Tag Archives: Bombings

U.N. says Syrian forces killed 85 civilians in besieged zone

A Syria Civil Defence member carries a wounded child in the besieged town of Hamoria, Eastern Ghouta, in Damascus, Syria Janauary 6, 2018.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Syrian government forces and their allies have killed at least 85 civilians since Dec. 31 in stepped-up attacks against the besieged rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta, the U.N. human rights chief said on Wednesday.

Conditions in the enclave, the last major rebel-held zone near Damascus and where at least 390,000 civilians have been besieged for four years, amount to a humanitarian catastrophe, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said.

“Residential areas are being hit day and night by strikes from the ground and from the air, forcing civilians to hide in basements,” he said in a statement.

Zeid said warring parties were obliged by law to distinguish between civilians and lawful military targets, and reports from Eastern Ghouta suggested of the attackers were flouting those principles, “raising concerns that war crimes may have been committed.”

Among the dead civilians were 21 women and 30 children, Zeid said.

Backed by Russian strikes, Syrian government forces have escalated military operations against Eastern Ghouta in recent months. Russia rejects accusations that its jets have been targeting civilians.

Zeid said failure to evacuate urgent medical cases from the enclave was also against international humanitarian law.

Armed opposition groups holed up in Eastern Ghouta had also continued to fire rockets into residential areas of Damascus, which he said caused terror among the population.

A rocket landed near a bakery in Old Damascus on Jan. 4, killing a woman and injuring 13 other civilians, he said.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and John Stonestreet)

Bishop says state of emergency not enough to protect Egypt’s Copts

People walk on a street in Egypt’s Southern governorate of Minya, Egypt April 12, 2017. REUTERS/Amina Ismail

By Amina Ismail

MINYA, Egypt (Reuters) – The Egyptian government needs to do more to protect the country’s Coptic Christians from a “wave of persecution” following bombings that killed dozens during the church’s most solemn week of the year, a senior bishop said.

Bishop Macarius, head of the Coptic diocese in Minya, south of Cairo, was skeptical that a state of emergency imposed after the Islamist attacks on Palm Sunday was adequate security and said the church wanted further guarantees.

Copts make up about 10 percent of the 92-million population of mostly Muslim Egypt and are the region’s largest Christian denomination, with a nearly 2,000-year-old history in the country.

The Coptic church in Egypt will mark Easter in a subdued fashion, Macarius said, with the usual prayers and religious observances but none of the celebrations and visits from dignitaries that would normally enliven the day.

“We can consider ourselves in a wave of persecution, but the church has gone through a lot in 20 centuries,” the bearded Macarius told Reuters in an interview.

“There are waves of persecution. It reaches to the highest point like a pyramid and then it goes down again,” the bishop said on Wednesday. “We are at a very high point.”

The bombings that killed 45 in Alexandria and Tanta last Sunday followed a series of sectarian attacks against the Copts and came days before Pope Francis is due to make his first visit to Egypt on April 28-29.

The attacks, claimed by Islamic State, represent a challenge to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has pledged to protect the Copts as part of his campaign against extremism. Sisi visited Coptic Pope Tawadros in Cairo on Thursday to express his condolences.

Although Copts have suffered attacks before from their Muslim neighbors, who have burnt their homes and churches in rural areas, the community has felt increasingly insecure since Islamic State has spread through Iraq and Syria and started targeting Christians.

After the Palm Sunday attacks, Sisi’s government introduced a three-month state of emergency which gives it sweeping powers to act against what it calls enemies of the state.

Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said the step was essential to combating what he called terrorist groups bent on undermining the country.

NO POLICE STATE

With a picture of Sisi hanging on the wall behind him, Macarius said the problem could not be tackled with a crackdown alone.

“Security solutions never succeeded alone. No state in the world should be a police state, either here or elsewhere,” the bishop said. “Emergency all the time makes people nervous.”

Sisi needs advisers who could brief him better on the religious, cultural and security aspects of the crisis, said Macarius, wearing an embroidered black cap.

The state also needed to find those who endorsed the ideology of the suicide bomber, he said, and authorities should devote more effort to monitoring social media.

