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Author Topic: ​ISIS Thread  (Read 9881 times)

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Offline ribbit

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Unless yuh fighting war yuh doh have a foreign policy plan. How simple these people are.

elan, what diplomacy obama done? he make a speech in cairo IN SUPPORT of mubarrak and a few months later mubarrak and his regime collapse (literally and figuratively). how you could have an effective diplomacy if one is so disengaged and obama is disengaged to an almost absurd extreme. ah mean, this fella go in a news conference telling reporters he find out about something from de news (casting around with a look like "don't ask me, it's not my fault").

true obama eh no war president. he is de passive-aggressive president with all de drone strikes - using hundred thousand dollars of equipment to kill a hundred dollars worth of terrorist. watch how dem terrorists shut down de israeli airport. get used to that - more of that to come in future.

Freaking John McCain couldn't identify ISIS. Ribbit, Who is ISIS? Where are they located? What numbers do they have in their ranks? What military equipment do they have? Which country are they?

OBAMA SKIPS HALF OF HIS INTELLIGENCE BRIEFINGS. that is inexcusable for someone with obama's responsibilities.

you and deeks must share de same celll; allyuh only lowering de bar. btw: ISIS being supplied by turkey and saudi arabia. what is de parvenu community-organizer-in-chief response? same thing he do in chicago - he ride out. that's what he learn from his years of community organizing. is no wonder putin feel is time for ussr 2.0.

Offline Bakes

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OBAMA SKIPS HALF OF HIS INTELLIGENCE BRIEFINGS. that is inexcusable for someone with obama's responsibilities.

Facts are inconvenient things...

The bogus claim that Obama ‘skips’ his intelligence briefings

Offline Pointman

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Re: ‘50 Trinis fighting with ISIS terrorists in Syria’
« Reply #32 on: December 04, 2014, 12:14:14 AM »
1000 dollars a day??? wow
Trini to de bone; Pointman to de bone.

Offline Dutty

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Re: ‘50 Trinis fighting with ISIS terrorists in Syria’
« Reply #33 on: December 04, 2014, 09:15:31 PM »
1000 dollars a day??? wow


Ent!! I eh even tink Blackwater was rainin da kinda money when dem was hiring mercenaries
Little known fact: The online transportation medium called Uber was pioneered in Trinidad & Tobago in the 1960's. It was originally called pullin bull.

Offline Sando prince

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #34 on: June 26, 2015, 01:02:19 PM »

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/uqI0a4VgEs8" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/uqI0a4VgEs8</a>

Offline Sando prince

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Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #35 on: November 05, 2015, 06:38:06 PM »
The Islamic State in Syria has released a video featuring four fighters from Trinidad and Tobago calling on the Muslims in this country to emigrate to the Syria and fight. The 11:20 minute video entitled "Those who Believe and Made the Hijra" was distributed on Twitter and pro-Islamic State Telegram channels earlier today. One man called Abdul Khalid explained that he is from Trinidad and Tobago, a recent convert to Islam and that his relatives, who were really strict Christians, forced him to memorise the Bible. See Video https://www.facebook.com/cnewslive/videos/10153675312825610/

Offline Deeks

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Re: Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #36 on: November 06, 2015, 09:56:55 AM »
From one extreme to the ultra extreme! I hope they get the happiness that they are looking for. And stay there! Doh come back to Trini.

Offline Sando prince

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Re: Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #37 on: November 06, 2015, 10:29:26 AM »
From one extreme to the ultra extreme! I hope they get the happiness that they are looking for. And stay there! Doh come back to Trini.

Do you believe the government should keep tabs on them just in case they return to T&T? Ah hear some people say so but from a legal perspective what can T&T government do? dem fellas not breaking any T&T laws by going foreign to fight

Offline Deeks

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Re: Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #38 on: November 06, 2015, 10:34:20 AM »
From one extreme to the ultra extreme! I hope they get the happiness that they are looking for. And stay there! Doh come back to Trini.

Do you believe the government should keep tabs on them just in case they return to T&T? Ah hear some people say so but from a legal perspective what can T&T government do? dem fellas not breaking any T&T laws by going foreign to fight

The gov't should keep tabs on them. These guys are seeing more active combat duty  than our present DF. You all forgot 1990 or what?!!!!!!!

