Tag Archives: Yemen

N. Carolina Man Appears to Be Top Editor of Al Qaeda Magazine, U.S. Officials Say

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FOXNEWS… A young North Carolina man who has moved to Yemen appears to be the editor-in-chief of a flashy new Al Qaeda magazine that features bomb-making instructions and an article by Usama bin Laden, U.S. officials said Monday.

Samir Khan, a 24-year-old American citizen who left the country last October, is believed to be the top editor of Inspire, a newly launched online magazine that seeks to recruit members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – the notorious terror group’s Yemeni branch that is linked to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound U.S. flight last Christmas.

The 67-page online publication, written in colloquial English and launched last month, features flashy graphics and punchy headlines like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” as well an article on global warming said to be written by Bin Laden. Continue Reading →

‘Make A Bomb In The Kitchen Of Your Mom’

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 ABCNEWS… The Al Qaeda affiliate based in Yemen has launched a new English-language web site that features statements from Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and Anwar Awlaki, the radical American-born imam linked to numerous U.S. terror plots, and gives instructions on how to make a homemade bomb.

Inspire” magazine, aimed at Westerners and published by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, includes such articles as “Make A Bomb In The Kitchen Of Your Mom,” written by someone called “The AQ Chef,” that gives step-by-step directions on how jihadis can make a bomb “from ingredients available in any kitchen in the world.” In addition to an interview with AQAP head Sheikh Abu Basir Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the magazine also republishes past statements by Bin Laden and Zawahiri, like an essay on climate change in which Bin Laden says that the earth is getting warmer because Al Qaeda has opened the gates of hell. A message from Awlaki praises accused underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab and accused Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, both of whom were reportedly in touch with Awlaki.

The magazine also quotes Noam Chomsky, David Letterman, and an email from failed Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad: “You would have to agree to the fact that there’s a force out there that’s fighting the West, and is defeating them.”

In an advice column called “What to Expect in Jihad – Part One, ” “Mukhtar” urges would-be jihadis to pack light when on the road, warns them not to become frustrated by language barriers, and notes that having a companion eases travel. “Having a friend makes a difference,” says a cheery yellow post-it note displayed next to a handful of bullets.

Terrorists Could Use Explosives in Breast Implants to Crash Planes, Experts Warn

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FOXNEWS… Female homicide bombers are being fitted with exploding breast implants which are almost impossible to detect, British spies have reportedly discovered.

The shocking new Al Qaeda tactic involves radical doctors inserting the explosives in women’s breasts during plastic surgery — making them “virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines.”

It is believed the doctors have been trained at some of Britain’s leading teaching hospitals before returning to their own countries to perform the surgical procedures.

MI5 has also discovered that extremists are inserting the explosives into the buttocks of some male bombers.

“Women suicide bombers recruited by Al Qaeda are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery,” Terrorist expert Joseph Farah claims.

The lethal explosives called PETN are inserted inside plastic shapes during the operation, before the breast is then sewn up.

The discovery of these methods was made after London-educated Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came close to blowing up an airliner in the U.S. on Christmas Day.

He had stuffed explosives inside his underpants.

Hours after he had failed, Britain’s intelligence services began to pick up “chatter” emanating from Pakistan and Yemen that alerted MI5 to the creation of the lethal implants.

A hand-picked team investigated the threat which was described as “one that can circumvent our defense.”

Top surgeons have confirmed the feasibility of the explosive implants.

Explosive experts allegedly told MI5 that a sachet containing as little as five ounces of PETN could blow “a considerable hole” in an airline’s skin, causing it to crash.

Saudi Arabia detains dozens of ‘al-Qaeda militants’

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BBCNEWS… More than 100 suspected militants linked to al-Qaeda have been arrested in Saudi Arabia, officials have said

The interior ministry said 58 Saudis and 55 foreigners in three independent groups were planning to target oil facilities and security forces.

The groups had links to an al-Qaeda affiliate based in neighbouring Yemen, an interior ministry spokesman said.

Analysts say the group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has exploited instability in Yemen to set up bases.

A large group of 101 suspects, described as a network, composed of 47 Saudis and others from Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea and Bangladesh was “specialised in targeting security personnel,” interior ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki said.

Two other groups totalling 12 suspects, described as terrorist cells, were also arrested, he said.

Weapons, cameras, documents and computers were seized with the suspects.

“The network and the two cells were targeting the oil facilities in the Eastern Province and they had plans that were about to be implemented,” Mansour al-Turki said.

“Each cell did not know about the other or their plans,” he added. Continue Reading →

Report: American Ex-convicts In Yemen Pose ‘Significant Threat’

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U.S. Worried About Three Dozen Criminals Who Converted to Islam in Prison, Most from New York

The Muslim response to the problem, hire more prison imams. Scary thing is, some idiot in government will agree with them.

ABC VIDEO… As many as three dozen criminals who converted to Islam in American prisons have moved to Yemen where they could pose a “significant threat” to attack the U.S., according to a report on al Qaeda from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be released Wednesday.

“The group seeks to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States,” said Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass., the committee chairman.

The Senate report said that while the ex-convicts “ostensibly” moved to Yemen to study Arabic, U.S. diplomats and law enforcement officials in Yemen “feared that these Americans were radicalized in prison and traveled to Yemen for training.”

An American official said the prison converts were believed to be primarily from the New York state prison system.

Members of the Senate staff were told by U.S. law enforcement officials that FBI agents in Yemen did not have the resources to track the ex-cons and that several “have dropped off the radar” for weeks at a time.

