Re: Al Quaida expanding scope?
[quote=davetlv]I'm sure even you Dig could have goggled. . . . but here you go. . . . how many of these do you want me to submit before you accept stark yet simple facts :roll: :roll: :roll:
[B][SIZE=3]Ties between al Qaeda and Hamas in Mideast are long and frequent[/SIZE][/B][SIZE=3]
[B]It shouldn't be any surprise that the two groups share ideology[/B][/SIZE]
[URL="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/05/INGERHG75F1.DTL"]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/05/INGERHG75F1.DTL[/URL]
he ideological compatibility of Hamas with other jihadi movements in the Middle East raises the question of whether the new Hamas government that is about to be sworn in could create in the West Bank and Gaza a new center for global terrorism.
Russia certainly doesn't think so, because President Vladimir Putin invited a Hamas delegation to Moscow. France has supported the Russian move. And in many diplomatic circles, even in Washington, the argument is being made that Hamas can be brought into a political process and moderated. This is clearly being raised by individuals who have no idea what Hamas truly represents and why Israel has cut off all financial support to the new Palestinian government even before it is formally set up.
True, unlike al Qaeda, Hamas until now has not been involved in terrorist attacks against Western targets in the United States and Europe. It was left by those fostering the global jihad to focus its military efforts on Israel alone. Yet Hamas has maintained critical links with al Qaeda. And last week, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said he was concerned that al Qaeda had infiltrated the West Bank and Gaza.
Earlier evidence of links exists. In 2003, an Israeli ground unit in Gaza, seeking Hamas suspects, went into a school established by the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. Written materials that Israeli soldiers collected revealed the writings of a famous Saudi Wahhabi religious authority, Sheikh Sulaiman al-Ulwan. His ideological entry into the world of Hamas immediately raised eyebrows. After all, his name was featured in a famous Osama bin Laden video clip from December 2001, when the al Qaeda leader entertained his entourage on camera by re-enacting with his hands the hijacked aircraft slamming into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
In that video, one Saudi messenger entered the scene at the end, telling bin Laden that he brought with him a "beautiful fatwa" from al-Ulwan, who had justified the mass murder of Americans. Now his ideas have penetrated the Palestinians as well. And his Islamic religious ruling justifying suicide bombing attacks appeared on the Hamas Web site along with those of other al Qaeda clerics.
Also, in 2003 and 2004, Israeli forces found Hamas posters that were distributed in West Bank cities that extolled the war being waged by Islamic militants in the Balkans, Chechnya and Kashmir. At the top was the portrait of Hamas leader Yassin alongside the portraits of bin Laden and Chechen militant leaders like Shamil Besayev, who took credit for the bloody attack on a Russian school in Beslan.
That Hamas and al Qaeda share some common ideological roots should not have come as any surprise. Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Article Two of the Hamas Covenant reads, "The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine."
Throughout the Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood is regarded as the common wellspring of all modern jihadi terrorism. Its spiritual leader, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, has been one of the pivotal figures in the globalization of the Danish cartoon rage as well as a supporter of fighting against U.S. forces in Iraq. Much of the al Qaeda leadership -- from bin Laden's mentor, Abdullah Azzam, to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of Sept. 11 -- started out with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hamas and al Qaeda, as Muslim Brotherhood offshoots, have had a number of notable links.
Bin Laden sent emissaries to Hamas in September 2000 and January 2001; Israel arrested three Hamas militants in 2003 after they had returned from an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah entered the world of terrorism through Hamas. And according to a 2004 FBI affidavit, al Qaeda recruited Hamas members to conduct surveillance against potential targets in the United States.
Hamas poses a unique danger in the world of global terrorism, because besides its past ties to the Sunni Islamic extremism of al Qaeda, Hamas is now erecting a strategic partnership with Shiite Iran. For years, Iran has funded Hamas, but now that relationship is about to be seriously upgraded.
Khaled Mashaal, head of the Hamas political bureau, declared at a recent news conference in Tehran that "Iran's role in the future of Palestine should continue and increase." He is clearly prepared to open up Gaza to Iranian influence and serve Iranian national interests.
Just recently, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah moved one of its command centers from its base in Beirut to the heart of Gaza. So now both of the major Islamist terrorist organizations have established themselves in this Hamas-dominated territory.
Hamas is not the PLO of 1993 that lost its collapsing Soviet patron, and hence had to moderate its behavior in order to obtain Western diplomatic and financial support. The patrons of Hamas today are pushing it in a completely opposite direction. And so Mashaal spoke openly recently about the defeat of the United States in Iraq and his opposition to Western policies across the entire globe, from Darfur to East Timor.
As the struggle between the West and Iran over its nuclear program heats up, Hamas could become an important instrument for any countermeasures that Iran seeks to take. Rather than accommodate Hamas, the West should seek ways to contain its spread. Palestinian society will eventually seek another path, but in the interim, it would be a cardinal error to assume that Hamas is about to change.
