[ToloNews] The US Treasury Department said that the al-Qaeda is gaining strength in Afghanistan while "continuing to operate with the Taliban ...Arabic for students... under the group’s protection."
"Al-Qaeda broadly still depends on donations from likeminded supporters, and from individuals who believe that their money is supporting humanitarian or charitable causes," it said in a report released on January 4.
Continued on Page 49
[DailyTimes.pk] Taliban political envoys arrived in Tehran on Tuesday for talks on the peace process, the Taliban and Iranian Foreign Ministry said. Iran is one of the few countries with which the Taliban have regular contacts.
There's a reason for that...
“Today, the political deputy of the IEA and head of the political office, Mullah Baradar Akhund, and the accompanying delegation arrived into Iran at the official invitation of the state of Iran,” Taliban spokesman Dr Mohammad Naeem tweeted. He said the delegation will talk to the Iranian officials about the relations between the two countries, the situation of Afghan refugees in Iran, and the current political and security situation of Afghanistan and region, and will exchange their views about it
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said that a Taliban political delegation led by Abdul Ghani Baradar is in Tehran to review Afghan peace process with Iranian officials, the Iranian official IRNA news agency reported.
The Taliban delegation visit was made upon Iranian Foreign Ministry invitation, Khatibzadeh said.
During its stay in Tehran, the Taliban delegation is to hold talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Iran special representative for Afghanistan affairs, he added. They will discuss the peace process in Afghanistan and the related issues, he noted.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry said Iran had informed Afghanistan about the Taliban visit and that Tehran would press the Taliban for an immediate ceasefire, reaching a comprehensive peace agreement within the framework of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
A foreign ministry statement said Iran wants to secure guarantee that Afghanistan should not turn into safe havens of terrorists but become a center for regional cooperation.
I think that translates into not allowing anyone in Afghanistan who'd go after the Mad Ayatollahs.
Iran is accused of supporting the Taliban was previously blamed several times by US officials for supporting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
US officials claimed at the time that Iranians are providing weapons and ammunition to the Taliban fighters, and some were even trained across the border.
An accusation that has always been denied by the Iranian officials, but officials in Tehran during their remarks always have supported the rule of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and its governance.
Two weeks ago, before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, accused Iran of having secret ties with the al-Qaida network and imposed new sanctions on several senior Iranian officials.
In May 2018, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister blamed the United States for supporting Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and ISIS.
[Garowe] NAIROBI, Kenya -- The US Africa Command will continue cracking down the Al-Shabaab militants from elsewhere in East Africa, AFRICOM said in a statement, just hours after the withdrawal of the army from Somalia, following an order by former President Donald Trump.
It's not clear if the decision will be reversed given that President Joe Biden has been reviewing some of the decisions taken by Trump, but the troops have been repositioned, and are expected to continue firing drones against Al-Shabaab from across the borders.
And the US base in Djibouti has a much better PX...
Gen Stephen Townsend, the commander AFRICOM, said the US army will continue working closely with East Africa partners including in the fight against Al-Shabaab, adding that Washington is keen to safeguard her social-economic and security interests.
The trip, which was Townsend's first visit to the African continent in 2021, demonstrated U.S. Africa Command's commitment to East African partners and provided the commander with the opportunity to visit Joint Task Force -- Quartz, the organization tasked with overseeing the repositioning of U.S. forces while meeting with commanders, forces, and partners in the region.
"Our strategy in East Africa relies on partnerships,"Townsend said. "East African and international partners are working toward a secure environment in Africa that enables political and economic development. U.S. Africa Command continues to do its part."
While in Djibouti and Kenya, Townsend and Thresher recognized U.S. forces in the region and the effect their actions have on mission success in East Africa, underscoring that U.S. forces in East Africa remain poised to respond to threats, deter aggression, and support partners while advancing the U.S. and regional security.
"U.S. Africa Command assists, supports, and strengthens partnerships and security in Africa. Our professional U.S. military forces are trusted and respected by our African partners and help advance mutual interests and security every day," said Thresher. "We take pride in this critical mission for America."
Thresher’s participation on the trip highlighted the emphasis on the need for professional, well trained enlisted corps for partner forces and how it is foundational for any nation's military success. He recognized U.S. forces and spoke with Somali military leadership about training possibilities. U.S. Africa Command training continues to remain a competitive advantage in an era of global competition.