Not far from where Macarius was speaking, Emad Aziz, 56, sat in his clothes shop counting the cost of the latest assault.

Egyptians usually buy new clothes to mark holidays such as Easter. Not this year, however.

“People are sad, and people buy new clothes when they are happy. The situation is really bad,” Aziz, a Christian, told Reuters. “Why would any Egyptian do this to his country? Is this loyalty to the country? Many people don’t want Egypt to get better.”

He agreed a state of emergency was “not a solution” to the situation of Copts in Egypt – where an economic crisis has severely eroded the living standards of millions.

Security appeared light at the Minya diocese but in Cairo, police have deployed around churches in force, erecting security barriers and metal detectors to screen those attending services in the days leading up to Easter.

In the Cairo district of Shubra, where many Christians live, worshippers filled a service at St Mark’s church, some following proceedings by scrolling the order of service across the screens of their smart phones.

A metal detector had been moved down the street so that any bomber could be stopped before reaching the church.

Romainy, a security guard, said members of the congregation were “sad but not scared”.

Across the street, a chicken seller, her dress flecked with feathers, said people were attending church as they always had.

“I would have gone to the service myself but I have work to do,” she said, declining to give her name.

Not everyone was so relaxed. At a nearby church, a plainclothes police officer told journalists: “It’s a very tense time in Egypt.”

(Additional reporting and writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Suspected Islamic State cell was planning attacks on U.S. forces in Kuwait

An Islamic State flag is seen in this picture illustration taken

KUWAIT CITY (Reuters) – Suspected Islamic State militants arrested in Kuwait and the Philippines were planning to carry out bombings against U.S. military forces in Kuwait, the Gulf country’s al-Rai newspaper reported on Monday.

The suspects were also plotting a suicide attack on a Hussainiya, or Shi’ite Muslim meeting hall, said al-Rai, which has close ties to the security services.

Philippine security forces arrested a Kuwaiti and a Syrian for suspected links to Islamic State on March 25, three months after they arrived in Manila.

Al-Rai said Kuwaiti security forces also arrested a Syrian chemistry teacher suspected of involvement with the plots.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait referred queries to Kuwaiti authorities. Kuwaiti security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kuwait, home to several U.S. military bases, suffered its deadliest militant attack in decades when a Saudi suicide bomber blew himself up inside a packed Shi’ite mosque in June 2015, killing 27 people. Islamic State claimed responsibility.

(Reporting by Ahmed Hagagy Writing by Katie Paul; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Iraqi forces battle Islamic State near Tigris river in Mosul

Iraqi rapid response fighting Islamic State in Mosul

By Isabel Coles

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi special forces battled Islamic State militants in districts near the Tigris river in Mosul on Monday as they sought to bring more of the east of the city back under government control.

The latest clashes occurred in the neighboring Shurta and Andalus districts. At least three Islamic State suicide car bombs targeted Iraqi forces in Andalus. There was no immediate word on any casualties. In an online post, Islamic State said it had carried out a “martyrdom operation” in the area.

Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) said the militants, who seized Mosul in 2014 as they swept across much of northern Iraq, only to since lose much of that terrain to government counter-offensives, were fighting back hard.

“We’ve begun breaching (Shurta) but there was an attack a few moments ago. By the end of the day we’ll make some progress,” CTS spokesman Sabah al-Numan said.

Shurta and Andalus are situated close to the eastern bank of the Tigris, separated only by some woodland, and within sight of the city’s northernmost bridge across the river.

Iraqi forces, which have reached three of the five bridges, say they will soon fully control the eastern bank. They have already taken areas of the river bank further south.

Once the east bank is recaptured, they can begin attacks on western Mosul, which the Sunni Muslim extremist insurgents still hold.

Iraqi forces have seized most of the east in a 3-month-old U.S.-backed campaign to oust the militants from Iraq’s second largest city, Islamic State’s last major Iraqi stronghold. The Tigris bisects Mosul from north to south.

A Reuters cameraman in a southern district along the Tigris said snipers from elite interior ministry combat units were firing across the river at Islamic State positions.

