Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-60-Caliphate-Refugee-12

C de Waart; CdW Intelligence to Rent [email protected] In Confidence

Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-60-Caliphate-Refugee-12

The al-mustaminun, the asylum seeker, shall not carry weapons.

Dec 11, The European Commission is set to propose the formation of a permanent border force and coastguard agency that would take control of the bloc’s external frontiers, in a move that would represent a significant transfer of sovereignty from national governments. According to EU officials and documents seen by the Financial Times, the bloc’s executive will reveal its plans next week. The proposal’s biggest step will reportedly be to hand Frontex border agency more power and resources to intervene when it decides that a country is failing to police its borders effectively. The plan comes amid a brewing refugee crisis in the continent, as 1.2 million migrants have already reached Europe this year. The plan is “a revolutionary change of Frontex into an EU border and coastguard agency,” said an EU diplomat, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The world has been shocked by the heart-breaking images of children’s bodies washing up on the shores of Europe. This year alone, more than 2,700 people have died trying to reach Europe, the majority of them drowning in the Mediterranean. By far the largest number of refugees are from Syria. In the past three months, 80 per cent of refugees crossing the border between Greece and Macedonia have come from Syria.

First things first: the refugee crisis is not a recent phenomenon. It’s just new to Europe and the west. By the end of 2014, just 14% of the world’s displaced people lived in the developed world. Less than 6% of Syrian refugees had applied for asylum in Europe (222,156 out of a then-total of roughly 4 million). When we ask about the causes of a refugee crisis that has been so serious for so long, we’re really asking why Europe has only just woken up to its existence.

Still, it’s been quite a wake-up call. Last year, up to 220,000 asylum seekers arrived in Europe by boat, which was itself a record. This year, even that unprecedented figure has been dwarfed, with more than 900,000 people landing on the beaches of Greece and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Why?

The first reason is the intransigent nature of the Syrian civil war. The majority of those coming are from Syria, according to statistics compiled by the UN and the Greek and Italian governments. Even if there are questions over the precision of this data, it’s clear that Syrians form the largest proportion of arrivals to Europe. And that’s because they’ve given up hope for their country, whose war shows no sign of ending. People have already weathered four years of brutal conflict; a fifth

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.–Winston Churchill

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is too much. Secondly, there’s no hope for them in the neighbouring countries of the Middle

East. At this point, it is now almost impossible for Syrians to gain legal entrance to most other Arab countries. About 4 million people have already managed to get to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan – but Europe is an increasingly attractive option for them since they have no secure legal status in the countries where they now live. The vast majority do not have the right to work; none of them are formally recognised as refugees; and many of their children are not in school. Some 400,000 Syrian children currently in Turkey have fallen outside the education system, according to Turkish officials. To make matters more desperate, a huge shortfall in UN funding has led to cuts to the handouts given to refugee families every month – making the Middle East an increasingly untenable place for them to stay.

The UK trumpets its aid to refugee camps as the answer, but in reality this aid means little when only a fifth of Syrians live in camps, and most of the rest are not in education or legal employment. Unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands are now moving to Europe to secure the rights they are entitled to under the 1951 refugee convention, but which, however generous the UK has been, they are denied in the Middle East

For all this, Europe’s asylum policies must share much of the blame – but not in the way that most of the continent’s isolationists might think. The crisis has reached Europe not because politicians haven’t defended their own borders (they did, erecting fences in Bulgaria, Greece, Spain and Hungary) but because such defences ultimately don’t work against people who are so desperate to breach them.

Failing to realise this, European governments thought that they could avoid providing safe access and asylum to significant numbers of refugees, since they wrongly assumed that most of those refugees would never dare risk their lives at sea. But Europe underestimated people’s desperation. Once refugees realised that they stood very little chance of gaining asylum in Europe through the formal channels, they simply forced Europe’s hand by making the journey themselves. Consequently, what could have been an orderly process turned instead into a very disorderly one – and one in which virtually anyone can now reach Europe by mingling onboard a boat of Syrians. The problem is intensified by the absence of a common European asylum policy, which encourages asylum seekers to fan chaotically across the continent in search of the countries that they believe will welcome them most warmly. Meanwhile, by failing to take in a significant number of refugees from Turkey, Europe gave the Turkish government little incentive to protect its own borders better. Brussels promised last week to send £2bn to Ankara, a move that prompted a slight uptick in arrests on the Turkish coast. But the long-term effect remains to be seen – particularly if Turkey (and Jordan and Lebanon) still sees no advantage in giving Syrians the right to work. And they have few reasons to do so unless Europe (and rest of the west) agrees to take in more refugees.





