Homeland Security News

Police in China's restive northwest foiled a terror plot by detaining five suspects and seizing 1.8 tons of bomb-making materials, the regional government said Tuesday, five days after a market bombing in the region killed dozens of people.  Authorities in the Hotan section of the Xinjiang region destroyed two bomb-making workshops in the latest raid on Monday, the regional government said on its official Tianshan Net website.

The Muslim region, home to the Turkish-speaking ethnic minority of Uighurs, has seen rising violence that China blames on secession-seeking terrorists. Uighurs complain of restrictive and discriminatory policies and practices by the government and the dominant ethnic majority of Han Chinese.

Read more:  ABC News

The leader of Libya's Ansar al-sharia militant group in Benghazi warned the United States on Tuesday against interfering in the country's crisis or face worse than their conflicts in Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Ansar al-Sharia is listed as a foreign terrorist organisation by Washington and it was accused of orchestrating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in which U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died.

Mohamed Zahawi, head of the Benghazi brigade of Ansar al-Sharia, accused the U.S. government of backing renegade former general Khalifa Haftar, who has begun a self-declared campaign to purge Libya of Islamist militants.  "We remind America, if they intervene, of their defeats in Afganistan, Iraq and Somalia, because they would face in Libya something much worse," he said in a statement. "It was America who urged Haftar to turn the country towards war and bloodshed."

Source:  Reuters

Fawzi Ayoub was a hijacker, international terrorist operative and senior member of Hezbollah. He was also a naturalized Canadian citizen, but on Monday Lebanese media reported he was dead, killed in an ambush by Syrian rebels.  The 48-year-old former Toronto supermarket employee, who rose through the ranks of Hezbollah despite his tendency for getting arrested before completing his missions, was declared a “martyr” on a Facebook page filled with photos of him in battle fatigues.

The Lebanese-Canadian had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list since 2009, when he was indicted for using a false American passport to enter Israel “for the purpose of conducting a bombing” for Hezbollah, according to his wanted notice.  While several Canadian jihadists have died over the past year while fighting to topple President Bashar Al-Assad, Ayoub is the first known to have lost his life defending the dictator. He was reportedly killed in Aleppo on Sunday by the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.  His death, which Lebanese news outlets said had been announced by Hezbollah, is further proof the radical Shiite group is suffering mounting losses in Syria, where it has deployed hundreds of fighters to prop up a neighboor and key ally.

Read more: National Post (Canada)

A shocking and frightening new video produced and released by a terrorist group formerly associated with al Qaeda is showcasing horrific killing sprees in Iraq deliberately recorded on camera.  "The Clanging of the Swords” is a graphic and disturbing film made by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.  Running over an hour, it displays bombings, executions, kidnappings, beheadings and more.

Analysts say the video proves ISIS - a group so extreme that al Qaeda has disowned it - is becoming an even deadlier threat, and they wonder who is providing it with weapons, and the equipment needed to produce the videos.  "This is funded," says Nadia Oweidat, a Middle East Analyst.  "This is geopolitics. There is money behind it.  It's not just idiots; these idiots have somebody controlling them and providing them with equipment that is very expensive.  You can't just get it in a cave."

A far cry from the grainy out-of-focus terrorism videos that have proliferated in the past decade, this one has glossy camerawork and high-level production techniques – as if these terrorists had taken cues from Hollywood movies like "The Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty" in order to maximize the terror for viewers.

The opening shots are filmed using an aerial camera flying over Fallujah. Later, you see a brazen daytime raid on a small Iraqi Army base. Once the militants have taken it over, cameras enter the base and show the gruesome aftermath – numerous dead soldiers.  One frightening sequence shows ISIS fighters disguised as Iraqi soldiers setting up fake checkpoints, and looking for members of Iraq's military. One man, accused of just that, is hauled off and executed.

Read more: CNN

United States Special Operations troops are forming elite counterterrorism units in four countries in North and West Africa that American officials say are pivotal in the widening war against Al Qaeda’s affiliates and associates on the continent, even as they acknowledge the difficulties of working with weak allies.  The secretive program, financed in part with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.

The goal over the next few years is to build homegrown African counterterrorism teams capable of combating fighters like those in Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that abducted nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls last month. American military specialists are helping Nigerian officers in their efforts to rescue the girls.  “Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to be doing,” said Michael A. Sheehan, who advocated the counterterrorism program last year when he was the senior Pentagon official in charge of Special Operations policy.  Mr. Sheehan now holds the distinguished chair at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

As the United States military seeks to extend its counterterrorism reach in Africa, President Obama is expected to appear at West Point on Wednesday to emphasize a foreign policy that would avoid large land wars, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and instead stress the training of allied and partner nations to battle militants on their own soil.

Read more: NY Times