Fighting has intensified since the turn of the year as Iraqi forces have renewed an offensive against the ultra-hardline militants. Troops had got bogged down in late November and December after entering Mosul as IS fighters fought back with car bombs and snipers, and concealed themselves among a civilian population of up to 1.5 million.

MORE PEOPLE MADE HOMELESS

The United Nations said a further 32,000 Mosul residents had fled the city in just over two weeks, bringing the total number of people made homeless in the campaign to retake Mosul to 161,000.

A resident in western Mosul, reached by phone, said Islamic State combatants had stopped people living in the west from crossing the river to the east.

Another resident said a number of IS militants, including senior leaders in western Mosul, had left the city in the direction of Tal Afar, a town toward the Syrian border.

Shi’ite Muslim militias have advanced on IS-held Tal Afar, and linked up with Kurdish fighters nearby in November.

The Mosul offensive, supported by U.S. coalition air power, involves 100,000-strong combined forces of Iraqi troops, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Shi’ite militias.

As IS has lost territory in its Mosul bastion, it has carried out bombing attacks in Baghdad and raids on police and army outposts elsewhere in the country. Since the turn of the year, attacks in Baghdad have killed dozens of people.

New York-based Human Rights watch said on Monday that Islamic State’s bombings, which have targeted crowded markets, amounted to “crimes against humanity”.

“(IS) has routinely carried out devastating attacks that appear designed to inflict maximum death and suffering on ordinary Iraqis,” HRW said in a statement. It urged the Iraqi government to greater assist victims of militant attacks.

(Reporting by Isabel Coles in Mosul, Saif Hameed and John Davison in Baghdad; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Aleppo could fall ‘at any moment’, U.N. reports civilian slaughter

Free Syrian Army fighters fire an anti-aircraft weapon in a rebel-held area of Aleppo, Syria.

By Laila Bassam and Stephanie Nebehay

ALEPPO, Syria/GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations said on Tuesday it had reports that Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi fighters had summarily shot dead 82 children, women and men in recaptured east Aleppo and a military source said the last rebel pocket could fall “at any moment”.

The Syrian army has denied carrying out killings or torture among those captured, and its main ally Russia said on Tuesday rebels had “kept over 100,000 people as human shields”.

The rout of rebels from their ever-shrinking territory in Aleppo has sparked a mass flight of civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a “complete meltdown of humanity”.

Hopes for a last-ditch deal to end the fighting by withdrawing fighters also seemed in doubt, with Moscow rejecting calls for an immediate ceasefire as concern grew over the fate of civilians.

“The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes,” said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. office. “There could be many more.”

France said it had called for an immediate U.N. Security Council meeting over the alleged atrocities to focus on possible war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Behind those fleeing was a wasteland of flattened buildings, concrete rubble and bullet-pocked walls, where tens of thousands had lived until recent days under intense bombardment even after medical and rescue services had collapsed.

Colville said the rebel-held area was “a hellish corner” of less than a square kilometer, adding its capture was imminent.

The Syrian army and its allies could declare victory at any moment, a Syrian military source said, predicting the final fall of the rebel enclave on Tuesday or Wednesday, after insurgent defences collapsed on Monday.

“WANTON SLAUGHTER”

Turkish and Russian officials will meet on Wednesday to examine a possible ceasefire and opening a corridor, a senior Turkish official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

But Moscow, the Syrian government’s most powerful ally, rejected any immediate call for a ceasefire. “The Russian side wants to do that only when the corridors are established,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

A man carries a child with an IV drip as he flees deeper into the remaining rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Syria

A man carries a child with an IV drip as he flees deeper into the remaining rebel-held areas of Aleppo, Syria December 12, 2016. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail

The spokesman for the civil defence force in the former rebel area of Aleppo reckoned rebels controlled an area of less than three sq km. “The situation is very, very bad. The civil defence has stopped operating in the city,” he told Reuters.

A surrender or withdrawal of the rebels from Aleppo would mean the end of the rebellion in the city, Syria’s largest until the outbreak of war after mass protests in 2011, but it is unclear if such a deal can be struck by world powers.