The result is a perfect storm in which refugees have no reason to stay put; Middle Eastern countries have no incentive to prevent them from leaving; and Europe has no means of blocking their path.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence Confirms Terrorists Tried to Enter U.S. as Syrian Refugees by JUDICIAL WATCH December 10, 2015

Individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria have tried to infiltrate the United States through the Obama refugee program that will admit at least 10,000 Syrians, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has confirmed.

The disturbing admission comes amid robust assurances by the administration that the refugees are thoroughly vetted before entering the country. In fact, the State Department publicly guarantees that every Syrian refugee is rigorously screened because "nothing is more important to us than the security of the American people." The agency also addresses public concerns involving resettling Syrian refugees by asserting that it's a "myth" that "all Syrians are dangerous." In fact, "none have been arrested or removed on terrorism charges," the State Department writes in a bulletin. Admission is only granted "after the most extensive level of security screening of any category of traveler to the United States," according to the agency.

Nevertheless, in early October the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Matthew Emrich, admitted during a congressional hearing that there's no way to adequately screen the new arrivals from the war-torn Muslim nation that's a hotbed of terrorism. That's because the Syrian government doesn't have an intelligence database to run checks against so there's no reliable method to accurately verify the identity of the new arrivals. Emrich did ensure during his congressional testimony that "we check everything that we are aware of" and that "we are in the process of overturning every stone." This may not sound all that reassuring to most Americans.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Assistant Director Michael Steinbach has also conceded that the U.S. government has no system to properly screen Syrian refugees. "The concern in Syria is that we don't have systems in places on the ground to collect information to vet," Steinbach said. "That would be the concern is we would be vetting - databases don't hold the information on those individuals. "You're talking about a country that is a failed state, that is - does not have any infrastructure, so to speak. So all of the data sets - the police, the intel services - that normally you would go to seek information don't exist." Judicial Watch reported on these two alarming revelations back in October.

Now we have the ODNI, the broad agency that serves as an umbrella for the The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

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intelligence community and advises the president, verifying that indeed terrorists have tried to exploit Obama's Syrian refugee initiative. The ODNI is composed of more than a dozen spy agencies, including Air Force, Army, Navy, Treasury and Coast Guard intelligence as well as the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This week the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Michael McCaul, released unclassified excerpts of information provided to him by the ODNI regarding possible terrorist exploitation of Syrian refugee flows. It's scary but, unfortunately, not surprising.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has identified "...individuals with ties to terrorist groups in Syria attempting to gain entry to the U.S. through the U.S. refugee program," the ODNI tells the Texas congressman in a document that contains classified information the lawmaker could not make public. The NCTC also wrote this to the congressman: "The refugee system, like all immigration programs, is vulnerable to exploitation from extremist groups seeking to send operatives to the West. U.S. and Canadian authorities in 2011 arrested several refugees linked to what is now ISIL. Early in 2011, Canadian authorities arrested dual Iraqi-Canadian citizen Faruq ‘Isa who is accused

of vetting individuals on the internet for suicide operations in Iraq. The FBI, in May of the same year, arrested Kentucky-based Iraqi refugees Wa'ad Ramadan Alwan and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi for attempting to send weapons and explosives from Kentucky to Iraq and conspiring to commit terrorism while in Iraq. Alwan pled guilty to the charges against him in December 2011, and Hammadi pled guilty in August 2012."The recent attacks in Paris were executed by terrorists who made it to Europe as refugees and the same could feasibly happen in the U.S. But national security has never stopped the Obama administration from assisting potential terrorists to settle in the U.S. Earlier this year JW reported on a "temporary" amnesty the administration is offering to nationals of Yemen, another Islamic Middle Eastern country well known as an Al Qaeda breeding ground.