[B][SIZE=3]?Axis of Evil?[/SIZE][/B][SIZE=3]
[B]Indicted Hamas leader linked to al Qaeda activist in Midwest[/B][/SIZE][B].[/B]
By Evan Kohlmann
s the result of an extensive, decade-long federal investigation, former U.S. resident Musa Abu Marzook, also the acknowledged "political bureau" chief of the Palestinian Hamas terrorist organization since 1991, has been indicted along with several other Palestinian Americans for repeated and deliberate violations of U.S. export regulations and the material-support provisions of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). While living as a U.S. resident during the mid-1990s, Abu Marzook also had a series of disturbing connections through family and personal associates to a known al Qaeda activist living in the U.S. named Ziyad Helmi Khaleel.
Musa Abu Marzook is a charismatic Islamist leader who has actively championed the jihad in Palestine. A day after a suicidal Hamas shooting attack in Jerusalem in 1994, Marzook told an interviewer, "Death is the goal to every Muslim and every fighter wants to die on Palestinian land. This is not the first time that the Izz Al-Din Al-Qassem heroes carr[ied] out suicide and terrorism actions." Moreover, captured Hamas operatives who were allegedly dispatched by Marzook from inside the United States have told Israeli interrogators that Marzook was intimately involved in financing and ordering actual Hamas terrorist operations.
At the same time, Marzook also played an integral role in local Muslim communities across America where he resided, including in Colorado, Northern Virginia, Texas, and Louisiana. In a suburb of Dallas, Marzook helped found the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), a Texas-based evangelical charity group that, last December, was named by the U.S. government as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity (SDGT) for providing critical financial support to Hamas. Musa also expanded his own personal roots here in America. For a time, Marzook set up shop in unimposing Ruston, Louisiana with his personal secretary and his family. Even his nephew Ahmed came to the United States, and stayed with his uncle every summer in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.
Ahmed Abu Marzook is the founder and president of Palestinian Internet Services (P-I-S.com), a prominent local Internet provider located in Gaza. P-I-S.com is responsible for hosting both the websites for the Gaza office of the now-banned Holy Land Foundation and HLF's special hospital in Gaza, Dar al-Islam. The enterprising Ahmed Abu Marzook has also spent extensive time in other parts of the U.S., including in Detroit, Michigan, where he incorporated "A&A Intercontinental" at 3167 Hanley Street. Unsurprisingly, the same Hanley Street address has also been linked in public records to Ziyad Khaleel, a U.S. citizen and the webmaster of the official Hamas Internet site.
At the time, Khaleel was a roving jack-of-all-trades in the American underground militant Islamic community. His name and Detroit address both appeared prominently in ledgers taken from the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in 1994, a critical international financial and strategic arm of al Qaeda. While in Orlando, Florida, Khaleel served as the regional director for the Columbia, Missouri-based Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), an Islamic charity that had a multimillion-dollar USAID contract cancelled after the U.S. State Department determined that it was not in America's "national-security interests." In Columbia itself, Khaleel operated a remote-branch office on behalf of radical Saudi dissidents based in London who were closely aligned with Osama bin Laden. He even added a digitized copy of an infamous al Qaeda propaganda video titled "The Martyrs of Bosnia" to his own short-lived Internet website, salam.net.
But Ziyad Khaleel never forgot his Palestinian heritage. While he used his technical abilities to register websites on behalf of a host of militant Islamic groups in North Africa and the Middle East, he simultaneously rededicated himself to spreading word of the Palestinian cause. He enthusiastically lectured to Muslim student groups at the University of Missouri on behalf of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), an organization based primarily in Dallas and Chicago and cofounded by Musa Abu Marzook. In a recent federal-court decision, a judge concluded that IAP has "distribute[d] information on behalf of Hamas" and, in a variety of other ways, "has acted in support of Hamas." While in Detroit, Khaleel collected advertising money for an IAP publication and shared common residential addresses in Detroit with both Ahmed Abu Marzook and, separately, another Palestinian associate of Uncle Musa: Mohammed Abu Dayyeh. And, of course, Khaleel happily administered the Hamas Internet domain for Marzook and his assorted henchmen.
In the mid-to-late 90s, Ziyad Khaleel finally ran afoul of federal authorities in the United States for taking his orders not from Musa Abu Marzook, but rather from the top advisors of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. In November 1996, senior al Qaeda lieutenant Khaled al-Fawwaz instructed Ziyad Khaleel to purchase a $7,500 satellite telephone for personal use by bin Laden. Between 1996 and 1998, Khaleel replenished the phone with more than 2,000 minutes of telephone air time, also at the behest of Fawwaz. Bin Laden's bustling branch office in Columbia, managed by Khaleel and disguised as a low-income housing project, started attracting far too much attention. The FBI secretly raided the nondescript office and collected extensive intelligence information.
Khaleel's role in knowingly aiding bin Laden was subsequently revealed in detail by prosecutors during the 2001 trial of al Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings. However, Khaleel was never indicted for his role in the conspiracy, even though bin Laden used the satellite telephone to communicate the very orders to carry out the attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. Nevertheless, according to Newsweek, on the eve of the millennium, Khaleel was abruptly seized by Jordanian intelligence officials and the FBI as he arrived in Amman. Evidently, investigators had sought to question him in regards to the shocking failed millennium terror plots attributed to the al Qaeda network. Nevertheless, the Newsweek report indicated Khaleel was "cooperating" with the inquiry and would not be held.