By finally dousing the last embers of resistance burning in Aleppo, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military coalition of the army, Russian air power and Iran-backed militias will have delivered him his biggest battlefield victory of the war.

However, while the rebels, including groups backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies, as well as jihadist groups that the West does not support, will suffer a crushing defeat in Aleppo, the war will be far from over.

“The crushing of Aleppo, the immeasurably terrifying toll on its people, the bloodshed, the wanton slaughter of men, women and children, the destruction – and we are nowhere near the end of this cruel conflict,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in a statement.

“FLEEING IN PANIC”

Aleppo’s loss will leave the rebels without a significant presence in any of Syria’s main cities, but they still hold much of the countryside west of Aleppo and the province of Idlib, also in northwest Syria.

Islamic State also has a big presence in Syria and has advanced in recent days, taking the desert city of Palmyra.

The army and its allies were advancing towards the Sukkari, Tel al-Zarazir and parts of Seif al-Dawla and al-Amariya districts, the Syrian military source said. “When the army regains control of these areas, its operation in the eastern areas of the city… will have finished”.

After days of intense bombardment of rebel-held areas, the rate of shelling and air strikes dropped considerably late on Monday and through the night as the weather deteriorated, a Reuters reporter in the city said.

However, rocket fire pounded rebel-held areas, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, reported. Rebels and government forces still fought at points around the reduced enclave, the Observatory said.

Smoke rises as seen from a government-held area of Aleppo, Syria

Smoke rises as seen from a government-held area of Aleppo, Syria December 12, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

The U.N. children’s agency UNICEF cited an unnamed doctor in Aleppo as saying that many unaccompanied children were trapped in a building that was under attack, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had no knowledge of the incident.

“Artillery shelling is continuing but because of the weather the aerial bombing has stopped. Many of the families and children have not left for areas under the control of the regime because their fathers are from the rebels,” said Abu Ibrahim, a resident of Aleppo in a text message.

Colville said he feared retribution. “In all, as of yesterday evening we have received reports of pro-government forces killing at least 82 civilians, including 11 women and 13 children,” Colville told a news briefing, naming the Iraqi armed group Harakat al-Nujaba as reportedly involved in the killings.

The military official said the rebels were fleeing “in a state of panic”, but a Turkish-based official with the Jabha Shamiya insurgent group in Aleppo said on Monday night that they had established a new frontline along the river.

“The bombardment is not on the frontlines, the greater burden of the bombardment is on the civilians, and this is what is causing a burden on us,” the official said.

Terrible conditions were described by city residents.

Abu Malek al-Shamali, a resident in the rebel area, said dead bodies lay in the streets. “There are many corpses in Fardous and Bustan al-Qasr with no one to bury them,” he said.

“Last night people slept in the streets and in buildings where every flat has several families crowded in,” he added.

Celebrations on the government side of the divided city lasted into Monday night, with fighters shooting rounds into the sky in triumph.

TIDE OF REFUGEES

A daily bulletin issued by the Russian Defence Ministry’s “reconciliation center” from the Hmeimin airbase used by its warplanes, reported that more than 8,000 civilians, more than half of them children, had left east Aleppo in 24 hours.

State television broadcast footage of a tide of hundreds of refugees walking along a ravaged street, wearing thick clothes against the rain and cold, many with hoods or hats pulled tight around their faces, and hauling sacks or bags of belongings.

One man pushed a bicycle loaded with bags, another family pulled a cart on which sat an elderly woman. Another man carried on his back a small girl wearing a pink hat.

At the same time, a correspondent from a pro-Damascus television station spoke to camera from a part of Aleppo held by the government, standing in a tidy street with flowing traffic.

In some recaptured areas, people were returning to their shattered homes. A woman in her sixties, who identified herself as Umm Ali, or “Ali’s mother”, said that she, her husband and her disabled daughter had no water.

They were looking after the orphaned children of another daughter killed in the bombing, she said, and were reduced to putting pots and pans in the street to collect rainwater.

In another building near al-Shaar district, which was taken by the army last week, a man was fixing the balcony of his house with his children. “No matter the circumstances, our home is better than displacement,” he said.