Offline Sando prince

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Re: Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #39 on: November 06, 2015, 10:36:33 AM »
From one extreme to the ultra extreme! I hope they get the happiness that they are looking for. And stay there! Doh come back to Trini.

Do you believe the government should keep tabs on them just in case they return to T&T? Ah hear some people say so but from a legal perspective what can T&T government do? dem fellas not breaking any T&T laws by going foreign to fight

The gov't should keep tabs on them. These guys are seeing more active combat duty  than our present DF. You all forgot 1990 or what?!!!!!!!

and what would that mean? Is it listening to their phone conversations? Spying on their travels? monitoring their bank accounts?

I see some possible court case developments that can occur if this take place.

.


Offline Deeks

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Re: Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #40 on: November 06, 2015, 11:01:01 AM »
From one extreme to the ultra extreme! I hope they get the happiness that they are looking for. And stay there! Doh come back to Trini.

Do you believe the government should keep tabs on them just in case they return to T&T? Ah hear some people say so but from a legal perspective what can T&T government do? dem fellas not breaking any T&T laws by going foreign to fight

The gov't should keep tabs on them. These guys are seeing more active combat duty  than our present DF. You all forgot 1990 or what?!!!!!!!

and what would that mean? Is it listening to their phone conversations? Spying on their travels? monitoring their bank accounts?

I see some possible court case developments that can occur if this take place.

.



Whatever it takes to secure the lives of the citizens of TT.

Offline Sando prince

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Re: Four Trinidadians featured in New ISIS Video
« Reply #41 on: November 06, 2015, 04:39:03 PM »


Offline Flex

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #43 on: January 19, 2016, 02:46:59 AM »
4 Trini ISIS fighters held
By Nalinee Seelal (Newsday)


FOUR Trinbago nationals believed to be fighting for the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are among 961 persons held at the Turkish border last December by Turkish authorities. The four remain under heavy guard at an isolation camp at the Turkish border while authorities are to decide their fate. Yesterday, former Minister of National Security Gary Griffith said that as far as he is aware those four TT nationals should not be allowed to return home.

“Based on the requirements under international airlines namely the US and the United Kingdom have declared that if persons are declared to be foreign terrorist fighters (FTF) they will not be allowed entry to board an aircraft for obvious reasons, and that being the case there is no direct flight from Turkey to Trinidad which will mean that they cannot return to Trinidad and Tobago. “They will just have to remain where they are and my recommendation is that if someone is labeled as an FTF they should not be allowed to return to our shores and this is in contrast to the views of some who are saying that they should be given a second chance because they are citizens and they have nowhere else to go,” Griffith said.

Also yesterday, former head of the national operations centre Garvin Heerah said, “this country will first have to verify the information under the exchange of information sharing with our international counterparts as related to the parameters of the UN security council resolution as signed by this country. As far as I understand in accordance with Turkish sovereignty and international directives if confirmed these persons can face prosecution by the Turkish authorities in an international court.” There are about 80 or more TT nationals believed to be in Syria fighting for ISIS based on information received from intelligence agencies.

Sources revealed that the four are from Central and South Trinidad who fled this country during 2012 and 2014. It is believed they travelled through Venezuela and then other countries before reaching Turkey, then Syria.

Newsday understands that the four are among a list of 80 persons identified by local intelligence agencies as having travelled to Syria to fight for ISIS. Records with information suggesting are contained in a data base at the officers of the Strategic Services Agency (SSA). The four held are among 961 foreign members of ISIS captured by Turkish security forces, according to an article published in Turkish newspaper, Hürriyet.

The real measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Offline Sando prince

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #44 on: January 20, 2016, 08:49:17 AM »

Locals returning home from terrorist group ISIS, could be a not so distant reality, especially as four citizens have been arrested in Turkey.

http://www.tv6tnt.com/home/rotator/-UMAR-ON-ISIS-TRINIS-ARRESTED-IN-TURKEY-365847361.html

Offline Sando prince

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #45 on: March 26, 2016, 04:05:31 PM »

Offline Flex

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #46 on: April 09, 2016, 02:32:23 AM »
PM: T&T Isis returnees under surveillance.
By Gail Alexander (Guardian).