Posted by: Steve White ||
01/27/2021 00:00 ||
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[AlAhram] Hopes were high after initial successes pushing back Islamist Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... murderous Moslems in 2015 and 2016, but with the rise of Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... 's West African branch the military ceded many of its gains.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
01/27/2021 01:48 ||
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A year ago we had a report that Iran had provided funds and Al Quds and Hezbollah trainers to help rebel ex-Seleka members become an effective jihadi force, an effort that involved 30-40 cadres travelling to Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria in 2017 and 2018 for training. Whether their numbers actually reached 300-400 members under the name Saraya Zahraa or Saraya Zahara is not clear. But there was a report two years ago of a group by that name fighting alongside local groups in Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. Could this be a response to that threat, or is this just a continuation of Russian efforts across central Africa? They’ve sent military specialists to at least twenty countries in the region.
[SouthFront] Russia is ready to discuss the issue of sending new military advisers to the Central African Republic, if an appropriate appeal is received from the country’s authorities.
This was announced to reporters by the special envoy of the Russian president for the Middle East and Africa, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov on January 25th.
“This [the question of the need for military advisers from the Russian Federation] should be assessed by the democratically elected leadership of the CAR,” he said. “If someone asks us, representing a sovereign country, being a legitimate leader, then such appeals are always considered in the most attentive way.”
According to Bogdanov, the Central African Republic remains in a very difficult situation.
The elections held in the country should have a positive effect on the socio-political situation and the solution of socio-economic problems, the high-ranking diplomat emphasized.
On January 22nd, an emergency regime was declared in the CAR for 15 days.
There are Russian military instructors in the republic. In March 2018, the Russian Foreign Ministry reported that, at the request of the CAR president, the Russian side was sending Bangui free military-technical assistance, in particular, small arms and ammunition, and five military and 170 Russian civilian instructors were sent to the country to train the local military.
In the summer of 2019, there were negotiations that another group of Russian military personnel could be sent to the UN mission in the CAR.
On December 22nd, 2020, the Foreign Ministry notified the UN Security Council that Russia had sent an additional 300 military instructors to the Central African Republic. On December 27, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said that in November 2020, Russia supplied BRDM-2 armored reconnaissance vehicles to the CAR.
On January 15th, there were reports that the Russian instructors would be withdrawn, but that turned out to be false or overturned.
On January 21st, the press service of the Foreign Ministry announced that the Russian military instructors sent to the CAR in December will remain in the country for now.
According to UN sources, the coordination on the ground between UN peacekeepers, the Russian “military instructors” and the 300 Rwandan soldiers also sent as reinforcements in December on a bilateral basis, turned out to be “pretty good.”
One of the sources said the coordination was an attempt to avoid “friendly fire” between the different forces, “to know who was where and who was doing what,” adding that “the Rwandans and the Russians have helped a lot.”
#1
The history of French involvement with their foreign colonies in Africa can be found in the struggele between France's own Quai d'Orsay (Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs) and its Ministry of Defense. For decades the Quai was determined to keep the Central African Republic under its thumb because it was hip deep in the profits derived from the only thing the nation had that was worth anything -- gemstones. While the French Quai raped the country, the CAR was slowly infiltrated by Muslim radicals. As there was little to no French military involvement with the CAR's feckless and corrupt generals, chaos was the result. Now, the Russians have intervened. Whether invited or not seems immaterial at this point. But their will be a payoff.
#2
/\ A region run by thugs and tribal gangs. It's Las Vegas without a modern highway network and sanitary system. The Russians should feel right at home.
France is just full of good advice on this subject today. See also this and this.
[AnNahar] The Iranian government must comply with the terms of the 2015 accord limiting its nuclear programme in order to see the United States return to the deal, a French presidency official said Tuesday.
"If they are serious about negotiations and want to obtain a new commitment from all participants in the JCPOA, first they must refrain from further provocations and second they must respect what they are no longer respecting" in terms of commitments, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Former US president Donald Trump ...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons...... withdrew in 2018 from the accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), though his defeat to President Joe Foreign Policy Whiz Kid Biden ...Failed seeker of the Democratic presidential nomination on multiple occasions, vice president under Barack Obama, giving it a last try in his dotage for 2020... has raised the prospect of a US return to the deal.
Because Euro-style “realism” has changed unwanted behaviours before, in contrast to those fecklessly ignorant and gauche Trumpists laying down markers and transacting deals.
[AlAhram] It remains unclear how Biden's administration might tackle Leb. ...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers... The United States under new President Joe Foreign Policy Whiz Kid Biden ...Candidate for president in 2020. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.... needs to adopt a more realistic attitude towards the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement to help break the political and economic impasse in Lebanon, a French presidential official said on Tuesday.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been spearheading international efforts to rescue Lebanon, once a French protectorate, from its deepest crisis since its 1975-1990 civil war.
