Tag Archives: Amaq

Islamic State Profiles the Leadership

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 April 2019

Islamic State flag in front of the main gate of Saddam Husayn’s palace in Tikrit, 5 April 2015 // AFP PHOTO / MOHAMMED SAWAF

A lengthy document—roughly sixty pages and 12,000 words—was published online on 21 February 2019 containing biographies of twenty-seven senior Islamic State (IS) officials, past and more recent. Those bios that are dated were written between October 2018 and the time of publication, with one exception that was written in the summer of 2018. The author claims to be an IS veteran. While longevity is difficult to prove, the fact that the author provides heretofore unseen images of some of the IS leaders suggests that at a minimum he is an IS operative. Continue reading →

Islamic State Newsletter Claims the Trèbes Supermarket Siege

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 April 2018

Arnaud Beltrame, Radouane Lakdim (image sources: one, two)

In Trebes, a small town of 5,000 people in southern France near Carcassonne, at 11 a.m. on 23 March 2018, a 25-year-old Moroccan-born man, Radouane Lakdim, walked into a “Super U” supermarket and opened fire, killing two people immediately, an attendant and a customer.

An hour earlier, Lakdim had hijacked a car on the outskirts of Carcassonne, killing the passenger by shooting him to death and seriously wounding the driver.

Lakdim then drove five miles to Trebes, appeared to stop outside a military barracks, before stopping outside a riot police centre and shooting at a group of four officers from 200 yards away, seriously injuring one. Continue reading →

Islamic State Claims the Port Authority Attack in America

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 December 2017

In the 110th issue of the Islamic State’s newsletter, Al-Naba, released on 15 December 2017, the jihadists claimed responsibility for the attempted pipe bomb attack at the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan, New York City, on 11 December 2017. The claim appeared on page 11 of 12 in a section entitled, “Events of the Week”. The text of the claim is reproduced below. Continue reading →

Islamic State Newsletter Adds to Claim of Las Vegas Massacre

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 October 2017

Al-Naba 100, page 2

In Las Vegas, just after 22:00 Pacific Time on 1 October [6:00 on 2 October, British time], 64-year-old Stephen Paddock fired about 1,100 rounds over a ten-minute period from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel at the crowd gathered on the Las Vegas Strip for the Route 91 Harvest music festival (the country singer, Jason Aldean, was playing at the time). When the shooting stopped, fifty-eight people had been murdered—making this the deadliest mass-shooting in American history—and 546 people had been injured. Paddock was found dead in the hotel room, having apparently shot himself.

The Islamic State claimed the Las Vegas attack via Amaq on 2 October, and soon released a fuller statement naming the killer as “Abu Abd al-Bir al-Amriki”. This followed the previous pattern laid down by IS when it claims its foreign terrorist attacks. There is as yet no definitive evidence of Paddock being motivated by jihadist ideology, nor of contact between Paddock and IS, and U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement have been quick to claim that such links do not exist.

In the 100th edition of Al-Naba, IS’s weekly newsletter, IS added details to its claims, page three contained a brief article adding details to IS’s claims about Las Vegas. A rough translation of the Naba article is reproduced below. Continue reading →

The Islamic State’s Fourth Attack in Britain in 2017

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 September 2017

“Bucket bomb” on the Parsons Green trube (image source)

At 8:20 on 15 September 2017, a bomb detonated in a rear carriage of a tube train at Parsons Green station in London. The passengers on the packed, rush-hour train described a flash “fireball” that travelled down the train. Thirty people were injured, some horribly burned, but there were no fatalities and the main explosive clearly did not detonate. The attack was claimed by the Islamic State (IS). Continue reading →

Coalition Kills Two Islamic State Weapons Engineers in Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 September 2017

The U.S.-led international coalition launched airstrikes into eastern Syria on 4 September 2017 that killed “two senior ISIS leaders” involved in “weapons engineering activities” and the external operations wing of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), according to a statement from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) yesterday.
Continue reading →

The Coalition Targets Islamic State Propagandists and External Terrorists

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 July 2017

Baraa Kadek (Riyan Meshal) [image source]

The United States announced on 27 July that it had killed seven “senior ISIS propagandists and facilitators in Iraq and Syria” since late March. The removal of these terrorists takes from the Islamic State “extensive experience and training, and degrades ISIS’s ability to plan and conduct attacks on civilian targets in Iraq and Syria, as well throughout the region and in the West,” U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said. The geographical pattern of the strikes that killed these men allow some conclusions about IS’s current situation on the ground, and the information provided by CENTCOM underlines IS’s will and capacity, even as it loses its caliphate, to conduct external operations. Continue reading →

The Fall of Islamic State’s Caliphate Won’t End the Foreign Attacks

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 July 2017

Screenshots from the bay’a-martyrdom videos of: Riaz Khan Ahmadzai (Muhammad Riyad), Anis Amri, Mohammad Daleel (source)

The Islamic State (IS) has escalated a campaign of global terrorism over the past few years, exactly as it was losing overt control of territory. In 2016, IS consolidated a model of guiding and claiming attacks in the West and elsewhere via is media channel, Amaq. The outlines of this have long been known. Now there is significant new detail thanks to a four part reporting series in the German newspaper BILD by Björn Stritzel, who contacted Amaq and posed over many months—in consultation with Germany security agencies—as a potential terrorist. Continue reading →

The Islamic State’s Newsletter on the London Bridge Attack and Melbourne Siege

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 June 2017

Al-Naba 84

The eighty-forth edition of Al-Naba (The News), released by the Islamic State on 8 June 2017, included a section on the terrorist attacks in Britain, on London Bridge, on 3 June, and in Australia, the siege of the apartment block in Melbourne, on 5 June. Continue reading →

Islamic State Attacks Have Sown Division in France, Marine Le Pen Would Sow More

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Published at The Telegraph

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 April 2017

Security forces stand guard after attack in Paris, 20 April 2017 (CREDIT: ETIENNE LAURENT/EPA)

In Paris last night a gunman parked his car, stepped out, and opened fire on a police van outside a Marks & Spencer’s on the Champs Élysées. One policeman was murdered; two were wounded. A female tourist was also injured. The attacker was killed by police as he tried to flee and continue his rampage. Within two hours, the Islamic State (ISIL) had claimed the attack via its Amaq News Agency, and, rather unusually, had named the killer: “Abu Yusuf al-Baljiki”.

It has been widely reported that “Abu Yusuf the Belgian” is really Karim Cheurfi the Frenchman, a 39-year-old imprisoned for fifteen years after being convicted for three counts of attempted murder in 2001. Notably, two of his intended victims were police officers. French media has reported that Cheurfi was briefly arrested on 23 February after expressing an intent to kill law-enforcement officials, but released due to lack of evidence; the Interior Ministry refused to comment. Continue reading →