Homeland Security News

Islamist extremist social media lit up with celebratory messages as the Taliban cemented its control over Afghanistan this weekend, raising concerns that a weakened al Qaeda and other terrorist groups could stage a comeback in the wake of the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, said they are likely to reassess their timeline for how rapidly al Qaeda’s core group, ravaged by years of U.S. counterterrorism operations, could reconstitute itself. The longstanding intelligence assessment had been 18 months to two years after an American military withdrawal, current and former U.S. officials said.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks conducted by al Qaeda, a counterterrorism mission that President Biden said was completed long ago.

But jihadist groups saw the stunningly rapid sweep to power of the Taliban—which harbored al Qaeda before 2001 and hasn’t publicly broken with it—as validating their strategy of patience, analysts who follow their online postings said.

Read more: Wall Street Journal

A Michigan man who pleaded guilty to conspiracy for trying to help his brother leave the country to join the Islamic State group has been sentenced to serve more than eight years in prison.

His brother has been sentenced to serve six and a half years in prison.

Mohamud Abdikadir Muse was sentenced to serve 98 months in prison for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State group the United States Attorney’s Office Western District of Michigan said in a Thursday release.

He was arrested in January of 2019 at the Gerald R. ford International Airport when his younger brother, Muse Muse, was trying to fly to Mogadishu, Somalia in order to join the Islamic State.

Read more: NBC 8 (Grand Rapids, MI)

United States Attorney Andrew Birge announced today that Muse Muse, age 22, from Lansing Michigan, has been sentenced to 78 months in federal prison for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

ISIS is a designated foreign terrorist organization. The FBI had been tracking Muse’s activity on the belief that he may attempt to join ISIS. Then, on Jan. 21, 2019, special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and members of its Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Muse Muse at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, after he checked in for a flight that would eventually take him to Somalia, with the goal of joining ISIS.

Shortly thereafter, his brother Mohamud Muse and cousin Mohamed Haji were arrested as co-conspirators.

Following his arrest Muse Muse adopted a handwritten statement prepared for him by an FBI special agent that summarized his interest in ISIS and end goal regarding his support of ISIS.

Read more: WILX

Polish authorities are preparing measures to confront violence inspired by anti-vaccine groups after an inoculation center was set ablaze overnight in a town in the country’s southeast.

Health Minister Andrzej Niedzielski, who traveled to the site in the town of Zamosc on Monday, called the deed an “act of terror” against the state and “a clash of civilization against barbarity.”

The incident is another example of the anti-vax movement becoming bolder in its attempts to undermine Poland’s inoculation campaign. Videos have spread on social media in recent days of people verbally abusing paramedics and vaccination center workers from other Polish towns.

Poland has vaccinated nearly 17.5 million of its citizens, which authorities say is short of the goal needed to achieve herd immunity. The government hopes vaccinations will help reduce the scale of hospitalizations during a new wave of the pandemic that is expected to emerge in the coming weeks.

Read more: Bloomberg

Islamist terrorist organisations including al-Qaeda, Islamic State (IS),and their supporter networks are increasingly exploiting open-source software to create “cloud platform” websites to store their content. These are password-protected websites that enable terrorist actors to share content via URLs. Many of these contain an extensive and regularly updated archive of terrorist material.

This trend is likely due in part to a broad improvement in moderation of terrorist content by mainstream tech platforms. Cloud platforms currently provide terrorist actors with a comparatively stable, centralised location in which to store their material. This is because the process of taking down cloud platforms is extremely challenging. As a result, content stored on cloud platforms canstay active without significant threat of being removed. Mostcloud platforms monitored by Tech Against Terrorism exploit open-source software developed by Germany-based company NextCloud.

Read more: Homeland Security Today