Foreign fighters in Iraq & Syria

[Firn]

Brussels Jewish Museum killings: Suspect 'admitted attack'

He said Mr Nemmouche had spent over a year in Syria and had links with radical Islamists.

....

Police found Mr Nemmouche had in his possession a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun believed to have been used in the attack, the Paris prosecutor told a news conference on Sunday.

With the weapons was a white sheet emblazoned with the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a jihadist group fighting in Syria, according to Mr Molins.

He was also sentenced to 5 years for armed robbery, it seems, before going to Syria. Arguably a second marker beside the Syria trip which caused monitoring activities. Similar connections (minus the terrorism at home, so far) have been already mentioned in this thread. This nexus and his criminal past might have facilitated the access to those guns, we will see. There will be lots of question in France, especially within the services.

Mr Nemmouche was also said to be carrying a camera with a 40-second video showing the two guns and a voice recording, claiming responsibility for the killings and expressing regret that the device had not succeeded in capturing the shooting.

Maybe influenced by the Syrian YTwar, in which such cameras are widely used for various reasons, propaganda being not the least among them.

[davidbfpo]

A short, six minute CNN interview with Peter Neumann from ICSR and he is very pessimistic about teh impact of foreign fighters. This quote comes after his direct contact with fighters:

They are telling us that the Syrian people do not like them very much. They are telling us that they hate the idea that all this infighting is going on between different groups – they came to Syria in order to fight Bashar Assad; what they end up doing is killing other Sunni rebels. And so there are a lot of powerful messages. If governments paid more attention, these would be very powerful messages to deter people from going to Syria in the first place

Link:http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2014/0...stan-in-1980s/

[davidbfpo]

An update on the French scene:http://jihadology.net/2014/06/09/the...eers-in-syria/

For David Thomson, the French jihadists are leaving to assume a defensive jihad against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but also because they believe in the Muslim prophecies of the end times, the Apocalypse, to be held in Syria (land of Sham). There is no portrait type of French jihadist even if some are from disadvantaged neighborhoods of large cities, others come from the countryside and have never met a Muslim. Many are offenders, but not all, some being fully inserted into the social fabric. The only common denominator is the role of the Internet and social networks. These helped to streamline the message of jihad and extend it to a wider younger audience. Most of the jihadists become self-taught via the net

[davidbfpo]

Amidst a longer story, IMHO fear-mongering, is this passage:

Security officials estimate that about two-thirds of those have already returned.

Link:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz36h0sNQoY

[davidbfpo]

One of the better press articles on why three Britons left for Syria. A complex and unpredictable mixture:http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...randeep-ramesh

A shorter Canadian report:http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/07...dists-at-home/

[Bill Moore]

Light infantry and special operators will be very familiar with these battle drills. You can critique their tactics at the margins, but overall they appear to be well trained, some of the tactics/battle drills demonstrated include man down drills, react to contact, bounding overwatch, how to execute an ambush, etc.

These are reportedly foreign fighters being trained in Syria. Apparently using our books.

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archiv...st_group_i.php

Chechen-led jihadist group in Syria releases video of training camp

A new jihadist group known as the Jamaat Ahadun Ahad, or the Group of the One and Only, has released a video of its training camp in Syria. The group is led by a Chechen commander and includes fighters from Chechnya, Europe, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and several Arab countries.

[davidbfpo]

An unclassified Danish Security Service (PET) Center for Terror Analysis has published:

...a 6-page unclassified intelligence threat assessment on the danger posed by foreign fighters currently operating in Syria with various militant groups, especially ISIS.

The report discloses that more than 100 Danes are currently believed to be fighting with these militant groups in Syria, and that 15 have been killed. The report also notes that a small but growing number of Danes are now leaving home to fight with ISIS in Iraq.

Link:https://www.pet.dk/English/Centerfor...nFINALpdf.ashx