(Reporting By Laila Bassam in Aleppo, Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Lisa Barrington and Tom Perry in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Angus McDowall in Beirut; Editing by Pravin Char and Peter Millership)

Bomb kills father and daughter at school in Thailand’s troubled south

A school bag lies on a street next to the site of a bomb attack at Tak Bai district in the troubled southern province of Narathiwat

BANGKOK (Reuters) – A motorcycle bomb killed a father and daughter in front of a Thai elementary school as parents were dropping off their children on Tuesday, officials said, the latest in a series of attacks in the troubled south.

The bomb went off in Narathiwat province, one of three Muslim-majority provinces in predominantly Buddhist Thailand where a separatist insurgency has been raging since 2004.

The blast killed a man and his five year-old daughter, the army’s Internal Security Operations Command said. The motorcycle was parked opposite the school entrance. Eight people were wounded.

“We suspect this to be the work of people who want to destabilize the situation and cause chaos,” the deputy spokesman of the ISOC, Yuthanam Petchmuang, told Reuters.

The attack occurred less than a month after a wave of bombings in tourist towns, including Hua Hin, Phuket and Surat Thani, killed four people and injured dozens.

Military personnel inspect the site of a bomb attack at Tak Bai district in the troubled southern province of Narathiwat

Military personnel inspect the site of a bomb attack at Tak Bai district in the troubled southern province of Narathiwat, Thailand, September 6, 2016. REUTERS/Surapan Boonthanom

Police say the tourist-town bombings were linked to the southern insurgency and arrested a suspect over the weekend in connection with the attacks.

Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan told reporters on Tuesday that the military government, which took power in May 2014, were making security preparations ahead of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha on September 12.

More than 6,500 people have been killed in insurgency-related violence in the Muslim-majority provinces Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani Province since the conflict began, according to Deep South Watch, which monitors the conflict.

While the conflict has been largely confined to the three southern provinces, analysts say that the spread of violence to other provinces could affect Thailand’s tourism industry.

(Reporting by Aukkarapon Niyomyat and Panarat Thepgumpanat; Writing by Cod Satrusayang; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Merkel cuts short holiday to face refugee policy storm

German Chancellor Merkel addresses a news conference in Berlin

By Paul Carrel

BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel interrupted her vacation on Thursday to face down accusations at home and abroad that her open-door refugee policy allowed Islamist terrorism to take hold in Germany.

Merkel returns to Berlin to hold a news conference at 12 p.m. (07:00 a.m. EDT) after a spate of attacks since July 18 left 15 people dead – including four attackers – and dozens injured.

Two assailants, a Syrian asylum seeker and a refugee from either Pakistan or Afghanistan, had links to Islamist militancy, officials say.

The attacks have burst any illusions in Germany that the country is immune to attacks like those claimed by Islamic State in neighboring France.

Politicians from left and right say Merkel’s refugee policy is at fault, after more than a million migrants entered Germany in the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

“All our predictions have been proven right,” Horst Seehofer, Bavaria’s state premier and a long-standing critic of Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, said on Tuesday. “Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany.”

Seehofer demanded that Merkel’s government adopt tougher security measures and tighter immigration policies.

Merkel has been on holiday in northern Germany since chairing a security meeting on Saturday, leaving Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere – who twice returned from vacation in the last 10 days – to present the government’s response.

Unlike French President Francois Hollande, who on Tuesday visited Normandy where two assailants killed a priest, Merkel has not been to the scene of any of the attacks in Germany – an absence that has raised questions about her leadership.

“How big will the pressure on Merkel be?” asked mass-selling daily Bild. Business daily Handelsblatt said: “Above all, the new situation puts the chancellor in a difficult position.”

Merkel’s popularity, already eroded by the refugee crisis, is likely to suffer again after a temporary boost following Britain’s vote last month to leave the European Union.

After a 27-year-old Syrian with Islamist ties blew himself up in the town of Ansbach on Sunday, Sahra Wagenknecht of the far-left Linke party criticized as “flippant” Merkel’s mantra of “Wir schaffen das”, or “We can do this,” for handling the influx.