A small number of people who have been to areas where the Islamic State (Isis) is operating and who have returned to T&T are under surveillance, Prime Minister Keith Rowley has confirmed.

He gave the reply in response to an opposition query in Parliament yesterday. Opposition MP Vidia Gayadeen-Gopeesingh had asked what steps the Government has taken to treat with the possible and/or eventual return of T&T nationals fighting with Isis.

Rowley said legislative adjustments are needed to deal with the situation. But he said the Government was aware of people going abroad and taking part in hostile action. He said Government also knew who had gone to those areas and returned home and was dealing with this via surveillance. He said because they could not be denied access to their home country, Government had to treat them as security concerns.

On other opposition queries, Rowley also confirmed that Government will implement mechanisms to pay the $1 million compensation package—promised under the PP administration—to officers killed in the line of duty. He said when these situations occur, the population shouldn’t begrudge a family.

On steps Government is taking to deal with the murder rate, Rowley put the challenge to the police and security sector in whose hands he said the responsibility for handling crime lies. “It’s not in the hands of teachers, lawyers or priests.”

Adding that the Government has on its payroll a large body of people whose job it is to respond on crime, he said Government was trying to appoint good, strong leadership in the Police Service and was ensuring training and resources aided high morale to confront the criminal element. He said nothing dramatic has happened in the Police Service to result in the current decline in detection, but Government was aware crimes were being committed and “we’re not hearing about follow-ups,” he stressed.

“This is unacceptable and the Minister of National Security and all those in security have a duty to ensure this is turned around.”

He said Government had brought to Parliament legislation for security agencies to get into the conversations of those planning crime. He said the State would ensure agencies have what they need to fight crime and he expected this would lead to an increase in detection.

Rowley faced grilling from Opposition MPs on the Office of the Prime Minister’s (OPM) purchase of a new Mercedes Benz vehicle for his transport. Asked by Tabaquite MP Suruj Rambachan if it would not have been prudent to defer the purchase given the state of the economy, Rowley said it was prudent to have bought a vehicle for $900,000 and not $2 million as the Opposition claimed.

He reiterated the vehicle purchase had been in the pipeline and it was needed to replace the previous one which was nine years old and required much costly maintenance, including having security issues.

The real measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Offline Sando prince

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #47 on: May 24, 2016, 04:37:46 PM »

Authorities in Trinidad investigate alleged ISIS plot to bomb shopping malls

Read more: http://www.caribbean360.com/news/authorities-trinidad-investigate-alleged-isis-plot-bomb-shopping-malls#ixzz49cEFWiob

Offline Sando prince

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #48 on: August 05, 2016, 09:45:58 PM »

Mother of ISIS fighter: He is never coming home
Trinis have nothing to worry about...

THE mother of Trinidadian ISIS fighter Shane Crawford— also known as Abu Sa'd at Trinidadi— said yesterday this country had nothing to fear from her son, who she said will never leave Syria to come back here.

Crawford's mother Joan, who in a 2014 exclusive Express interview, spoke of the reasons her son joined terror group ISIS, said yesterday that she knew nothing of her son's activities in the Middle East.

Crawford, 31, is from Enterprise in Chaguanas, and was featured in an ISIS online propaganda magazine where he advocates the killing of Christians and says that it would have been an honour to kill former prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20160803/news/he-is-never-coming-home

'Media making my son look like a criminal'

Crawford's mother, who did not allow her face to be shown during yesterday's TV interview, said she has not slept since reading the article online and criticised reports for painting her son as a criminal.

Asked if she knew Crawford's whereabouts, Joan said she was aware that he was in Syria but said although they are in touch, they do not speak about his activities there. She said they usually speak about family matters and she was not aware that Crawford was in touch with any other relatives besides his sister.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20160803/news/he-is-never-coming-home


Offline Flex

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #49 on: December 08, 2016, 04:41:39 PM »
ISIS in the Caribbean
BY SIMON COTTEE (The Atlantic)


The spread of Salafi Islam and a government’s blind eye toward recruiting has helped lead more Trinidadians to fight for ISIS than any other country in the Western hemisphere.

