Soca Warriors Online Discussion Forum
General => General Discussion => Topic started by: socafighter on June 24, 2014, 08:56:55 AM
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ISIS in Iraq stinks of CIA/NATO ‘dirty war’ op
by William Engdahl
William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst and strategic risk consultant whose internationally best-selling books have been translated into thirteen foreign languages.
For days now, since their dramatic June 10 taking of Mosul, Western mainstream media have been filled with horror stories of the military conquests in Iraq of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with the curious acronym ISIS.
ISIS, as in the ancient Egyptian cult of the goddess of fertility and magic. The media picture being presented adds up less and less.
Details leaking out suggest that ISIS and the major military ‘surge’ in Iraq - and less so in neighboring Syria - is being shaped and controlled out of Langley, Virginia, and other CIA and Pentagon outposts as the next stage in spreading chaos in the world’s second-largest oil state, Iraq, as well as weakening the recent Syrian stabilization efforts.
Strange facts
The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”
We are told that ISIS masked psychopaths captured “arms and ammunition from the fleeing security forces” - arms and ammunition supplied by the American government. The offensive coincides with a successful campaign by ISIS in eastern Syria. According to Iraqi journalists, Sunni tribal chiefs in the region had been convinced to side with ISIS against the Shiite Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. They were promised a better deal under ISIS Sunni Sharia than with Baghdad anti-Sunni rule.
According to the New York Times, the mastermind behind the ISIS military success is former Baath Party head and Saddam Hussein successor, General Ibrahim al-Douri. Douri is reportedly the head of the Iraqi rebel group Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order as well as the Supreme Command for Jihad and Liberation based on his longstanding positions of leadership in the Naqshbandi sect in Iraq.
In 2009, US ‘Iraqi surge’ General David Petraeus, at the time heading the US Central Command, claimed to reporters that Douri was in Syria. Iraqi parliamentarians claimed he was in Qatar. The curious fact is that despite being on the US most wanted list since 2003, Douri has miraculously managed to avoid capture and now to return with a vengeance to retake huge parts of Sunni Iraq. Luck or well-placed friends in Washington?
The financial backing for ISIS jihadists reportedly also comes from three of the closest US allies in the Sunni world—Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
US passports?
Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials. The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.
Advertised publicly as training of ‘non-extremist’ Muslim jihadists to wage war against the Syrian Bashar Assad regime, the secret US training camps in Jordan and elsewhere have trained perhaps several thousand Muslim fighters in techniques of irregular warfare, sabotage and general terror. The claims by Washington that they took special care not to train ‘Salafist’ or jihadist extremists, is a joke. How do you test if a recruit is not a jihadist? Is there a special jihad DNA that the CIA doctors have discovered?
Jordanian government officials are revealing the details, in fear that the same ISIS terrorists that today are slashing heads of ‘infidels’ alongside the roadways of Mosul by the dozens, or hundreds if we believe their own propaganda, might turn their swords towards Jordan’s King Abdullah soon, to extend their budding Caliphate empire.
Former US State Department official Andrew Doran wrote in the conservative National Review magazine that some ISIS warriors also hold US passports. Now, of course that doesn’t demonstrate and support by the Obama Administration. Hmm...
Iranian journalist Sabah Zanganeh notes, "ISIS did not have the power to occupy and conquer Mosul by itself. What has happened is the result of security-intelligence collaborations of some regional countries with some extremist groups inside the Iraqi government."
Iraq’s Chechen commander
The next bizarre part of the ISIS puzzle involves the Jihadist credited with being the ‘military mastermind’ of the recent ISIS victories, Tarkhan Batirashvili. If his name doesn’t sound very Arabic, it’s because it’s not. Tarkhan Batrashvili is a Russian - actually an ethnic Chechen from near the Chechen border to Georgia. But to give himself a more Arabic flair, he also goes by the name Emir (what else?) Umar al Shishani. The problem is he doesn’t look at all Arabic. No dark swarthy black beard: rather a long red beard, a kind of Chechen Barbarossa.