Under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) illegal aliens from Yemen, headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), get to stay in the U.S. for at least 18 months. In its latest Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department reveals that AQAP militants carried out hundreds of attacks including suicide bombers, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations. The media has also documented this for years with one in-depth report confirming that "Yemen has emerged as the breeding grounds for some of the most high-profile plans to attack the U.S. homeland."

“The Muslims Are Coming!” December 7, 2015 ARUN KUNDNANI, Kundnani is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror and a lecturer at New York University. His articles include “The belief system of the Islamophobes.”He tweeted last night: “Glaring contradiction at heart of #ObamaSpeech: we mustn’t discriminate against Muslims but they’re responsible for stopping terrorism.” He said in a recent piece: “The promise of the ‘war on terror’ was that we would kill them ‘over there’





so they would not kill us ‘over here.’ Hence mass violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia — in the name of peace in the west. The ‘Authorization to Use Military Force’ that the U.S. Congress passed in the days after 9/11 already defined the whole world as a battlefield in the ‘war on terror.’ President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing program a veneer of legality. …

“We all know the ‘war on terrorism’ kills more civilians than terrorism does; but we tolerate this because it is ‘their’ civilians being killed in places we imagine to be far away. Yet colonial history teaches us that violence always ‘comes home’ in some form. …

“For Muslim citizens in western states, these dynamics bring an enormous burden: they are reduced to the false choice of moderate or extremist, good Muslim or bad Muslim. The question that hovers over their very being is whether they will detach themselves from their connections to zones of violence abroad or channel that violence within the west. But this question is not posed directly; it is always displaced onto the plane of culture: do you accept western values? “This framework imposes itself relentlessly on Muslim public expression, rendering suspicious anyone who refuses to engage in rituals of loyalty to western culture. Meanwhile, ISIS casts these Muslims as living in the ‘grey zone’ between western imperialism and the claim of a revived caliphate. “What results is a mutual





reinforcing of the militarized identity narrative on both sides: the jihadists point to numerous speeches by western leaders to support their claim of a war on Islam; and western leaders legitimize war with talk of a ‘generational struggle’ between western values and Islamic extremism.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday 09 Dec from Paris that climate change is contributing to the flight of thousands of people from Syria into the eastern edges of Europe.Kerry acknowledged that while he thinks climate is a factor in the crisis, "it's not the majority" factor. Still, he said, climate seemed to play a role in creating the conditions for a civil war in Syria that is the main cause of the refugee crisis."About a million people plus, I think about a million two to a million five moved because of a massive drought in Syria towards Damascus," he said. "And clearly, that was destabilizing to some degree because you had a massive Sunni population moving in. And as the civil war began to take hold, they began to take sides and had an impact."Kerry then elaborated that the far biggest problem in Syria are basic issues like governance and corruption. He said the Syrian war started when young people protested for the lack of jobs and were met by President Bashar Assad's "thugs.""Well, there's a percentage, Tom," Kerry replied. "I don't have the ability to tell you sort of the full degree."

Regards Cees *** The other crisis we don’t talk about a lot; The refugee crisis in Pakistan

Ever since migrants marched out of Africa and spread out across the globe, migration has been a perennial theme in human affairs. Ambitious individuals looking for business opportunities, persecuted social groups fleeing bigotry, or simply the seasonal nomads looking for greener pastures have travelled to foreign lands and made their temporary or permanent homes there. The ebb and flow of the movement of people depends a great deal on the temperament of the host communities. That is why human rights activists are interested in protecting and promoting the rights of immigrants, who may unwittingly find themselves living in hostile host communities.The treatment of migrants has been the biggest human rights issue in 2015. According to the International Organisation for Migration, more than 750,000 migrants have been detected at the borders of the European Union (EU) between January and November 2015 compared with 280,000 detections for the whole of 2014. The figures do not include those who got in to the EU undetected. Further, more than 2,800 migrants are reported to have died trying to make the crossing this year — altogether 3,406 people have died in the Mediterranean in 2015.In the background of this global refugee crisis, Pakistan too has had its share of Afghan refugees to deal with. However, a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, “What are





you doing here? Police abuses against Afghans in Pakistan” documents a marked increase in abuses against Afghan refugees in the wake of the APS attack in December 2014. The Pakistan government has a legitimate right to regulate refugees and migrants, however, that has to be done in compliance with international and domestic legal standards. While the security challenges faced by Pakistan from terrorism are real and need to be effectively tackled, the recent tragedy in Paris highlights the need for solidarity and that generalisations must be avoided. The persecution, intimidation and scapegoating of all Afghans living in Pakistan on the pretext of fighting terrorism is not the way forward.