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

For well over a year and a half now, Raqqa, the so-called stronghold of the Islamic State in Syria, has been subjected to sustained aerial bombardment by U.S., French, and Russian war planes. In recent months, the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition has reportedly killed more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, including key figures among ISIS’s leadership, most notably its senior strategist and spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. It has also launched an offensive, now in its second month, on the group’s Iraqi capital of Mosul. According to estimates by American officials, ISIS has lost about 45 percent of its territory in Syria and 20 percent in Iraq since it rose to prominence in the summer of 2014. At the same time, the flow of foreign fighters to the caliphate has plummeted, from a peak of 2,000 crossing the Turkey-Syria border each month in late 2014 to as few as 50 today. Yet still there are people making the long and precarious 6,000-mile journey from Trinidad to Syria in an effort to live there. Just three days before the release of Dabiq 15, eight were detained in southern Turkey, attempting to cross into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. All were female, and they included children.

In a recent paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, John McCoy and W. Andy Knight posit that between 89-125 Trinidadians—or Trinis, to use the standard T&T idiom—have joined ISIS. Roodal Moonilal, an opposition Member of Parliament in T&T, insists that the total number is considerably higher, claiming that, according to a leaked security document passed on to him, over 400 have left since 2013. Even the figure of 125 would easily place Trinidad, with a population of 1.3 million, including 104,000 Muslims, top of the list of Western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization; it’s by far the largest recruitment hub in the Western Hemisphere, about a four and a half hour flight from the U.S. capital.

How did this happen?

n a 1986 travelogue essay about Saint Lucia, a Caribbean island north of Trinidad, the British novelist Martin Amis described the place, condescendingly, as “both beautiful and innocuous, like its people.” “Even at its most rank and jungly,” he continued, “St Lucia has a kiddybook harmlessness.” This is all very far from Trinidad, where away from the tourist spots at Maracas beach and the Queen’s Park Oval Cricket ground, you can feel an edge and menace on the streets, especially after dark.

On the night I arrived in St. Augustine, a town in the northwest, there was a double murder. The number of murders for the year was already 77, and it was still only February. This was unprecedented, even for Trinidad, where the “overall crime and safety situation” is currently rated by the U.S. State Department as “critical,” with 420 murders in 2015. By late June, when I made a second trip to the island, the number of murders for 2016 had soared to 227, a 15 percent increase on the 196 murders over the same period in 2015. Last month, on November 11, it reached 400.

In 2011, the government declared a state of emergency, in response to a wave of violent crime linked to drug trafficking and intelligence reports warning of an assassination plot against the then-Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and senior members of her cabinet. At-Trinidadi, along with several others, was detained on suspicion of colluding in the alleged plot. In Dabiq, at-Trinidadi, alludes to this, but denies any involvement. “That would have been an honor for us to attempt,” he acknowledged, “but the reality of our operations was much smaller.” He also credited a Muslim scholar named Ashmead Choate as a formative spiritual influence. Choate, a fellow Trini and former principal of the Darul Quran Wal Hadith Islamic School in Freeport, central Trinidad, reportedly left for Syria between 2012 and 2013, taking his family with him. According to at-Trinidadi’s testimony in Dabiq, Choate, who was detained alongside him during the state of emergency, was killed fighting in Ramadi, Iraq.

Trinidad is ‘the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has had an actual Islamic insurrection.’

The last state of emergency in T & T was declared in 1990, when, on July 27, a group of black Muslims, the Jamaat al Muslimeen, stormed into the nation’s Parliament in the capital city of Port of Spain and tried to overthrow the government, shooting then-Prime Minister Arthur Robinson and taking members of his cabinet hostage. Around the same time, another group of Muslimeen gunmen forced their way into the studio of the nation’s only TV station. At 6:30 p.m. the Muslimeen’s leader Yasin Abu Bakr came on television and announced that the government was overthrown. This was premature: Six days later, the Muslimeen surrendered, and the government regained control. But history was made. As Harold Trinkunas of the Brookings Institution remarked to The Miami Herald, Trinidad is “the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has had an actual Islamic insurrection.”