According to a November, 2013 report in The Wall Street Journal, Emir Umar or Batrashvili as you prefer, has made the wars in Syria and Iraq “into a geopolitical struggle between the US and Russia.”
That has been the objective of leading neo-conservatives in the CIA, Pentagon and State Department all along. The CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen Saudis and other foreign veterans of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling Russia in the early 1990s, particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia. James Baker III and his friends in Anglo-American Big Oil had other plans. It was called the BTC pipeline, owned by a BP-US oil consortium and running through Tbilisi into NATO-member Turkey, free of Russian territory.
Batrashvili is not renowned for taking care. Last year he was forced to apologize when he ordered his men to behead a wounded ‘enemy’ soldier who turned out to be an allied rebel commander. More than 8,000 foreign Jihadist mercenaries are reportedly in ISIS including at least 1,000 Chechens as well as Jihadists Saudi, Kuwait, Egypt and reportedly Chinese Uyghur from Xinjiang Province.
Jeffrey Silverman, Georgia Bureau Chief for the US-based Veterans Today (VT) website, told me that Batrashvili “is a product of a joint program of the US through a front NGO called Jvari, which was set up by US Intelligence and the Georgian National Security Council, dating back to the early days of the Pankisi Gorge.”
Jvari is the name as well of a famous Georgian Orthodox monastery of the 6th century. According to Silverman, David J. Smith—head of something in Tbilisi called the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, as well as the Potomac Institute in Washington where he is listed as Director of the Potomac Institute Cyber Centerr—played a role in setting up the Jvari NGO.
Silverman maintains that Jvari in Rustavi, near the capital, Tbilisi, gathered together Afghan Mujahideen war veterans, Chechens, Georgians and sundry Arab Jihadists. They were sent to the infamous Pankisi Gorge region, a kind-of no-man’s lawless area, for later deployment, including Iraq and Syria.
Batrashvili and other Georgian and Chechen Russian-speaking Jihadists, Silverman notes, are typically smuggled, with the assistance of Georgia’s Counterintelligence Department and the approval of the US embassy, across the Georgia border to Turkey at the Vale crossing point, near Georgia’s Akhaltsikhe and the Turkish village of Türkgözü on the Turkish side of the Georgian border. From there it’s very little problem getting them through Turkey to either Mosul in Iraq or northeast Syria.
Silverman believes that events in Northern Iraq relate to “wanting to have a Kurdish Republic separate from the Central government and this is all part of the New Great Game. It will serve US interests in both Turkey and Iraq, not to mention Syria.”
Very revealing is the fact that almost two weeks after the dramatic fall of Mosul and the ‘capture’ by ISIS forces of the huge weapons and military vehicle resources provided by the US to the Iraqi army. Washington has done virtually nothing but make a few silly speeches about their ‘concern’ and dispatch 275 US special forces to allegedly protect US personnel in Iraq.
Whatever the final details that emerge, what is clear in the days since the fall of Mosul is that some of the world’s largest oilfields in Iraq are suddenly held by Jihadists and no longer by an Iraqi government determined to increase the oil export significantly.
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Hmmmmm interesting ....
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Another nutjob, the first line is the funniest
William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst and strategic risk consultant whose internationally best-selling books have been translated into thirteen foreign languages.
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Surprised so little posted about ISIS. Not a piece on James Foley. Maybe Al Sharpton need to go Iraq.
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Another nutjob, the first line is the funniest
William Engdahl is an award-winning geopolitical analyst and strategic risk consultant whose internationally best-selling books have been translated into thirteen foreign languages.
so just cause the man have a different look at things he is a nut job?
you ever take the time to look at things without having a preconceived notion?
where you does get your news from?
The US government and their Middle east allies created ISIS same way they created the Muhajideen back in the 80's.
People bitching bout Obama not doing anything...fact is he can't, he just continuing the plan that Bush started lol
its not coincidence that the US has a black president who's past is so murky and has Muslim ties just by his name...that is more than enough to keep the white population agitated.
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What is so murky about Obama's past.
