As al-Qaida Terrorist Leaves Prison, Victims’ Families Relive The PainBenjamin Weiser
Star Tribune, Nov. 27, 2020Edith Bartley knew the day would come. For almost 15 years, she and her mother have traveled to Manhattan from the Washington, D.C., area to attend the trials of men charged in a conspiracy that included al-Qaida’s bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. Her reason for making the trips was deeply personal: Her father and younger brother were among the 224 victims. So it was with some trepidation that she read a recent e-mail from federal authorities telling her that one of the defendants, Adel Abdel-Meguid Abdel-Bary, 60, was about to be released after 21 years in prison.Abdel-Bary, an operative in London who on behalf of al-Qaida publicized a claim of responsibility for the attacks, is the only one of the men convicted in the plot known to be ready to leave prison, outside of cooperating witnesses. Some of the men charged in the conspiracy, including Osama bin Laden, were killed by the U.S. or its allies. Seven conspirators are serving life sentences. But Abdel-Bary, now in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities, has finished his sentence and is expected to be deported to Britain, his last place of residence.To Bartley, the prospect that Abdel-Bary will be free, even in another country, is unsettling. “Just serving a sentence doesn’t mean that a person has been rehabilitated, doesn’t mean that their core thinking has changed,” Bartley said. “This is a person who can still do harm in the world.”His immigration lawyer R. Andrew Painter said, “After all this time, all Mr. Bary wants is to enjoy a quiet life with his family.”
He has a wife in London and several children. One son, Abdel-Majed Abdel-Bary, who was a child when Abdel-Bary was jailed, was arrested in April by Spanish authorities and accused of having joined ISIS fighters in Syria.
It has been years since a series of high-profile terrorism trials were held in Manhattan, growing out of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people; an aborted plot to blow up New York landmarks; and the 1998 attacks on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than a dozen terrorists were convicted in those and related cases and sentenced to life in prison. But some others have completed their sentences.
“Not everyone who is convicted of a terrible crime spends life in prison,” said Nicholas Lewin, a former assistant U.S. attorney who helped prosecute Abdel-Bary. “People are released upon finishing their sentence,” Lewin added. “It’s fundamental to our system of justice.”
Prosecutors say Abdel-Bary handled communications with the media for al-Qaida before and after the bombings. In 2015, he was sentenced to 25 years but received credit for the years he was jailed in Britain while fighting extradition, and also for good behavior in prison in the United States.
Susan Hirsch, a George Mason University professor, lost her husband, Abdurahman Abdalla, in the Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, bombing and wrote a book about what she has called “a victim’s quest for justice.” Hirsch acknowledged Abdel-Bary’s 21 years constituted a substantial sentence but said, “It’s on the lower end of just, as far as I’m concerned.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Pentagon Chief Visits Somalia Ahead of Expected Troop Cuts
Eric Schmitt
NY Times, Nov. 27, 2020
Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller met with American troops and diplomats in Somalia on Friday, the first Pentagon chief to visit the strife-torn East African nation. He may also be the last. The three-hour visit to Mogadishu, the Somali capital, came as the acting secretary was wrapping up an overseas trip to the Middle East and East Africa. For security reasons, the Pentagon announced the stopover only after Mr. Miller had left the country.
Mr. Miller is preparing to announce as early as next week that virtually all of the more than 700 American military troops in Somalia will depart by the time President Trump leaves office in January.
Before that happens, Pentagon officials said, Mr. Miller wanted to thank the troops in person over the Thanksgiving holiday and to meet with Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the head of the military’s Africa Command, and Donald Yamamoto, the U.S. ambassador to Somalia. General Townsend had pushed back on proposals earlier this year by Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary at the time, to draw down U.S. forces and other assistance in Somalia. In a statement issued by his command on Friday, General Townsend did not mention the expected troop cuts, but seemed to anticipate them by seeking to pre-emptively reassure African allies that the United States remained committed to the region.
“Partnership and a range of U.S. assistance remains critically important to the stability, security and prosperity of this region,” said General Townsend, who flew from his headquarters in Germany to meet with Mr. Miller in Somalia and Djibouti. “We must continue to work together and deliver whole-of-government, international and African solutions to address regional issues.”
Mr. Trump’s withdrawal plan would not apply to thousands of U.S. troops stationed in nearby Kenya and Djibouti, where American drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based. They would continue to conduct counterterrorism operations against the Shabab, the Al Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Still, critics said the expected troop cuts would occur at a difficult time for Somalia. The country is preparing for parliamentary elections next month and a presidential election in early February. The removal of U.S. troops could complicate any ability to keep election rallies and voting safe from Shabab attackers. Political turmoil has also erupted in neighboring Ethiopia, whose army has battled the Shabab.
Most of the 700 American troops in Somalia are Special Operations forces stationed at a small number of bases across the country. Their missions include training and advising Somali army and counterterrorism troops and conducting kill-or-capture raids against the Shabab.
The Shabab have in recent months issued specific new threats against Americans in East Africa — and even in the United States. Earlier this month, a veteran C.I.A. paramilitary officer was killed in combat in Somalia. After a hiatus this year, Shabab fighters have increased a campaign of car bombings in Somalia, American counterterrorism and intelligence officials said.
Security inside Somalia is increasingly fraught despite a concerted campaign of American drone strikes and U.S.-backed ground raids against Shabab fighters over the past two years, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the inspectors general of the Defense and State Departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Terry Glavin: Trudeau’s Incoherence Has Disappointed The French And All Muslims
Terry Gavin
National Post, Nov. 3, 2020
French President Emmanuel Macron could really use some friends right now. He’s being burned in effigy, and bloodcurdling vows to avenge the Prophet Muhammad have been shouted in street protests in Bangladesh, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Palestine. The world’s theocracies are taking aim at him and at the economy of the French republic itself, the birthplace of liberté, égalité and fraternité.