“The events of recent days show that the admission and integration of a large number of refugees and migrants is associated with many problems,” Wagenknecht said.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Syrian refugee suicide injuries 12 at German music festival

Police secure the area after an explosion in Ansbach, Germany,

By Andreas Burger

ANSBACH, Germany (Reuters) – A 27-year-old Syrian man denied asylum in Germany a year ago blew himself up on Sunday outside a crowded music festival, injuring 12 people in the country’s fourth violent attack on members of the public in less than a week.

A spokeswoman for the Bavarian state police force said on Monday it was unclear whether the man was an Islamist militant, and that investigations were continuing.

German newspaper Die Welt quoted Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann earlier as saying: “My personal view is that it is unfortunately very likely that a real Islamist suicide attack took place here.”

The incident, on top of three other attacks since July 18 that left 10 people dead and 34 injured, will fuel growing public unease about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy. More than a million migrants have entered Germany over the past year, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

For a graphic on the blast, click on http://tmsnrt.rs/2abQibf

Police said three of the 12 wounded were in a serious condition after the attack in Ansbach, a town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg that has a U.S. Army base.

The dead man had been in treatment after twice before trying to kill himself, though Sunday evening’s explosion was more than just “a pure suicide attempt”, Herrmann told Reuters. An Islamist link could not be ruled out, he told reporters earlier.

“It’s terrible … that someone who came into our country to seek shelter has now committed such a heinous act and injured a large number of people who are at home here, some seriously,” Herrmann told a news conference early on Monday.

“It’s a further, horrific attack that will increase the already growing security concerns of our citizens. We must do everything possible to prevent the spread of such violence in our country by people who came here to ask for asylum.”

Herrmann told Reuters the recent attacks raised serious questions about Germany’s asylum law and security nationwide. He planned to introduce measures at a meeting of Bavaria’s conservative government on Tuesday to strengthen police forces, in part by ensuring they have adequate equipment.

Herrmann said the Syrian asylum seeker arrived in Germany two years ago and had been in trouble with local police repeatedly for drug-taking and other offenses.

He said investigators had yet to determine the motive of the attacks. “Because the rucksack and this bomb were packed with so many metal parts that could have killed and injured many more people, it cannot simply be considered a pure suicide attempt.”

It was the second violent incident in Germany on Sunday and the fourth in the past week, including the killing of nine people by a deranged 18-year-old Iranian-German gunman in the Bavarian capital Munich on Friday.

EXPLOSIVES, METAL PARTS

Herrmann said the man, whose identity has not yet been released, had been living in Ansbach for a year. Although his application for asylum had been denied, he was not in danger of being deported immediately given the civil war in Syria.

One U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators would focus on what the bomber was doing before he left Syria and why he was denied asylum.

U.S. security sources said the bombing did not appear to be a well-planned operation and could well turn out to be the act of another mentally unstable individual.

Herrmann said the man had been denied entry to the Ansbach Open music festival shortly before detonating the bomb outside a restaurant. More than 2,000 people were evacuated from the festival after the explosion, police said.

Ansbach resident Thomas Debinski said people panicked when they heard the explosion, especially after the events of the past week, and it soon became clear that someone had set off a bomb in a rucksack.

Earlier on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee was arrested after killing a pregnant woman and wounding two people with a machete in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart.

“After what just happened in Munich, and today in Reutlingen, what you hear about, it is very disturbing, when you know that such a thing can happen so close to you, in such a small town as Ansbach,” Debinski said.

A week ago a 17-year-old youth who had sought asylum in Germany was shot dead by police after wounding five people with an ax near Wuerzburg, also in Bavaria. He was initially thought to be Afghan but federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has since said he may have been from Pakistan.

Police said neither Sunday’s machete attack nor Friday’s shooting in Munich bore any sign of connections with Islamic State or other militant groups.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Wuerzburg attack as well as the July 14 rampage in the French Riviera city of Nice in which a Tunisian man drove a truck into Bastille Day crowds, killing 84 people.