In a telling comment his Dabiq interview, at-Trinidadi references this cataclysm in T&T’s recent history, alluding to “a faction of Muslims in Trinidad,” who “attempted to overthrow the disbelieving government but quickly surrendered, apostatized, and participated in the religion of democracy, demonstrating that they weren’t upon the correct methodology of jihad.” In Trinidad, the Muslimeen is widely excoriated as a “militant” group, yet it is instructive that at-Trinidadi condemns it for not being militant enough, and for not practicing the right kind of Islam.

The Islamic scene on the island is divided: There is the Indo Islam of the East Indians, who first came to Trinidad in the mid-19th century as indentured slaves, and there is the Islam of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, whose members, many of whom were formerly Christians, are almost exclusively black. These two groups do not tend to mix, still less intermarry. But both, in their different ways, are far from the Salafi Islam that the Trinidadian criminologist Daurius Figueira believes has infiltrated T&T. Figueira, who is Muslim, has written widely on drug trafficking in the Caribbean and, more recently, on the jihadist ideologues Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi and Anwar al-Awlaki.

He attributes the growth of Salafism on the island to Saudi proselytizing. “They’ve spent money and brought in all these Wahhabi scholars from Mecca,” he told me when I visited him. “They’ve passed on the doctrine, then they’ve started to take the young males and send them to Mecca, and then they come back to Mecca and they continue, so now you don’t even need to send missionaries again.” The most visible sign of this infiltration, he said, is the full hijab: Before the Saudis’ missionaries came, Muslim women in Trinidad didn’t wear it, but now he said it’s relatively commonplace. Figueira was keen to dissociate the Jamaat al Muslimeen from the militant Salafis whom he believes are sympathetic to ISIS. “If you have any understanding of the Jamaat al Muslimeen,” Figueira said, “you’ll understand that Islamic State will have nothing to do with them because the Muslimeen does not pass the test by Islamic State to be a Salafi jihadi organization.”

How were so many able to leave Trinidad to join ISIS? Nobody was stopping them.

In a research paper on the Jamaat al Muslimeen, published in the British Journal of Criminology, the sociologist Cynthia Mahabir describes how the Muslimeen, after 1990, transformed itself from an idealistic social movement—“a fraternity of ‘revolutionary men of Allah’”—into an criminal enterprise, or “Allah’s outlaws,” to use the title of Mahabir’s paper. Figueira puts it like this: “Yasin [Abu Bakr] would never get involved with Islamic State and recruit [people] and send them to Syria, because it’s bad for business! They [are] on a hustle, they’re hustlers, they looking for a living.” According to the analyst Chris Zambelis, this hustle has allegedly involved “gangland-style slayings, narcotics and arms trafficking, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, and political corruption.”

On the two occasions when I was in Trinidad earlier this year I tried to meet Yasin Abu Bakr, but he was unable to see me. However, I did meet his urbane and charming son, Fuad, who leads a political party called New National Vision. Fuad, who has inherited his father’s height and striking looks, showed me around the Muslimeen compound on the outskirts of Port of Spain. He spoke of his father with great warmth and affection, describing him as “a genuinely good person” who has spent his life defending the underdog and fighting injustice.

From what I’d read about the compound, I had expected to see Abu Bakr’s scowling security detail policing the joint, but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, while I was waiting outside in the carpark with my noticeably nervous East Indian cab-driver, who remained inside his locked and glacially air-conditioned car, I was surveilled by a group of giggling girls, no more than 7 or 8 years old, from an Islamic school on the site. The compound was quiet, and has clearly seen better days. “This place was full, it was a community, people lived here, people were coming in droves,” Fuad said, referring to the period just before the attempted coup in 1990. (Afterward, the group declined due to internal feuds and law enforcement’s massive curtailing of their activities.) He also spoke wistfully of a period of “communal living, even community justice.” “If you had an issue, you came to the imam, and he would send his guys and they would sort it out.”

