.
Nine suspects were nabbed from Dera Ismail Khan a few days ago including Amin alias Chhota Aftab, source said. Police said during investigation it was found that he is the same man whipping the Swat girl, as shown in the footage.
He is said to hail from Swat and is not even the relative of the girl he whipped.
Chhota Aftab was shifted from DI Khan eight days ago
Taliban Claims Pakistan U.N. Agency Attack
Militants Say Suicide Bomber Hit World Food Program Because Relief Work Not in “the Interest of Muslims”
In other words if Muslims see the kuffar, the infidel, doing good works it makes them question their hatred for all things Western or American.
CBS NEWS…Taliban militants claimed responsibility Tuesday for the deadly suicide bombing at the U.N. food agency’s heavily fortified compound in Islamabad, saying international relief work in Pakistan was not in “the interest of Muslims.”
The attack, which killed five workers for the World Food Program on Monday, pushed the U.N. to temporarily close its offices in the country and exposed the vulnerability of many international relief agencies working to provide aid to millions of civilians affected by the fight between the government and Islamic militant groups.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik accused the Taliban of carrying out the attack to avenge the Aug. 5 slaying of their leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone attack.
Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq confirmed his group was behind the bombing in a phone conversation with The Associated Press and lashed out at foreign aid workers here.
“We proudly claim the responsibility for the suicide attack at the U.N. office in Islamabad. We will send more bombers for such attacks,” he said. “The U.N. and other foreign (aid groups) are not working for the interest of Muslims. We are watching their activities. They are infidels.”
He added that the Taliban would not target Muslim relief groups. Continue Reading →
Yemen the “New Big Magnet” for al Qaeda
Saeed Sankar and others inside a court cage react as a state security court in San’a, Yemen handed down death sentences to six al Qaeda militants convicted for a number of deadly attacks on Western targets last year, on Monday, July 13, 2009
CBS News… Hundreds of hardcore Arab fighters loyal to al Qaeda have fled the Afghanistan-Pakistan region this year, heading mainly to Yemen to bolster an Islamist insurgency targeting oil-rich Saudi Arabia, according to Arab, Pakistani and Western officials who spoke to CBS News.
The implications of such a buildup in Yemen are profound not only for the stability of Saudi Arabia — the birthplace of Islam and home to the holiest of Islamic shrines — but for the world’s dependence upon a continued flow of petroleum from the largest known oil reserves.
For years, Western intelligence officials have believed that Osama bin Laden would eventually aim to destabilize Saudi Arabia, his own birth place. Bin Laden traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join the U.S.-led and Saudi-supported “jihad” (or holy war) against the Soviet occupation. While Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, large numbers of Arab volunteer fighters remained in Afghanistan.
“The trend is very, very clear,” one Western diplomat based in Islamabad told CBS News on condition of anonymity. “There is no question about Arab members of al Qaeda increasingly seeking ways to travel to Yemen.
“Some have been arrested along this route,” said the official, who refused to name the countries in which arrests have taken place, or the number of people arrested.
A senior Pakistani official who spoke to CBS News confirmed that Arab militants linked to al Qaeda were heading to Yemen in growing numbers. The Pakistani official claimed the militants had traveled to Yemen via Iran, using remote locations along the southern Iranian coast to discretely board fishing vessels. Continue Reading →
Calais migrants to get flight home and £1,900
Telegraph… As well as a guaranteed place on the plane worth around £500, many of those on board will receive the sum and a guarantee of retraining back in their homeland.
However, there will be nothing to prevent any of them travelling all the way back to France the moment they get to Afghanistan.
It is intended to be the first of many flights which will cost millions of pounds, split between France and Britain.
The aim is to reduce the number of migrants who are massing in Calais, which they use as a springboard to try and get to Britain, where they will claim asylum or disappear into the black economy.
The dramatic development followed last month’s clearing of “The Jungle”, a notorious Calais squatter camp which was filled with mainly young men from Afghanistan.
The French immigration minister hailed the raid as an important step in the battle to make the northern port ‘watertight’ to migrants, but was widely criticised after almost all those arrested were later released.
It now appears that a compromise has been reached with many of them who have agreed to accept the huge cash incentive to go home, even if only briefly. The sums involved are worth hundreds of times more in central Asia than in Britain or France.
The French pulled out of a similar deportation scheme a year ago, with First Lady Carla Bruni among those insisting that it was immoral to send Afghans back to their war-torn country.
But now such arguments appear to have been forgotten, with the first plane – believed to be being supplied by a British firm – taking off from London in the early hours, before stopping to pick up some 250 migrants in Paris. Continue Reading →
Billions in U.S. Aid Never Reached Pakistan Army
FOX NEWS… ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United States has long suspected that much of the billions of dollars it has sent Pakistan to battle militants has been diverted to the domestic economy and other causes, such as fighting India.
Now the scope and longevity of the misuse is becoming clear: Between 2002 and 2008, while Al Qaeda regrouped, only $500 million of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army generals tell The Associated Press.