He has travelled twice to Lebanon since a huge explosion at the Beirut port in August devastated swathes of the capital, but no progress has been made to form a credible interim government.
While former U.S. president Donald Trump ...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US... 's administration backed Macron's initiative, it opposed efforts to include the heavily armed Hezbollah that wields enormous power in Lebanon and which Washington brands a terrorist group.
"There is urgency in Lebanon and we think that there are priorities that we (La Belle France and the United States) can pursue together," the French official told news hounds, speaking on condition of anonymity ... for fear of being murdered... , saying Macron's first priority was putting together a viable Lebanese government.
"We don't expect a change in American attitude towards Hezbollah, but more American realism on what is possible or not given the circumstances in Lebanon," he said, without elaborating on what Gay Paree wanted Washington to do.
It remains unclear how Biden's administration might tackle Lebanon. The 2015 U.S. Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act (HIFPA), which aimed to sever the group’s global funding networks, was imposed during President Barack Obama My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it... 's administration, in which Biden was vice president.
The French presidency official said there were no immediate plans to reschedule a trip by Macron to Lebanon after he put off a visit in December when he contracted COVID-19.
#1
After more than 800 years, and after Lebanon achieved true independence in 1945, France walked away from its protectorate. It next turned its back on its historic role as guarantor of that nation's Christian community. And now this cheese-eating (you know the rest) wants US "realism"? Maybe France didn't invent the word chutzpah, put it certainly knows how to employ it.
[GaroweOnline] WASHINGTON -- A U.S. appeals court upheld the convictions and prison sentences of three white men who plotted to bomb a Kansas apartment complex that was home to Somali immigrants and a mosque, rejecting in a ruling on Monday that the FBI had entrapped them.
Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Eugene Stein were found guilty by a jury in the Kansas U.S. district court in 2018 of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and violating the civil rights of Muslims living in the Garden City housing complex.
In January 2019, U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren sentenced Allen to 25 years in prison, Wright to 26 years, and Stein to 30 years.
The three men appealed to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court, arguing that the judge erred in denying their request that they are allowed to advance a defense of entrapment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also argued that the pool from which their jury was selected was improperly small.
A three-judge panel rejected these arguments on Monday. The panel ruled that the men had not challenged the manner of jury selection within the seven-day period required under law, and would have anyway failed in that gambit if they had.
The FBI used an undercover informant who pretended he was an arms dealer to the three men, which the men argued was entrapment.
The three men are evil and are also idiots. When the FBI took down the Klan, they used enough undercover agents and informants that the joke was that in any three-man meeting of the Klan, one guy was an undercover agent and a second was an informer. I have no doubt the FBI is using the same playbook to handle new domestic groups dedicated to violence.
The panel said that an entrapment defense requires there to be evidence that defendants lack a predisposition to engage in the crime they have been charged with, and ruled the men had failed to meet this bar. There was extensive evidence over time of defendants' eagerness to enter into this conspiracy, the panel wrote: "Stein had already learned about the apartment complex they targeted from a militia group he was involved in, and Allen and Wright were busy trying to make explosives before meeting any undercover agents."
[AlAhram] 'Three people convicted under Article 4 of the anti-terror law were executed on Monday at the Nasiriyah central prison,' the security source told AFP, on condition of anonymity.
On Sunday, an official from Iraq's presidency told AFP more than 340 execution orders "for terrorism or criminal acts" were ready to be carried out.
"We are continuing to sign off on more," that official said, speaking on condition of anonymity
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: trailing wife ||
01/27/2021 00:50 ||
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[11135 views]
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[IsraelTimes] The deputy US envoy to the United Nations ...boodling on the grand scale... , Richard Mills, tells the Security Council that the Biden administration will renew ties with the Paleostinians that were frozen under the Trump administration.
He says Washington will urge the government of Israel and the Paleostinian Authority to avoid unilateral steps such as Israeli settlement activity, home demolitions and annexation, Paleostinian payments to Lions of Islam and their families and incitement against Israel.
He says Israel’s recent normalization deals with Arab nations is not a substitute for Israeli-Paleostinian peace.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...Arabic for 
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling 
...Failed seeker of the Democratic presidential nomination on multiple occasions, vice president under Barack Obama, giving it a last try in his dotage for 2020...
...Candidate for president in 2020. 