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so just cause the man have a different look at things he is a nut job?
you ever take the time to look at things without having a preconceived notion?
It generally saves time to filter out individuals known for having wholly biased and unreliable view points - now of course that doesn't mean they're wrong every time, but this individual routinely rejects science in favour of pro-corporate, pro-Russian interest party lines. The guy believes oil is not created from biological material and denies climate change - he cares not for the truth and has repeatedly shown intellectual dishonesty in his arguments.
where you does get your news from?
A number of sources, depending on the topic, preferring individuals with a background and experience that suggests they know what they're talking about. This sentence sounds bitchy but I promise it's not, just the only way to say it on the internet lol. I basically select sources based on whether I think they're 1) qualified (and thus have the knowledge and/or experience to be trustworthy on the matter) and 2) in proportion to their bias (bias is always present in the news, so if possible I prefer rigorous academic journals, but obviously they cannot be as current as news media, so I prefer organisations that have typically allowed their journalists editorial freedom such as The Guardian and The Independent).
The US government and their Middle east allies created ISIS same way they created the Muhajideen back in the 80's.
People bitching bout Obama not doing anything...fact is he can't, he just continuing the plan that Bush started lol
ISIS wasn't created in the same was as the Muhajideen - they received weapons directly from the US and UK during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (SIRI have an excellent database of arms deals that catalogue these trades). ISIS (ironically, given the meaning of Mujahideen) has a stronger religious tradition imo - the Mujahideen were clearly formed of a resistance to foreign invasion and occupation, whilst ISIS was created from the beginning with the aim of forming an Islamic State in opposition to President Assad. Moreover, they were hostile with competing rebel factions from the start, something that appeared later for the Mujahideen.
On Obama, he's certainly the most conservative Republican president ever imo. Historials will look at his record on drone strikes with disdain I'm sure
its not coincidence that the US has a black president who's past is so murky and has Muslim ties just by his name...that is more than enough to keep the white population agitated.
"Has Muslim ties"? Oh you're a right-wing nut, I should of just not bothered, so impervious to logic you must be to believe all that bollocks. Lemme guess, he's a Kenyan Muslim subverting the Presidency?
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its not coincidence that the US has a black president who's past is so murky and has Muslim ties just by his name...that is more than enough to keep the white population agitated.
Feliz yuh living too long up in de cold with dem Vikings, lol
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Trini Involved in Beheading
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/videos/-Trini-Involved-in-Beheading--2503----272965581.html?m=y&smobile=y (http://www.trinidadexpress.com/videos/-Trini-Involved-in-Beheading--2503----272965581.html?m=y&smobile=y)
Story Updated: Aug 27, 2014
For the last few days the American media have been carrying stories about beheaded journalist, James Foley, who was murdered by Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham (ISIS). The ongoing Syria war has also seen several citizens beheaded by the same terrorist group. TV 6 in an exclusive investigative story a few months ago entitled "Jihadists Among Us", reported that Trinidadians might have quite possibly formed part of the Anti-Assad movement in Syria. Tonight it appears that a man with a Trinidadian accent was caught on tape in the beheading of a Syrian citizen a few months ago.
(TV6 video included in link)
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Hmmm...
The CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen Saudis and other foreign veterans of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets in Afghanistan into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling Russia in the early 1990s, particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia.
Sounds like something similar will be taking place in Siberia...
From Siberia to Kaliningrad: the fledgling independence movements gaining traction in RussiaMoscow appears to have blocked efforts hold a march in favour of Siberian independence this weekend, but that doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t spreading, writes Paul Goble
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/15/russia-fledgling-independence-movements
Does this have anything to do with Russo-China agreement to build a gas pipeline to China through Siberia?
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Trini Involved in Beheading in Syria ..??
