[FoxNews] The surge in migrant drownings in Eagle Pass has "overwhelmed" local mortuaries and funeral homes, requiring the border town's fire department to request refrigerators to store bodies, the agency's chief told Fox News.
"There are so many bodies being recovered that the morticians are asking for assistance," Eagle Pass Fire Department Chief Manuel Mello III, said. "I had never seen so many drownings like we're seeing right now."
"We do a body recovery daily," Mello continued. "It's very traumatic for my personnel."
The Del Rio sector of the southern border has seen over 376,000 migrant encounters since October 2021, averaging out to nearly 1,100 per day, according to Customs and Border Protection. Across the entire border, there have been 1.8 million encounters over the past 11 months.
Two weeks ago, 13 migrants died and 53 others were apprehended while attempting to cross the Rio Grande into the United States, according to CBP.
"Sometimes you'll be walking in an area where the water will never go above your knee, but all of a sudden you'll have a drop of about 10, 12 feet," Mello said of the RIo Grande. "If you're carrying a baby, you're going to go down 10 or 12 feet with that baby."
He said several children recently died while crossing the river.
"We had a three-month-old baby, we had a three-year-old baby brother that passed away," Mello told Fox News. "The uncle was trying to cross, he fell into a deep hole in the river, let go of the babies."
"The babies drowned," he said.
When Mello joined the fire department over 25 years ago, there would be only 12 body recoveries a year. Now, there are about 30 a month, he said.
"I don't see any end in sight," Mello said.
"I would like to see the federal government jump in and help out in whatever way they can," the fire chief told Fox News. "If they could at least stop this migration, that would be awesome."
He said Maverick County, where Eagle Pass is located, is on pace to have 300 body recoveries this year.
Mello said his office typically receives 7,000 emergency calls annually. But last year, the department received 8,500 calls and is on track to hit that same figure again this year.
Since October, CBP has conducted nearly 19,000 search and rescue efforts, compared to less than 5,000 in fiscal 2019.
As the weather in south Texas cools and hurricane season begins, Mello worries that more migrants will cross while the river in dangerous conditions.
"I would ask any government official to come and see what's going on down here in Eagle Pass," Mello said. "We've got a big issue here in Eagle Pass."
[FoxNews] Sheriffs dealing with the crisis at the southern border are taking aim at Washington, D.C., for declaring a public emergency over the migrants that have been bused into the sanctuary city by Texas and Arizona -- and bristling at claims that the buses have turned D.C. into a "border town."
"They have seen nothing. They are not a border town. They don't know what a border town is," Goliad County, Texas, Sheriff Roy Boyd told Fox News Digital.
Mayor Muriel Bowser on Thursday declared a public emergency over the migrant buses which have been coming to D.C. from Texas and Arizona since April. She said the move would allow the city to create an Office of Migrant Services to provide migrants with accommodation, health care, transportation and other services.
"We’re putting in place a framework that would allow us to have a coordinated response with our partners," Bowser said Thursday. "This will include a program to meet all buses, and given that most people will move on, our primary focus is to make sure we have a humane, efficient, welcome process that will allow people to move on to their final destination."
She is one of a number of liberal mayors and officials of self-proclaimed "sanctuary cities" who have sounded the alarm over the influx of migrants -- which represent just a fraction of those encountered at the border. A D.C. councilmember sparked pushback when she declared that "in many ways, the governors of Texas and Arizona have turned us into a border town,"
Texas has sent less than 10,000 migrants to D.C. since April, while Border Patrol has so far encountered over 2 million migrants this fiscal year, with monthly encounters regularly hitting the 200,000 mark. Sheriffs and border officials who have been dealing with the crisis since shortly after President Biden took office have responded with astonishment at the noises coming from the cities.
"I think it's all a bunch of political grandstanding, trying to get themselves some attention and squeeze a little bit of money out of the federal government or somewhere else that they can use for whatever they think it's needed for," Boyd said. "If they want to see what it looks like. They can come down here for us. It's being shoved on us by the federal government and their policies and their lack of enforcement."
Boyd is one of a number of sheriffs and border officials saying D.C. and New York are just getting a taste of what they have experienced daily since the crisis began.
"‘Welcome to our world’ is what they say," Jonathan Thompson, executive director and CEO of the National Sheriffs’ Association told Fox News Digital. "Welcome to the everyday problems we are facing, and you have been ignoring and that you continue to want to blame someone else for."