The other crisis we don’t talk about a lot;Southeast Asia: a new refugee crisis looming? ROMA RAJPAL WEISS 8 December 2015 2015 will be remembered as the year of mass migration. This year, the world has endured an unprecedented flood of haunting images. The one image we have all seen over and over again is of overcrowded boats packed with desperate people in dire need of supplies. Sometimes they are Syrians, sometimes Iraqis, sometimes Africans. Among the distraught faces are also a number of people who are stateless. In May this year, the world’s short-lived attention turned towards the thousands of migrants stranded in boats across the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, off the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The boats were carrying Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic minority, fleeing from the Burmese state of Rakhine and Bangladesh. Denied citizenship and basic rights in Myanmar, the Rohingyas have been subjected to persecution in their own homeland. According to UN estimates, 94,000 people departed by sea from Bangladesh or Myanmar since 2014, including 31.000 people in the first half of 2015. Over 1,100 migrants have died on sea since 2014. The boats that managed to find their way to shore were turned away and forced to return to sea. Faced with substantial international pressure, the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia subsequently reconsidered their actions and promised aid, announcing that temporary shelter would be provided on the condition that the refugees were resettled by the international community within a year.

Around the same time, mass graves were discovered near human trafficking camps in Thailand and Malaysia. Thai police confirmed that the dead were Rohingyas who had died of starvation or disease while being held by traffickers awaiting ransoms before smuggling them to Malaysia. Moreover, in a recent report Amnesty International documents that at sea too the refugees suffer terrible abuses.The plight of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar is rapidly deteriorating. Just ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections on 8 November 2015, President Thein Sein signed off on a series of laws that restrict religious conversion and interfaith marriage. The bills are a part of the ‘Race and Religion Protection Laws’. This could be seen as the last nail in the coffin for the Rohingyas, who have suffered discrimination for decades.Rohingya candidates have also been barred from running in the upcoming elections and thousands have been struck off the electoral rolls and stripped of their right to vote. It remains to be seen if the National League of Democracy (NLP) party around Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, which won the recent elections by a landslide, will improve policies towards the Rohingya.

ASEAN governments don’t do enough to solve crisisThe large-scale displacement of Rohingyas has become a regional crisis for five directly affected countries – Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Along





with 12 other countries, they participated in a meeting in May this year in Bangkok to discuss “irregular” migration in the Indian Ocean.The recommendations put forward by the meeting included mobilizing resources to support emergency responses, preventing human trafficking, enhancing legal and safe channels of migration among the countries in question, and addressing the root causes of migration in the areas of origin. However, the UNHCR reports that the implementation of these proposals has yet to begin, including the establishment of a joint task force and other urgently needed mechanisms. Five months after the meeting, there has been little news about concrete measures taken.Experts have also criticized the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for failing to establish an effective legal framework for refugees. ASEAN aims to foster economic growth and social progress among its members as well as to protect regional peace and stability. But as Dr. Amy Nethery from Deakin University in Melbourne pointed out in an article in The Diplomat recently, the Rohingya refugee crisis highlights the devastating human effects of the absence of an effective asylum policy.India and China, the wealthiest nations in the region, have remained passive bystanders, eschewing any involvement with Myanmar at a political level despite their substantial economic investments in the country. For a long time, Thailand turned a blind eye to the slave labor that was the backbone of the country’s fishing industry. Human trafficking networks have also been reported to operate with the support and protection of corrupt Thai officials.Moreover, following the 2014 coup, Thailand’s military junta began reviewing many policies of the deposed government of Yingluck Shinawatra and tightened measures against Burmese refugees and other migrants. As the Bertelsmann Transformation Index BTI shows, discrimination and harassment of minorities is frequent in Thailand:“Thailand has not ratified U.N. conventions on refugees, and has forcibly repatriated Burmese and Lao refugees and Rohingya refugees. Migrant workers (estimated to number in the millions), especially women, suffer salary discrimination and on-the-job harassment. Female migrant workers are perhaps the most underprivileged and maltreated social group in Thailand, and are generally ignored by Thai law.”However, in Thailand international pressure and threat of sanctions seems to have done some good. Over the last few months, the country’s administration has cracked down on traffickers and corrupt officials.But Thailand needs international support to combat trafficking. The region urgently needs a firm anti-trafficking policy, and it must coordinate its efforts in order to address the problem in the long term. ASEAN should also intervene by putting pressure on Myanmar because unless the root cause of the problem is addressed, there can be no sustainable solution for the Rohingya refugee crisis. Myanmar must put an end to its discriminatory policies. With the Monsoon season ending, a new wave of refugees is expected to cross the Southeast Asian seas. Amnesty International already warns that a new “sailing season” crisis looms in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea. It’s time to act now.