It’s a shame no help is coming from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose point-missing incoherence has sidelined Canada in the effort to defend France in its current agonies. Expressions of solidarity and sympathy are all well and good, but Macron’s defence of the right of satirists to publish vulgar cartoons was not a defence of the right, as Trudeau absurdly suggested last Friday, “to shout fire in a movie theatre crowded with people.”
A target had been painted on Macron’s back long before the 47-year-old middle-school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in broad daylight Oct. 16, the grisly culmination of a methodically organized incitement campaign orchestrated by France’s Hamas-affiliated Collective Cheikh Yassine. The pretext for the feigned outrage was Paty’s use of the contentious Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad from 2015, in a class discussion, to explore the disputes and arguments around free speech.
And those cartoons were not published in order to “arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet,” as Trudeau put it. Specifically, the cartoons depicted Mohammad — a blasphemy all on its own, by some Islamic standards — lamenting the barbarism so often carried out in his holy name.
For this, 11 Charlie Hebdo staff members were massacred on Jan. 7, 2015. To mark the beginning of the trial of those terrorists and their accomplices, Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons on Sept. 1. In anger, a crackpot wielding a meat cleaver attacked and seriously injured two people Sept. 25 on the street where the Charlie Hebdo office used to be.
Neither did it help — although it was perhaps some small mercy that he was being merely obtuse and oafish — in the way Trudeau classified the acts of beheading a 60-year-old worshipper and slitting the throat of a 55-year-old church sexton and stabbing a 44-year-old mother of three to death at the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice last Thursday morning. These are “unjustifiable acts,” Trudeau asserted, “which have no place in our society.”
Was this really something any of us needed to be told? Is France “our society”? Is it just “our” society where Trudeau would want us all to refrain from such savagery? Are there other societies where Trudeau considers head-chopping and the public disembowelment of innocents to be unobjectionable?
The jihadist charge sheet against Macron was drawn up well before these horrifying events. You’ve got to wind the clock back to April 30, when Macron’s government signed a decree unveiling the thrust of a wide-ranging reform program aimed at supporting the disaffected Muslim youth in France’s crowded banlieus and strengthening France’s civil traditions, all in one project. The plan, which enraged France’s “secular” right as much as it did the Islamists, calls for an overhaul of the French curriculum to include enhanced Arabic-language courses, and the study of Islamic history and civilization. Broadly supported by the French Council of the Muslim Faith, it’s this that’s got the Islamist fringe in a lather. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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What Ethiopia’s Crisis Means For Somalia
Vanda Felbab-Brown
Brookings, Nov. 20, 2020
With many around the world focused on the dangerous military confrontation in Ethiopia, Somalia too is facing a triple security crisis that can jeopardize the country’s halting progress. Ethiopia’s instability and ethnic strife are producing security repercussions in Somalia. Somalia’s upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections are the second component of the emerging security storm. And the Trump administration’s plan to withdraw U.S. special operations forces from Somalia in the next two months will further weaken the various struggling anti-Shabab forces and strengthen the militants.
Here, I spell out the implications of the Ethiopian crisis for Somalia. In a forthcoming post, I’ll deal with the latter two issues.
ANTI-SHABAB OPERATIONS
The escalating military confrontation between the federal government of Ethiopia and the political leadership of the Tigray region has produced a worrying humanitarian situation. It also threatens to plunge the Tigray region into prolonged violent strife, ensnarl regional actors, and exacerbate ethnic violence across the country.
In addition, the crisis has potentially grave consequences for stability and security in neighboring Somalia. It hurts counterinsurgency efforts against the potent jihadi terrorist group al-Shabab and exacerbates Somalia’s existing tensions between its capital and regions.
Ethiopian forces, whether operating under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) or independently, are a powerful actor in Somalia. Their military heft significantly surpasses that of the Somali National Army (SNA) or Somali National Police (SPN). Despite years of international training and payments, the SNA and SNP remain predominantly conglomerations of clan-based fractious militias, with little independent capacity even for defensive operations against al-Shabab.
Somali federal forces and AMISOM rely on militias for rare offensive operations against al-Shabab and defense of bases. But although AMISOM has not conducted major offensive operations against al-Shabab since 2016 and remains hunkered down in garrisons, its presence and that of non-AMISOM Ethiopian forces stiffen the militias’ morale.
Wherever Ethiopian troops have withdrawn, al-Shabab attacks against local militias, leaders, and populations ensued; in most cases, the group has eventually taken over those territories. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Mali: Air Strikes Kill Dozens Of Jihadist Insurgents: Vatican News, Nov. 3, 2020 — French forces on Monday said that at least 50 persons linked to the Al-Qaeda terrorist group were killed in airstrikes in central Mali.
Canada Faces Fresh Calls To Help Fight Terrorism, Facilitate Peace Talks In Mali: Red Deer Advocate, Nov. 15, 2020 — Canada is being urged to step up its presence in Mali, including through the provision of military assistance to help fight Islamic militants in the region and a diplomatic push to lead peace and reconciliation talks.
French Forces Take Out Leading Jihadist In Mali: RFI, Nov. 13, 2020 — France’s Barkhane force “neutralised” Bah ag Moussa on Tuesday in an operation involving ground troops and helicopters, Defence Minister Parly said in a statement on Friday.
ISS Live: Is Kenya Succeeding In Preventing Violent Extremism?: ISS, Oct. 8, 2020 — Terrorism remains a risk, and there’s a lack of clarity on whether prevention efforts are working