The account of the generals, who asked to remain anonymous because military rules forbid them from speaking publicly, was backed up by other retired and active generals, former bureaucrats and government ministers.
At the time of the siphoning, Pervez Musharraf, a Washington ally, served as both chief of staff and president, making it easier to divert money intended for the military to bolster his sagging image at home through economic subsidies.
“The army itself got very little,” said retired Gen. Mahmud Durrani, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. under Musharraf. “It went to things like subsidies, which is why everything looked hunky-dory. The military was financing the war on terror out of its own budget.”
Generals and ministers say the diversion of the money hurt the military in very real ways:
—Helicopters critical to the battle in rugged border regions were not available. At one point in 2007, more than 200 soldiers were trapped by insurgents in the tribal regions without a helicopter lift to rescue them.
—The limited night vision equipment given to the army was taken away every three months for inventory and returned three weeks later.
—Equipment was broken, and training was lacking. It was not until 2007 that money was given to the Frontier Corps, the front-line force, for training.
The details on misuse of American aid come as Washington again promises Pakistan money. Legislation to triple general aid to Pakistan cleared Congress last week. The legislation also authorizes “such sums as are necessary” for military assistance to Pakistan, upon several conditions. The conditions include certification that Pakistan is cooperating in stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that Pakistan is making a sustained commitment to combating terrorist groups and that Pakistan security forces are not subverting the country’s political or judicial processes. Continue Reading →
Muslim threats to Christians rise in Pakistan
By Anjum Herald Gill THE WASHINGTON TIMES
LAHORE, Pakistan | Christians in Pakistan are feeling increasingly insecure after several violent attacks by Muslim extremists in the past two months.
In one case, eight Christians were burned to death by a Muslim mob after reports that the Muslim holy book, the Koran, had been desecrated.
Growing Talibanization of the country and a blasphemy law in place for two decades make non-Muslims, especially Christians, easy targets for discrimination and attacks, Christian and human rights activists say.
“The attacks on Christians seem to be symptomatic of a well-organized campaign launched by extremist elements against the Christian community all over central Punjab since early this year,” Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Chairwoman Asma Jehangir said at a press conference last month.
The situation has become so serious that Pope Benedict XVI and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari discussed it during a meeting Thursday at the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the Associated Press reported.
The Vatican said the two stressed “the need to overcome all forms of discrimination based on religious affiliation, with the aim of promoting respect for the rights of all.”
Most of the attacks on Christians’ houses and churches followed claims of desecration of the Koran. Subsequent investigations generally proved the claims to be false. Continue Reading →
Cultural misogyny; young Punjabi mothers in Canada pressured to birth sons, reject girls
From The Toronto Star.
Desperate mothers
October 3, 2009
Raveena Aulakh
STAFF REPORTER
On a windswept street in a bustling industrial area on the outskirts of town, a stocky man in a white shirt and dark jeans pulls out three Ziploc bags containing red, brown and silver pills.
Take two red and brown pills each day for a week, he tells the woman who says she is nine weeks pregnant, and your baby has an 85 per cent chance of being a boy. Then he demands $750 in cash.
In the Indian state of Punjab, the culture is obsessed with boys. Desperate to avoid giving birth to girls, women for decades have taken extreme measures. They swallow herbs, drink pregnant cow’s milk, pray in marathon sessions, and since the widespread use of ultrasound technology, abort female fetuses.
It’s a huge topic of debate in India, with an alarmingly skewed birth ratio of boys to girls.
But this scene on an industrial strip was not played out in Punjab, but just west of Toronto, in an area a large number of Punjabis now call home – and where the latest Canadian census figures reveal significantly fewer girls than boys in the South Asian community. Continue Reading →
Young girl kills militant in Jammu and Kashmir
H/T to Proud Kaffir, thanks for this one. Its about damn time. What is disgusting, is its a good certainty than in Canada and most of Europe, had someone done this they would be jailed rather than rewarded. Even so, I would prefer to be in a box having 12 men judge me, than carried in a box with six men under me.
From Thaindian.com
Jammu, Sep 28 (IANS) In what may be the first ever such act of resistance against militants in Jammu and Kashmir, a young woman in Rajouri district killed one militant and injured and drove away two others who had barged into her house and tried to abduct her, police said Monday.
Rukhsana, who gave up her studies two years ago after failing class tenth, was in her house in Shadhara village in Thana Mandi area of the district, about 190 km north-east of Jammu, when three militants barged in late Sunday night, police in Rajouri said.
The militants demanded Rukhsana be handed over to them, which her father Noor Hussain, mother Rashida and brother Ejaz tried to resist. At this, the militants started hitting the family members with rifle butts. This angered Rukhsana and she picked up an axe and hit one of the militants, killing him. He was later identified as Abu Osama of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
A violent scuffle ensued, in which another militant was injured and he and the third soon fled.
Police officials have commended Rukhsana’s courage, while state Director General of Police Kuldeep Khoda has sent a special message for Rukhsana and said she would soon be rewarded.
“We have also provided police protection to the family,” Deputy Inspector General of Police Rajouri-Poonch range S.D.S. Jamwal told reporters.