(Additional reporting by Reuters TV, Thomas Krumenacker and Andrea Shalal in Berlin, Joern Poltz and Jens Hack in Munich, John Walcott in Washington; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Saudi Arabia’s new jihadists; poorly trained but hard to stop

A damaged car is seen after a blast near the U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia's second city of Jeddah July 4, 2016. Picture taken July 4, 2016. Saudi Press Agency/

By Angus McDowall

RIYADH (Reuters) – Technical hitches limited the death tolls in three suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia but the apparent coordination of the blasts suggests jihadis have the tools to sustain their bombing campaign.

Three young Saudis detonated explosive vests near a Shi’ite mosque in Qatif last Monday, killing only themselves, while an attack by another young Saudi suicide bomber at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina killed four policemen.

Before dawn the same day a 34-year-old Pakistani driver had blown himself up in a car park outside the U.S. consulate in Jeddah but only injured two security guards.

“Technically these people are poor. Psychologically they are very poor. Training-wise they are poor,” said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi security expert at the Jeddah-based Gulf Research Centre with ties to the Saudi Interior Ministry.

“Out of five suicide bombers, four killed themselves for nothing.”

Nevertheless, that five individuals were able to build or acquire explosive vests and to plot three attacks on the same day points to a command chain and supply network that presents a formidable threat, security analysts say.

The attacks were not claimed by any group although the government believes Islamic State is responsible after detaining 19 suspects linked to the five attackers.

The coordination but poor training appear to be a sign of Islamic State’s operational model in Saudi Arabia, recruiting would-be jihadists online and managing plots remotely with minimal involvement in training.

An Islamic State recruit inside the kingdom will then seek friends or relatives to join him in an attack, while his handlers in Syria or Iraq suggest a target and help to provide explosives and instructions on how to make a bomb.

That low profile makes it very difficult for the security forces to identify networks or uncover attacks before they are carried out, and Islamic State’s minimal investment in operations means it has little to lose if a plot goes awry.

SLEEPER CELLS

Unlike during an al Qaeda campaign a decade ago there is no network of interconnected cells under a central leadership in Saudi Arabia that can be infiltrated or rolled up by the security services.

“They ask young people to stay in Saudi Arabia and create sleeper cells and this is a very dangerous thing because you do not know who is in a sleeper cell or who is a lone wolf,” a senior Saudi security officer told Reuters last year.

Traces of nitroglycerine were found at the locations of each of last week’s explosions and preliminary investigations suggest the explosives were of a type used by the military.

Police at present believe they came from the same source, said Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Mansour Turki.

“We’re talking about highly organized attacks under a central command (outside Saudi Arabia) and with a chain of supply,” said Alani.

However, he said the lack of an in-country leadership able to carefully select and groom recruits, provide training, centralize bomb making and prepare attackers psychologically meant that many of its operations were ineffective.

The attackers in Jeddah and Medina were both approached by police in car parks near their likely targets because their nervous behavior attracted suspicion. The Jeddah bomber detonated his device too far from the police to kill them.

After the attack in Qatif, police found explosive packs intact, Alani said, indicating that only the detonators had exploded, killing the bombers but not causing wider damage. Turki said he was unable to confirm that some devices did not properly explode.

CRACKDOWN

Saudi Arabia’s success in clamping down on al Qaeda since its 2003-06 attacks has forced Islamic State towards its model of remote control for lone wolves or sleeper cells.

Western diplomats say the kingdom has developed one of the most formidable counter-terrorism operations in the Middle East under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Interior Minister.

The security police, known as the Mubahith, closely monitor Saudis with suspected connections to militants and have detained over 15,000 suspects since the al Qaeda campaign began.

The rate of arrests slowed near the end of last decade but accelerated again after 2011, when Arab Spring uprisings and civil wars across the Middle East impelled thousands of young Saudis to head overseas to join the fight with many returning home after, officials said.

“The Saudis have come up with a successful strategy with dealing with this sort of problem and they have mounted a highly effective public education campaign in the mosques,” said former U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman.

“And second, they have very effective internal security mechanisms that have enabled them to spot people in the process of turning to terrorism.”