Tentatively, I asked Fuad about ISIS and whether there were recruiters in T&T working for the group. According to local news reports, the recruitment hubs are located in Rio Claro in the southeast and Chaguanas in central Trinidad. “Listen,” he said, “there are facilitators, people who are there [in Syria], they communicate to friends. Trinidad is small and the Muslim community is even smaller, so it’s basically friends, people you know, who are saying to you, ‘you know, do you want to come?’ No big, bad recruiter.” Yet this not quite the picture I received from one source within the Ministry of National Security, who said there was one particular imam playing the role of “big, bad recruiter.”

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Trinis who had gone to Syria since the outbreak of the civil war included an entire community of Muslims from Diego Martin, a small town north of Port of Spain. “An entire community,” he repeated. He also claimed that some leavers had received military training in Trinidad before they left. “There is mujahideen training, or there has been mujahideen training going on in T&T, since about 2007. I was made aware of that in 2009.” He received this information, he said, from a trusted confidant from within the Muslim community, and added that it wasn’t the Muslimeen, but a more radical faction of Salafis that had splintered from them. I had heard this rumor many times when I was in Trinidad, but this was the first time I’d heard it from a source within the security services. Mark Bassant, an investigative TV journalist in Trinidad, also suspects that some of those who have gone to Syria have undergone weapons training in Trinidad.

When, in the summer of 1498, Christopher Columbus approached the shores of Trinidad, he would have been struck by the richness of the island, with its tropical climate, flowering vegetation, flashing birds, rivers and waterfalls. For more recent visitors, who reach the island by air, it is the richness of Trini culture, vividly exemplified in its annual carnival in February. To outsiders, Trinidad can look like a paradise. But for those many Trinis who are blighted by its high crime rate, rising unemployment, pockets of abject poverty and endemic corruption this proposition is routinely put to the test. This may explain why Islam, with its call to end corruption and oppression and to return to a simpler, more just society, appeals to so many of those from whom Trinidad’s myriad blessings are withheld. But this doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why so many Trinis have been captivated by the brutal and hallucinatory Islam of ISIS.

A more immediate question, and one that’s easier to answer, is how so many were able to leave Trinidad to join ISIS. The answer to this is that they were allowed to. Nobody was stopping them. In fact, this was state policy. It was state policy when the conflict first started in Syria, in 2011, and it is still state policy in late 2016. As Roodal Moonilal flatly explained to me, over a drink in the Hyatt in downtown Port of Spain, “ISIS is not proscribed in T&T, meaning that you can go and train with ISIS for 2-3 years and come back here with all the rights and privileges of a citizen of T&T.”

Gary Griffith, who served as Minister of National Security between September 2013 and February 2015, told me, when we met earlier this year, that his “concern as Minster of National Security was not them [fighters from T&T] going across—they were free to go across, if they wanted—my concern was to ensure that they do not come back.” Griffith is particularly critical of his successor and political opponent Edmund Dillon, for what he sees as Dillon’s evasiveness in dealing with the issue of returnees from Syria. Griffith, by contrast, is emphatic: “They should not be allowed re-entry. … If they know that it’s a one-way ticket to hell, that is the ultimate deterrent.” He also expressed indignation that his own proposal to create “a counter-terrorism intelligence unit” for monitoring terrorist threats, launched when he was minister, was blocked by the current government. Dillon, he said, has “a good heart and means well.” But “he’s burying his head in the sand. He thinks God is a Trini.” Dillon did not respond to my numerous requests for comment.

In addition to turning a blind eye to ISIS recruitment, the current government has done little to challenge the spread of Salafi Islam in in the country. Moonilal believes that this, more than derailing ISIS recruitment networks, is the greatest security challenge facing T&T. Yet there are few signs that it will be taken up any time soon.

“We have beautiful sunshine, we have oil and other natural resources, arable land, we have a blessed country,” Fuad Abu Bakr told me. But it evidently wasn’t enough for at-Trinidadi. A woman identifying herself as his mother told the Trinidad Express that, since he left, “His life is better. He has purpose.”​

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/12/isis-caribbean/133746/

« Last Edit: December 08, 2016, 04:43:40 PM by Flex »
The real measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Offline ribbit

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Re: ​ISIS Thread
« Reply #50 on: December 10, 2016, 08:19:41 AM »
It's instructive, that last line from the mother, how this decision to join ISIS is normalised. The Middle East will be a killing field for generations even after the oil run out.

 

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