"The sheriffs on the border right now are living this every day," Retired Texas Sheriff Clint McDonald, the executive director of the Southwestern Border Sheriff’s Coalition, told Fox News Digital. "And they've been criticized for asking for help with what they're going through. And now that major cities are starting to feel this pressure, it seems to be a whole different scenario for them than it is for the people who live it every day."
[KhaamaPress] ISIS grabbed credit for the devastating suicide kaboom that took place outside the Russian embassy in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on Monday and took at least six lives, including two members of the embassy staff.
According to an ISIS statement posted on Telegram on September 5, an ISIS fighter "blew up" his explosive vest in a gathering joined by Russian employees" close to the embassy in the Afghan capital, international media reported.
Along with the Russian embassy personnel, four Afghans requesting consular services were also among the casualties, and at least ten others were maimed, according to Kabul police front man Khalid Zadran.
According to the Taliban ...Arabic for students... -run Bakhtar news agency, the Taliban security forces were able to identify the jacket wallah who set off the explosives. Bakhtar claims that the suicide bomber was shot and killed by Taliban forces.
While Abdul Nafy Takor, a front man for the Afghan Interior Ministry, told the media that as the bomber approached his alleged target, security personnel guarding the embassy engaged with the bomber.
The Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said in a statement earlier on Monday that Taliban security has initiated a thorough investigation and would take additional measures to guard the Embassy and avoid such incidents from impeding the Embassy’s operations.
The Taliban official also stated about the telephone conversation of the Taliban Foreign Minister with his Russian counterpart over the deadly attack outside the Russian embassy in Kabul.
The foreign minister of Russia expressed his sorrow over the deaths of Afghan citizens and blamed the attack on "international criminal syndicates" stressing the importance of fighting back against them.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
09/12/2022 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
[ShabelleMedia] The Chief of the Somali Police Force, General Abdi Hassan Mohammed Hijaar has warned the public against seeking justice in al-Shabaab ...... the personification of Somali state failure... ’s courts.
He issued the warning on Monday after the government forces set foot in the al-Shabaab court in Basra near Mogadishu, where people used to go for finding verdicts on disputes.
Hijaar called on anyone who receives calls from al-Shabaab areas to inform the security agencies to act and avert any "harassment or extortion" by the murderous Moslem group.
Finally, the police boss said Monday’s military operation in Basra killed one soldier and maimed another.
It was the first operation of its kind in which they destroy an al-Shabaab court since the start of this year.
[Rudaw] A group of Syrian refugees in The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the decaying remnant of the Ottoman Empire... is planning to form a caravan to reach the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... , organisers said Saturday.
Plans are being drawn up online via a Telegram channel, set up six days ago and followed by almost 70,000 people. Organisers are calling on people to bring sleeping bags, tents, life jackets, water, canned food and first aid kits.
"We will announce it when it's time to go," one organiser, a 46-year-old refugee who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP.
Some of the organisers already lived in the EU, he added.
Organisers say the caravan will be split into groups of up to 50 people, each led by a supervisor.
"We have been in Turkey for 10 years," read one message posted on the channel by an administrator. "We are protected... but Western countries must share the burden."
There are 3.7 million Syrian refugees officially living in Turkey.
Syria's civil war, which began with a brutal crackdown of anti-government protests in 2011, has killed nearly half a million people and forced around half of the country's pre-war population from their homes.
Many Syrian refugees in Turkey fear being sent back, especially after a recent shift in Turkey's stance towards Damascus.
Ottoman Turkish President His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First ...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than there are in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really most important... has said he is preparing to send back one million Syrian refugees on a voluntary basis.
In February and March 2020, tens of thousands of migrants colonists approached the land border between Turkey and Greece, after Erdogan threatened to keep the borders with Europa ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... open.
Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles was the pilot on American Airlines Flight 77 which crashed into the Pentagon that day, is angry about the possibility
She says she's not alone: 'The families are outraged. They don't want closure, they want justice'
Burlingame says there is no justice for her brother and the families without a death penalty sentence
It was first revealed in March that guilty pleas in exchange for a life sentence could finally bring to a close the over two decade-long case
The anti-war group 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows , has said that the plea deals are in part a good faith agreement due to CIA torture of the five
It was first revealed in March that guilty pleas in exchange for a life sentence could finally bring to a close the over two decade-long case, the longest ever at the war court.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash and Ammar al-Baluchi were all expected to face the death penalty if convicted.