Of course, the abrupt ending to this tale leaves many intriguing questions unanswered about the apparent links between prominent Hamas and al Qaeda activists living and working inside the United States. Is this proof that Hamas and al Qaeda have been openly collaborating with each other? It should be noted in this regard that several Hamas leaders have specifically renounced any ties to al Qaeda and have condemned the 9/11 terror attacks. However, like virtually any radical movement, Hamas is characterized by many factions, some more moderate and some more extreme. While the U.S. government has heretofore been reluctant to take decisive action against Hamas, perhaps the very real fear of fringe Palestinian militants aligning themselves with al Qaeda will finally encourage us to change that policy and "get tough" with all terrorists who have American blood on their hands, irrespective of their geographic or national identity.
[URL="https://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kohlmann010203.asp"]https://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kohlmann010203.asp[/URL]
[B][SIZE=3]Islamic Extremism in Europe: Beyond al-Qaeda?Hamas and Hezbollah in Europe[/SIZE][/B]
[B]Featuring Matthew Levitt[/B]
[B]April 27, 2005[/B]
[B]Testimony before the Joint Hearing of the House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Europe and Emerging Threats[/B]
INTRODUCTION
The rise of global jihadist movements in Europe is alarming, not only because of the threat such movements pose to our European allies but because Europe has served as a launching pad for terrorist operatives plotting attacks elsewhere. As the 9/11 trial just begun in Spain highlights, the 9/11 hijackers and their logistical and financial collaborators plotted and planned their operations in Europe. Similarly, Richard Reid?s failed shoe-bombing of a U.S. airliner was plotted and launched from Europe; Hezbollah operatives have launched attacks against Israel from Europe; and Hamas operatives have plotted and funded suicide and other terrorist attacks against civilians in Israel from Europe as well.
While terrorist groups remain the central structural unit in international terrorism, terrorist groups today are better described as networked groups tied together by individual relationships than as clearly defined organizations that are structured and discrete. The relationships between individual terrorists affiliated with different groups are paramount, especially when operating within Diaspora communities in places like Europe and the United States. This crossover and pollination facilitates cooperation among groups, including operational cooperation but far more often interconnectivity at the logistical and financial support levels. Such links exist even between groups that do not share similar ideologies, leading to cooperation between religious zealots and secular radicals; between ideologically- or theologically-driven terrorists and criminal entities (as has been the case in several terrorist attacks in Iraq, where criminal elements played critical roles in return for monetary compensation); between Sunni and Shi?a groups; and between individuals whose person-to-person contacts require no agreement between their respective headquarters.
As such, it should not surprise that several investigations into al-Qaeda operatives in Europe and elsewhere revealed significant crossover to terrorist elements tied to Hamas. A particularly interesting example is the Madrid Al-Qaeda cell, perhaps the most important cell broken up since 9/11. Around April 2002, Spanish authorities searched the home and offices of Muhammad Zouaydi, a senior al-Qaeda financier in Madrid. Investigators found a five-page fax dated October 24, 2001, revealing that Zouaydi was not only financing the Hamburg cell responsible for the September 11 attacks, but also Hamas. In the fax, which Zouaydi kept for his records, the Hebron Muslim Youth Association solicited funds from the Islamic Association of Spain. According to Spanish prosecutors, "the Hebron Muslim Youth Association is an organization known to belong to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas which is financed by activists of said organization living abroad." Spanish police also say Zouaydi gave a total of almost $6,600 marked ?Gifts for Palestine? to Sheikh Helal Jamal, a Palestinian religious figure in Madrid tied to Hamas.
The al-Taqwa banking system?with offices in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy and the Caribbean?also facilitated the financing of multiple terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Bank al-Taqwa was added to the U.S. Treasury Department?s terrorism list in November 2001 for ?provid[ing] cash transfer mechanisms for Al Qaida,? and European intelligence services confirm ?al-Taqwa used Hamas funds in the late 1990s.? Subsequent investigation has determined al-Taqwa was established in 1988 with financing from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, "$60 million collected annually for Hamas was moved to accounts with Bank al-Taqwa." Al-Taqwa shareholders include known Hamas members and individuals linked to al-Qaeda. Ghalib Himmat, noted for his ties to the International Islamic Charity Organization (IICO), another charity suspected of financing Hamas, is also an executive of the al-Taqwa banking network. Moreover, a 1996 report by Italian intelligence further linked al-Taqwa to Hamas and other Palestinian groups, as well as to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group and the Egyptian al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya.
Beyond the presence in Europe of global jihadists tied to the al-Qaeda network, the activities of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah also pose significant national security risks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, these risks are not limited to the terrorist attacks these groups plot against Israel, they include risks to the countries in which they are operating and to the United States as well.
[URL="http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=234"]http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=234[/URL]
Anything else sir?[/quote]
Not for now, this will keep me busy for a while.
Thanks.