Regards Cees ***Dec 10, The European migration and refugee crisis could push the UK towards the exit door of the European Union, David Cameron has warned. The Prime Minister said that in the short term headlines about an influx of refugees, as well as the bloc’s economic problems, could cause people to “push Europe away”.In an interview with the Spectator magazine “I think with both the eurozone crisis and the migration crisis, the short term impact is for people to think, ‘oh Christ, push Europe away





from me, it’s bringing me problems’,” he told the magazine. “I think the longer-term reaction might actually be, 'well if they are going to have a single currency and they are on our doorstep and they are going to try and make it work, let’s make sure our relationship with them works and then we have safeguards, not least for our vital financial services industry so that the system doesn’t work against us'.” “The short term reaction can be 'get me out of here', the longer term reaction is 'we must find a better way of working with our partners because we share the same challenges'.”

Dec 10, Athens has become the new center of Europe's migration crisis after receiving more than 2,300 asylum seekers in the space of two days. They had been evicted from the Macedonian border on Wednesday. The mass relocation, coupled with a daily flow of new arrivals from the Greek islands, has left humanitarian aid workers scrambling for space and supplies to house an unprecedented influx of people to the capital. According to Katerina Mamoli, the Athens regional coordinator for Greece's Ministry of Immigration, the city's three refugee camps were at full capacity on Friday afternoon, hosting a combined total of approximately 3,000 people. "This has been happening for five months, it is nothing new," Mamoli told DW. "Now it's a more complicated procedure because we have people from many different countries, so of course there are problems, but we are handling these problems."

Dec 11, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering establishing a mini-Schengen borderless zone after several countries reintroduced border controls and others criticized the poor security of Europe's external borders. The future of the Schengen zone has been thrown into doubt because of the refugee crisis. The original intention was to create a zone within Europe, consisting of 26 countries that have abolished passport and border controls.

Dec 08, Austria has started building a fence along its border with Slovenia, as an EU leader warned the bloc could fall apart with “catastrophic” results. The Austrian army on Monday began erecting a fence 2.2 metres high and 2.3 miles long near the Spielfeld border crossing in the south of the country – the first such internal barrier erected within the passport-free travel zone. Austria insisted the move is merely to channel refugees, rather than halt them. It follows the erection of fences by Hungary on the border with Serbia, and Bulgaria on its border with Turkey. Slovenia has erected a fence on its border with Croatia.

Dec 07, The Norwegian government is paying asylum seekers to return to their home countries as the refugee crisis continues. Thousands of kroner are being offered to each person who voluntarily leaves the country and they also have their flights paid for.Katinka Hartmann, head of the immigration department’s return unit (UDI), said that many of the people arriving from Syria, Iraq, the Middle East and Africa expect to receive protection quickly and cannot wait the months or even years the process can take.“They thought they would have the opportunity to work or take an education – and maybe even to get their family to Norway,” she told NRK television.

Nov, Sweden is introducing border checks for the first time since the start of the refugee crisis, hours after its prime minister asked European counterparts at a high-level migration conference in Malta to do more to help his country and Germany care for refugees arriving on the continent.





Western media are reporting on the Muslim refugee crisis as a humanitarian problem for the West only. But where are the media questions about the huge financial and land resources available in the Arab Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE? Why isn’t the UN forcing these petrodollar-rich Arab Muslim nations to take in their Muslim brothers?




Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-60-Caliphate-Refugee-12

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