Story Created: Aug 27, 2014 at 9:19 PM ECT
Express
http://www.tv6tnt.com/sevenpm-news/-Trini-Involved-in-Beheading--2503----272965581.html (http://www.tv6tnt.com/sevenpm-news/-Trini-Involved-in-Beheading--2503----272965581.html)
For the last few days the American media have been carrying stories about beheaded journalist, James Foley, who was murdered by Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham (ISIS). The ongoing Syria war has also seen several citizens beheaded by the same terrorist group. TV 6 in an exclusive investigative story a few months ago entitled "Jihadists Among Us", reported that Trinidadians might have quite possibly formed part of the Anti-Assad movement in Syria. Tonight it appears that a man with a Trinidadian accent was caught on tape in the beheading of a Syrian citizen a few months ago.
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A Trini ..oh nooooooooo
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ah next journo get killed. biden follow that up with a "tough" speech which serves to underscore how no action happening.
ah mean, what journalist dey have to behead before obama break out a strategy? ah figure nothing less than a sports journalist would have to die before obama decide he have to do something. someone like a jason whitlock. till then, no strategy necessary since no action forthcoming.
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...
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What is your strategy. You could pay ransom money or bomb them into submission. That includes killing civilians. At the means time all Americans should stay out of the war zones. Well unless they are CIA.
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What is your strategy. You could pay ransom money or bomb them into submission. That includes killing civilians. At the means time all Americans should stay out of the war zones. Well unless they are CIA.
Doh study them... the "no strategy" thing has been explored and explained as being specific and limited to the threat in Syria, yet Republicans and other mindless idiots (aye aye... ribbit dai'z you??) still clinging onto that for dear life.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/politics/obama-isis-response/index.html
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so just cause the man have a different look at things he is a nut job?
you ever take the time to look at things without having a preconceived notion?
It generally saves time to filter out individuals known for having wholly biased and unreliable view points - now of course that doesn't mean they're wrong every time, but this individual routinely rejects science in favour of pro-corporate, pro-Russian interest party lines. The guy believes oil is not created from biological material and denies climate change - he cares not for the truth and has repeatedly shown intellectual dishonesty in his arguments.
where you does get your news from?
A number of sources, depending on the topic, preferring individuals with a background and experience that suggests they know what they're talking about. This sentence sounds bitchy but I promise it's not, just the only way to say it on the internet lol. I basically select sources based on whether I think they're 1) qualified (and thus have the knowledge and/or experience to be trustworthy on the matter) and 2) in proportion to their bias (bias is always present in the news, so if possible I prefer rigorous academic journals, but obviously they cannot be as current as news media, so I prefer organisations that have typically allowed their journalists editorial freedom such as The Guardian and The Independent).
The US government and their Middle east allies created ISIS same way they created the Muhajideen back in the 80's.
People bitching bout Obama not doing anything...fact is he can't, he just continuing the plan that Bush started lol
ISIS wasn't created in the same was as the Muhajideen - they received weapons directly from the US and UK during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (SIRI have an excellent database of arms deals that catalogue these trades). ISIS (ironically, given the meaning of Mujahideen) has a stronger religious tradition imo - the Mujahideen were clearly formed of a resistance to foreign invasion and occupation, whilst ISIS was created from the beginning with the aim of forming an Islamic State in opposition to President Assad. Moreover, they were hostile with competing rebel factions from the start, something that appeared later for the Mujahideen.
On Obama, he's certainly the most conservative Republican president ever imo. Historials will look at his record on drone strikes with disdain I'm sure
its not coincidence that the US has a black president who's past is so murky and has Muslim ties just by his name...that is more than enough to keep the white population agitated.
"Has Muslim ties"? Oh you're a right-wing nut, I should of just not bothered, so impervious to logic you must be to believe all that bollocks. Lemme guess, he's a Kenyan Muslim subverting the Presidency?
you seriously pick apart everything I said word for word? lol...OK :-\
Didn't think me saying ISIS and Muhajideen were "formed the same way" needed further explaining though since my main point there was the instigation/involvement of the US.
So yuh saying normal Christian people does name their child Barrack Hussein?...well if that is not Muslim ties? I ent know what to say ;D
A right wing nut? yuh forget to add 'White' and 'Christian' to that statement lol
but then again I'm as Liberal as they come ;)
carry on :beermug:
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What is your strategy. You could pay ransom money or bomb them into submission. That includes killing civilians. At the means time all Americans should stay out of the war zones. Well unless they are CIA.