Security tactics have been accompanied by softer measures too. So-called “rehab” centers for militants employed Wahhabi clerics to preach that obedience to the king trumped individual decisions to go and fight in defense of Muslims overseas.

Meanwhile, Saudi media were given access to young men who had returned from fighting overseas whose stories of the brutal reality of life among jihadist groups were broadcast in an effort to dissuade others from militancy.

ONLINE RECRUITS

But sympathy towards fellow Sunni Muslims fighting the war in Syria has created a new generation of young Saudi jihadists.

They support the idea of an Islamic State caliphate and view Saudi Arabia’s rulers and the army and clergy which back them as infidels who betray true Islam.

The government crackdown has forced Islamic State has found new ways to reach potential recruits from a distance, for example through online computer games that are hard for security services to monitor.

Mohammed, a 15-year-old in Riyadh, was contacted by jihadists while playing games on his desktop computer and messaging other online players, his father told Reuters earlier this year, asking to keep his anonymity.

He was chatting with someone who started to send him messages about the injustice faced by Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria. “Come play with us for real,” the person said, and sent Mohammed some films showing Islamic State attacks.

His parents blocked the contact. Reuters was not able to confirm who had contacted Mohammed.

“Daesh is trying to be very active in social media, but I think we are winning thanks to their stupid operations. How can you defend somebody who kills innocents in mosques?” said the senior security official.

(Story refiles to add dropped word in paragraph 10.)

(Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Washington; editing by Anna Willard)

Islamic State: Dhaka Cafe slaughter a glimpse of what’s coming

Policemen sneak a look inside the Holey Artisan Bakery and the O'Kitchen Restaurant as others inspect the site after gunmen

By Ruma Paul

DHAKA (Reuters) – Islamic State has warned of repeated attacks in Bangladesh and beyond until rule by sharia, Islamic law, is established, saying in a video last week’s killing of 20 people in a Dhaka cafe was merely a glimpse of what is to come.

Five Bangladesh militants, most from wealthy, liberal families, stormed the upmarket restaurant on Friday and murdered customers, the majority of them foreigners, from Italy, Japan, India and the United States, before they were gunned down.

“What you witnessed in Bangladesh … was a glimpse. This will repeat, repeat and repeat until you lose and we win and the sharia is established throughout the world,” said a man identified as Bangladeshi fighter Abu Issa al-Bengali, in the video monitored by SITE intelligence site.

Bangladesh has rejected the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the Friday attack and blamed it on a domestic militant group.

It was one of the deadliest attacks in Bangladesh, where Islamic State and al Qaeda have claimed a series of killings of liberals and members of religious minorities in the past year. The government has also dismissed those claims.

The IS video began with pictures of recent attacks in Paris, Brussels and Orlando in the United States that the Middle East-based militants have claimed.

The fighter in the video, who spoke in both Bengali and English, said Bangladesh must know that it was now part of a bigger battlefield to establish the cross-border “caliphate” the group proclaimed in 2014.

“I want to tell the rulers of Bangladesh that the jihad you see today is not the same that you knew in the past,” he said from a busy street in the militant group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, in Syria.

“The jihad that is waged today is a jihad under the shade of the Caliphate.”

Though Bangladesh has rejected the IS claim of responsibility for Friday’s attack, police said they were stepping up security in response to the video threat.

“We are taking this issue seriously. All our concerned units are working tirelessly,” said deputy police inspector general Shahidur Rahman.

Police believe the domestic Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State, played a significant role in organizing the band of privileged, educated young men who carried out the attack.

Police have said they are hunting for six members of the group suspected to have helped the attackers.

But foreign security experts say the scale and sophistication of the attack on the Holey Artisan bakery cafe pointed to some level of guidance from international militant groups.

Officials in Dhaka said on Tuesday police commandos had mistakenly shot dead a restaurant chef during the operation to end the siege.

H.T. Imam, a political adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, also said security officials had seen online warnings about an impending attack on Friday and ordered major hotels and restaurants in the neighborhood of the cafe shut.

But they missed the actual target, he said.

(Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Robert Birsel)