Homeland Security News

From the shores of Lake Chad, Islamic State’s West African ally is on a mission: winning over the local people.

Digging wells, giving out seeds and fertilizer and providing safe pasture for herders are among the inducements offered by Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA), which split from Nigeria’s Boko Haram in 2016.

“If you are a herder, driver or trader, they won’t touch you - just follow their rules and regulations governing the territory,” said a herder, who moves cattle in and out of ISWA territory and whose identity Reuters is withholding for his safety. “They don’t touch civilians, just security personnel.”

The campaign, which has created an economy for ISWA to tax, is part of the armed insurgent group’s push to control territory in northeastern Nigeria and in Niger.

Read more:  Reuters

More than 40 members of the Tuareg community have been killed in two separate attacks by suspected jihadists in north-eastern Mali, officials say.

The attacks happened in the remote Menaka region on Thursday and Friday.

They are believed to have been carried out in revenge after Tuareg attacks on jihadist bases in recent weeks.

Much of north-eastern Mali is lawless despite a 2015 peace deal between the government and Tuareg rebels and the presence of an international force.

Tuaregs - historically nomadic Berber people - seized parts of the region, including the historic city of Timbuktu, in 2012.

But the area was later taken over by Islamist fighters linked to al-Qaeda, until they were removed in a French-led military operation in 2013.

Mali has seen four uprisings since it won independence from France in 1960.

Tuareg and Arab groups in the north-east - an area locals call Azawad - have said they are being ignored by the more prosperous south.

Source:  BBC News

One morning last April, in the 16th month of a grueling hostage negotiation, a top Qatari diplomat sent a text message to his boss to complain about a brazen robbery being perpetrated against his own country.

Qatar had entered secret talks to free 25 of its citizens from kidnappers in Iraq, yet the bargaining had turned into a kind of group shakedown, the official said, with a half-dozen militias and foreign governments jostling to squeeze cash from the wealthy Persian Gulf state.

“The Syrians, Hezbollah-Lebanon, Kata’ib Hezbollah, Iraq — all want money, and this is their chance,” Zayed bin Saeed al-Khayareen, Qatar’s ambassador to Iraq and chief negotiator in the hostage affair, wrote in the message. “All of them are thieves.”

And yet, the Qataris were willing to pay, and pay they did, confidential documents confirm.

In the April text message and in scores of other private exchanges spanning 1½ years, Qatari officials fret and grouse, but then they appear to consent to payments totaling at least $275 million to free nine members of the royal family and 16 other Qatari nationals kidnapped during a hunting trip in southern Iraq, according to copies of the intercepted communications obtained by The Washington Post.

Read more:  The Washington Post