Why is it people continue to lower the bar when it come to this president? Now his administration don't even have to plan.
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What is your strategy. You could pay ransom money or bomb them into submission. That includes killing civilians. At the means time all Americans should stay out of the war zones. Well unless they are CIA.
Why is it people continue to lower the bar when it come to this president? Now his administration don't even have to plan.
I eh lowering no bar for the President. Honestly speaking, you think they don't have a plan. Barak chose the wrong words. You think them generals in the Pentagon eh have plans ready. ISIS baiting the American public with the executions. They want the US to bring back the troops so that they can fight a guerrilla war . Dude is over 12 years this country fighting 2 wars. You eh friggin tired.
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What is your strategy. You could pay ransom money or bomb them into submission. That includes killing civilians. At the means time all Americans should stay out of the war zones. Well unless they are CIA.
Why is it people continue to lower the bar when it come to this president? Now his administration don't even have to plan.
I eh lowering no bar for the President. Honestly speaking, you think they don't have a plan. Barak chose the wrong words. You think them generals in the Pentagon eh have plans ready. ISIS baiting the American public with the executions. They want the US to bring back the troops so that they can fight a guerrilla war . Dude is over 12 years this country fighting 2 wars. You eh friggin tired.
deeks, i do not see any thought-out planning in how this administration has handled events outside of the usa. obama did not have meaningful foreign policy experience on his team from day one. this is just events overwhelming the administration's meagre capabilities sad to say. pretending they doing a good job and need to be shielded from criticism is lowering the bar.
here a recent MTP interview:
https://www.youtube.com/v/6SiAcJ8XtXc
listen to all the pauses when discussing james foley. obama went and played golf after that - he doh give a sh*t. this is not a priority for him - doh pretend it is.
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/09/10/347486634/obama-to-say-u-s-will-take-out-islamic-state-wherever-they-exist
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Oy vey
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‘50 Trinis fighting with ISIS terrorists in Syria’
By \\\\\ Mark Bassant CCN Senior Multimedia Investigative Journalist
Story Created: Sep 25, 2014 at 10:25 PM ECT
Express
At least 50 Trinidadians have flown to Syria to join the terrorist organisation Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) within the last several months.
Intelligence sources as well as those in a certain religious sect have confirmed the local fighters have been leaving the country to head to Syria over the last few months.
Minister of National Security Gary Griffith when contacted about this several weeks ago stated, “ I will neither confirm or deny this.”
On TV6’s Morning Edition yesterday, Griffith, however, said, “Trinidad and Tobago must never be seen or believe we are isolated in anyway from global terrorism.”
Griffith said this was the reason the Government has been trying to introduce electronic fingerprint technology for those entering the country. “If you put fingerprints there we are following the trail of individuals based on a watch list worldwide,” he said.
Director of National Security Operations Centre (NOC), Garvin Heerah, who spoke to the Express yesterday, said, “That situation has engaged the attention of the intelligence agencies of Trinidad and Tobago. And at this point we are unable to give a figure as such, but it is something being worked on fervently.”
Heerah said because of the recent resolution that Trinidad and Tobago agreed to co-sponsor the UN Security Council resolution on foreign terrorist fighters, he had to be very limited in the information he revealed.
“We are working hand in hand with our international partners,”said Heerah.
Intelligence, airport security sources and sources within a religious sect confirmed that many of the men and in some cases women and children have left using the route through Tobago, onward to England and then arriving in Turkey where the men cross the border, while women and children stay in Turkey.
The pattern of travel is a bit tricky, according to Heerah who said: “We are waiting further information. The reason for that is the disguised method of departure in that the departure out of Trinidad is not say through Piarco and then straight to a destination, it is staggered.”
Heerah explained that the Trinidadians were also using South American destinations and other Caribbean islands to depart from as they attempted to conceal their footprints and their final destination.
One woman who was recently part of the delegation held in Venezuela and sent back home left through Tobago for England then onward to Turkey, sources said.