#2
/\ Only a wild guess, but the travel and activities of 19 Islamic men surely popped on someone's radar screen. A tip from a foreign intelligence service or multiple services? A local law enforcement observation and report? Ongoing signals intercepts, surveillance and monitoring? Source reporting? A US based support network? Financial transactions ?
At exactly what point was the theory of them all becoming Alaskan bush pilots, thrown out
?
#4
Being locked up for the rest of their miserable, empty life like the caged animal they are "IS" justice. Plea deals are just another proof of the radical Islamic infiltration of the power elites within the demokrat party and the Puppet Show.
[IsraelTimes] Flights resumed from Aleppo on Friday after repairs were carried out on Syria’s second-largest airport following an air strike earlier this week blamed on Israel.
The first civilian flight landed in more than 72 hours.
Damage to the main runway in Tuesday’s raid had put the airport out of service, but the transport ministry said Friday repairs had been completed.
The first incoming flight, from Kuwait, landed at 8:30 p.m. local time (1730 GMT), according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, a Britannia-based watchdog of unclear funding.
There were no reports of injuries in the strike, the second to hit the airport in just a week.
Since civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes against its northern neighbor, targeting government troops as well as allied Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah fighters.
As a rule, Israel’s military does not comment on specific strikes in Syria, but has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country. It says it also attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
09/12/2022 01:59 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Syria
[FoxNews] A military official has tried to raise awareness of a growing security threat in Syria at a time when the country has seen increased activity from belligerents.
CENTCOM chief Gen. Erik Kurilla on Friday visited the al-Hol camp in Syria and said ISIS has looked to exploit the conditions in the camp as a means of gaining new recruits to its cause.
"The SDF mission to clear ISIS from the camp continues: This is a critical, wide-ranging operation which will make the camp safer for all residents," Kurilla said following his visit. "We’ve already seen ISIS members holding women and girls enslaved in chains inside the camp, torturing camp residents, and seeking to spread their vile ideology."
"Most of the residents seek to escape ISIS, but ISIS sees the camp as a captive audience for its message and recruitment efforts," he continued. "It is therefore urgent that we repatriate residents back to their countries of origin and rehabilitate them if needed."
The al-Hol camp is Syria’s largest refugee camp, with children making up more than half the camp’s population, according to The Washington Post. Recent estimates say that around 55,000 residents currently live at the camp.
Kurilla stressed that he does not believe a military solution exists to deal with the threat posed by the camp: Instead, he has pushed for the camp to be cleared and for residents to return to their country of origin, with at least half from Iraq.
#8
I'll leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusion.
"With approximately 80 births in the camp each month, this place is a literal breeding ground for the next generation of ISIS, he said, adding that about 70% of the camp population was under the age of 12."
[DW] Fans of the IS group have helped families of former members, trapped in a camp in Syria, by raising money for groceries. But they also want funds to smuggle young men out of the camp, so they can learn to fight.
"This message is the beginning of an important call for donations," said a note in German on the instant messenger service, Telegram, in late July. "In the camp there are two brothers, 15 and 17 years old, in hiding. Their family in the land of the unbelievers has published their pictures and wants to bundle them back to their homeland."
But the mother of the boys wants "to bring them to safety," the note said, and to do so she would need a total of $14,000 (€14,000). The money would be used to pay people smugglers to get the teenagers out of al-Hol, a camp in northeastern Syriafor displaced people.
This is not the only such crowdfunding campaign that relates to al-Hol. There are thought to be around 56,000 people in the camp today and they include "victims, bystanders and perpetrators of bad boy violence" under the "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.... ", or IS, group. According to research by the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, over 90% of those in the camp are women and kiddies. And of those, about two-thirds are under the age of 18.
Almost all of the women and kiddies were brought here after 2018, when the IS group was pushed out of territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria. Many of the women were widows of the IS fighters. The camp is managed and guarded by the Syrian Kurdish military, who control this part of the country.
Life in al-Hol camp, which is the size of a large town, is difficult and dangerous. The UN reported 106 murders, including beheadings, in the camp between January 2021 and June 2022. Observers have said the camp is divided between those who still adhere to the IS' fanatical ideology — researchers estimate that's around a third — and those who have abandoned it.
Besides violence, there's also lack of sanitation, medicine, solid housing and education. Many of the women here have little in the way of income. This is why over the past few years, IS supporters outside the camp have been raising money for the families living inside the camp.