U.S. law enforcement officials in Yemen are on “heightened alert because of the potential threat from extremists carrying American passports,” the report said.

Also of concern to U.S. officials, the Senate staff found, is a group of “nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country.”

An American official described them as “blond-haired, blue eyed-types” who fit the profile of Americans who al Qaeda has sought to recruit for terror missions. Continue Reading →

In Yemen Child Brides Are Still the Norm

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Do I hear a bid of two goats or one camel?

The Washington Post article dutifully presents the perverse practice of allowing child brides, as a “cultural thing”, but lets face it, if it indeed were just a cultural thing, the practice would be that much easier to do away with. Since the false prophet of Islam is accredited with being the supreme example of human behavior, and that anything he did, can and will be, copied, the demand for child brides will continue, even in secret if need be. KGS

Child brides’ enduring plight
Problem illustrates hold of tribal Islamic doctrines

SANAA, YEMEN — Ayesha rested her head on the doctor’s desk. She had removed her black veil, revealing a round face contorted in pain. She had married a 53-year-old man when she was 13. Now 15, she wanted her childhood back. She clutched her sides and groaned.

It was 3:30 p.m. in Arwa Elrabee’s office. The gynecologist looked at Ayesha and shook her head. She knew Ayesha’s pain was as much psychological as it was physical.

“I don’t want to be married,” Ayesha explained, her mother standing next to her.

“Why did you marry her off so early?” the doctor demanded. “Why didn’t you allow her to continue her education?”

“It wasn’t me. It was her father,” Ayesha’s mother replied. “He wanted to marry her off.”

Yemen has no minimum age for marriage, and girls as young as 8 are often forced to wed. Many become mothers soon after they reach puberty. The country has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. The death of a 12-year-old in childbirth this fall highlighted the health risks.

Child brides and young mothers are the most vivid manifestations of how tribal doctrines prevail over modern attitudes in the Middle East’s poorest country.
The only place many young women here can vent their frustrations is among other sympathetic women, such as Elrabee, a former deputy health minister who has tried to alter perceptions about early marriages.

“Hopefully, my life will get better, God willing,” Ayesha said.

“Life. This is the life,” said Elrabee, as she watched Ayesha and her mother leave, dark blurs floating through a tangle of other black-clad women,

Read it all here.

Yemen the “New Big Magnet” for al Qaeda

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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

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 →

Yemen a new hot spot for terrorists: says Canadian minister

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Canadian officials observing ‘flow’ of extremists

Thanks for doing your job Mr. Van Loan

Thanks for doing your job Mr. Van Loan

 National Post… Three years after police disrupted an al-Qaeda-inspired bomb plot in Toronto, Canadian extremists are continuing to seek terrorist training, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said Friday.

Mr. Van Loan said in an interview that Canadian security officials were still observing a “flow” to terrorist hot spots but that Yemen was replacing Afghanistan and Pakistan as the preferred destination.

“We’re having considerable success,” he told the National Post. “But there still continue to be cases of people flowing to — we don’t know for sure [they are] gaining terrorist training — but certainly some of the destinations and the countries that people are going to, there are strong implications that people are still going and meeting up with known terrorist organizations.”

As the Minister in charge of the RCMP and CSIS, Mr. Van Loan is largely responsible for Ottawa’s counterterrorism program. He was commenting a day after an Ontario judge sentenced Saad Khalid to 14 years in prison for his role in a 2006 plot to detonate truck bombs in downtown Toronto.

The Saudi Arabia-born Khalid was one of the “Toronto 18,” a group of young men that trained at a camp in Washago, Ont., in December 2005. The group had also allegedly sought weapons training in Pakistan and intended to flee there after the bombings.

The Minister said he would have liked to see a tougher sentence but “there is also a clear message here that terrorism won’t be tolerated and a clear message to Canadians that we do have a real problem with homegrown terrorism.”

The term homegrown terrorism refers to violence by Westerners who are not formally connected to terrorist groups but have embraced the al-Qaeda philosophy. Homegrown terrorists sometimes seek training abroad in places such as Pakistan, but the Minister said they were looking increasingly to the Arabian peninsula.

“A lot of the activity that’s been happening recently in north Pakistan and Afghanistan has caused a lot of disruption to the terrorist training camps, to the efforts of the core of al-Qaeda and associated organizations,” Mr. Van Loan said.

“And I think that has had some impact on the flow and traffic there. But there are other parts of the world, too, where we are seeing flows of people from around the world who are potentially linked with Islamic extremism, particularly to places like Yemen and other parts of the Mideast.” Continue Reading →

Yemeni cleric to be deported for Hamas fundraising

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Sheik_Mohammed_Ali__al-moayadCBC .. A jailed Yemeni cleric will be deported home from the U.S. after pleading guilty Friday in New York City to raising money for Hamas.

As part of the plea deal, Mohammed Ali Hasan Al-Moayad will be sentenced to time served — more than six years — and sent back to Yemen.

A Brooklyn jury had convicted the 60-year-old of supporting terrorism in 2005, for which he received a 75-year prison term. The U.S. government touted the verdict as a major victory in its war against terrorism. But an appeals court threw out the conviction last year, ruling that certain evidence at Al-Moayad’s trial was inflammatory testimony and should not have been admissible.

Rather than try him again, prosecutors opted for a plea deal because to spare government time and expense. They also said the cleric has severe health problems.

The United States considers Hamas, the political and militant group in power in the Gaza Strip, to be a terrorist organization.