“She also travelled with her four children ages three, four, five and nine and is now near the border of Syria, while her husband, also a Trinidadian, had been questioned as one of the men in the plot to assassinate the Prime Minister during the state of emergency and also had other pending charges is in Syria fighting for ISIS. In fact information we received is that he could be the Trinidadian voice behind a recent video in which a Syrian citizen was beheaded,” a well-placed source said.
Top ranking intelligence sources also reliably informed the Express as well as members of a certain religious sect that they had received credible information about certain men recruiting locally for ISIS.
One of the men who could be recruiting is from the Rio Claro area. A source said, “I know one man who has already gone and two of his brothers are supposed to leave soon to go to Syria to join him.”
Heerah confirmed that there were several persons locally on their radar: “There are persons of interest of which presently information is being gathered that may have an involvement, so I am not denying what you are saying.”
The local fighters are paid US$1,000 per day for fighting for ISIS.
Trinidad and Tobago on Wednesday became a co-sponsor of a binding resolution compelling countries to stop their citizens leaving their homelands to join ISIS and other militant groups based in the Middle East and block them from returning to threaten their native countries using passports already granted.
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Oh my ..not good...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8TLu514EgU
interview with an isis jihadist from canada, from vice news
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Oh my ..not good...
When they get in trouble I hope they don't call the TT govt to come and bail them out.
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so the primary target in the latest air strikes in syria was the "kouresan" group. there were zero articles mentioning this group prior to the announcement from obama. and different officials are saying different things on whether this group was an imminent threat (they probably don't know for sure). this seem like a smokescreen.
and now obama blaming us intel for underestimating isis (not the kouresan group). former intel chiefs are calling :bs: on being thrown under the bus. they saying the potus was suffciently briefed to make a reasoned determination.
there is a consistent pattern of blame-shifting by obama over the last 6 years. is either his fault or he cyah staff a team of professionals - i think the latter is more likely the case. either reason - obama will not be the person to resolve these us adventures satisfactorily. the pivot is dead. the usa better prepare for a generation in the middle east until the demographies shift. too many unemployed young males in that region - they will be warring for a good while yet.
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I eh think trini ripped enough to flex they "world dominance muscles"
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look like former CIA head leon panetta come out with public criticism of obama's handling of syria and iraq. right before elections too. obama's "red lines" will be his foreign policy legacy. panetta is not the only one as well - former middle east envoy also talking out of school how us credibility has been shredded by obama.
this pivot to asia will have consequences. bet that saudi gets nukes in a few years. will be interesting to see if it worth the price.
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Unless yuh fighting war yuh doh have a foreign policy plan. How simple these people are.
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?
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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.
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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 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-bogus-claim-that-obama-skips-his-intelligence-briefings/2012/09/23/100cb63e-04fc-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_blog.html)
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1000 dollars a day??? wow
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1000 dollars a day??? wow
Ent!! I eh even tink Blackwater was rainin da kinda money when dem was hiring mercenaries
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https://www.youtube.com/v/uqI0a4VgEs8
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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/
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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.
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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
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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?!!!!!!!
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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.
.
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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.
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Whatever it takes to secure the lives of the citizens of TT.
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National Security Minister Responds to Trini ISIS Video See Video http://www.tv6tnt.com/sevenpm-news/-National-Security-Minister-Responds-to-Trini-ISIS-Video--2924---341357812.html (http://www.tv6tnt.com/sevenpm-news/-National-Security-Minister-Responds-to-Trini-ISIS-Video--2924---341357812.html)
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https://m.facebook.com/chris.herbert6420/posts/10153191869156434?refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fedition.cnn.com%2F2015%2F12%2F10%2Feurope%2Famputee-soldier-muslim-facebook-donald-trump%2F&locale2=en_US&__tn__=%2As
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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.
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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
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ISIS Claims Responsibility for Brussels Attacks; More Than 30 Dead
http://www.wsj.com/articles/people-injured-after-explosion-at-brussels-airport-police-say-1458632527
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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.
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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
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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
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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/
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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.