AID FOR THE 'SISTERS'
Researchers said that since around mid-2019, outsiders have promoted crowdfunding campaigns on pages with names like "Justice for Sisters," "Caged Birds" and "Sisters in the tent." The campaigns can usually be found on private messenger applications like Telegram or, despite the risk of being prosecuted for funding a terrorist organization, on more public platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
In a 2021 report, the Combating Terrorism Center at US military academy West Point counted up 40 such initiatives from around the world, most often appearing in the following languages: German, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, English, French and Russian.
Often the campaigners say they are raising money to help al-Hol families to buy food, medicine, toys or clothing.
CHANGE OF FOCUS
But this is not always the case, as the recent crowdfunding campaign for the two adolescent boys on the German-language Telegram channel, called "Spend in the way of Allah," shows, said social media monitors at the US-based International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, or ICSVE.
Instead of raising money for families' daily needs, several crowdfunding campaigns announced they would now be more focused on funds for smuggling people out of the camp, the ICSVE reported recently.
"And this shift has occurred for some very practical reasons," Anne Speckhard, the center's director, told DW.
One is that some of the children are now aging out of the general camp, she said. In particular, adolescent boys will eventually be separated from their families by the Syrian Kurdish military who manage al-Hol, and put into other prisons.
"This is causing deep distress and overwhelming despair among the mothers," said Speckhard, adding that they're asking for money to help smuggle the children out of the camp.
"Unfortunately though, they [the children] will be smuggled out into the hands of IS and other krazed killer groups, and trained to become fighters," Speckhard said. Adolescent girls that get out are often sent to become wives for IS fighters elsewhere.
BEYOND THE CAMP GATES
"Smuggling in and out of the camp happens on a daily basis," Christian Vianna de Azevedo wrote in an August 2020 paper in the journal, Perspectives on Terrorism. That includes "all sorts of goods as well as residents," de Azevedo concluded, and involves the bribing of guards as well as the evolution of a nearby network of people smugglers.
"The smuggling of young boys out of the camp and into krazed killer groups has been going on since day one there," said Vera Mironova, a Russian-American academic and author of the 2019 book, "From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists."
"And often it goes in waves," Mironova told DW. "For example, this month they could be sending young boys out and then next month they won't have the money to do so. It's hard to predict as it's circumstantial and logistical. Last time I spoke to some of the women in the camp — it was about two months ago — they told me they'd just sent two orphans to Idlib for training," she said.
Idlib is part of Syria that is controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else ...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State... , a group that shares some of IS' conservative religious ideology and which was formerly associated with terror group al-Qaeda.
CROWDFUNDING COMPETITION
There's also a lot of competition between the different fundraising campaigns, Mironova explained in a 2020 article she wrote after a year of monitoring 30 such online campaigns.
In the past, some of the funding drives may have said they were using the money to free women or children from the camp because that idea has more appeal for potential donors. But "in the majority of cases, money sent to camps is used for food and other basic necessities," she pointed out.
The money raised is brought into the Syrian camp via a combination of official and unofficial financial systems. This includes the online payment system PayPal, banks and Western Union and similar exchanges, as well as the informal network of money transfers known as "hawala."
Speckhard and researchers at the ICSVE believe that at least one of the crowdfunding campaigns they were monitoring over the summer was launched because the pace of repatriations had picked up.
Although the German-language fundraiser didn't say so, the teenage boys in their note were actually originally from Tajikistan, a country that has taken a very proactive stance on repatriating its natives from al-Hol.
About 85% of al-Hol's residents are either Iraqi or Syrian but the rest are originally from 60 other countries. Most migrated to join the IS group and then stayed, because they believed in the group's bad boy ideology.
FATE UNKNOWN
Despite the conditions at al-Hol, repatriating them from Syria remains a controversial subject. Governments have been reluctant to do so because they fear a possible security threat or negative public reactions or both, and according to Human Rights Watch. By 2021, only 25 countries had attempted to bring people home from al-Hol.
The central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have been among the most proactive countries in this area. In late July, 42 Tajik women and 104 children arrived back in Tajikistan.
It is unlikely that the two Tajik teenagers will be on the next flight. By early August, just 10 days after the fundraising campaign began, several al-Hol-related Telegram channels reported in Russian and German that they had reached their target and had enough money to get the boys "to safety."
Posted by: trailing wife ||
09/12/2022 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
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 
...... the personification of Somali state failure...
...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than there are in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really most important...
Hezbollah
[FoxNews] A military official has tried to raise awareness of a growing security threat in Syria at a time when the country has seen increased activity from belligerents. 
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State...
