History of Terrorism: From Russia With Hate

By Peter Bergen

The news that the Istanbul attack was carried out by a Russian and citizens of Central Asian states that were once part of the Soviet Union might surprise those who have hitherto seen the group as a collection of mostly Arab fighters with a large Western European contingent.

Yet in fact, Russian citizens — many of whom are Chechens or Dagestanis from the largely Muslim North Caucasus region of Russia — are the largest group of foot soldiers in ISIS from a non-Muslim majority country, and they have played key roles in the group.

According to Turkish officials the attack at Istanbul airport was carried out by terrorists from Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan and was planned by ISIS’s leadership. The Soufan Group, a New York-based intelligence consulting firm that tracks “foreign fighters” who have joined ISIS, estimates that 2,400 Russians have traveled to Syria. It placed the number of fighters from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan at 500 each.

In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin estimated the number of fighters who had left for Syria from Russia and the former Soviet republics at 5,000 to 7,000.

Individuals from the former Soviet republics have risen to the leadership ranks in ISIS. The most well known is Omar Shishani, killed in an American airstrike earlier this year, was an ethnic Chechen who had a $5 million U.S. reward on his head at the time of his death. He was the group’s commander in northern Syria and he also oversaw the prison in ISIS’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa, in which the terrorist group held foreign hostages.

Read the Remainder at CNN

 

History of Terrorism: Bullet Scars as Uganda Remember Israeli Entebbe Raid in 1976

Four decades later, now-friendly countries to jointly mark daring IDF hostage rescue operation in sign of reconciliation

ENTEBBE, Uganda (AFP) — Skimming above the choppy waves through the dark the four planes swooped in low over Lake Victoria, packed with over 200 elite Israeli commandos on a daring raid to free hijacked hostages.

Landing soon after midnight at Uganda’s Entebbe airport on July 4, 1976, it took the paratroopers less than an hour to storm the base and free over 100 passengers aboard an Air France plane, an operation that has gone down in special forces legend. The plane had been hijacked a week earlier on June 27.

Four decades later, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to visit Uganda for the anniversary not only to mark the operation and boost now-friendly ties between Uganda and Israel, but also to pay a deeply personal tribute.

The commando leader, the only Israeli soldier killed in the raid, was his older brother, 30-year old Lieutenant-Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu.

As an operation, it was “a difficult one,” remembered Amir Ofer, then a sergeant major and now a businessman, visiting Uganda earlier this month as part of preparations to mark the anniversary.

Read the Remainder at Times of Israel

 

Cold War Files: 10 Sinister Groups Behind the Cold War’s Craziest Conspiracy

In 1972, a fascist named Vincenzo Vinciguerra detonated a car bomb in the Italian town of Peteano. As Vinciguerra had planned, the attack was initially blamed on left-wing extremists. Years later, Vinciguerra explained his motives: “Our movement is pledged to target . . . ordinary people, to create conditions of anarchy. The resulting state of fear will mobilize public support for a strong regime, even at the cost of democracy. We call it the “strategy of tension.”

In fact, Vinciguerra’s bomb was just one of a number of terrorist attacks carried out by a bewildering array of right-wing movements and front groups with the evident support of the Italian security services. The aim was to undermine support for democracy and discredit the communists and anarchists who would be blamed for the atrocities. The exact details of this conspiracy remain shadowy, but the basic outline of the strategy of tension is now clear, as are the names of a number of the groups involved.

10. The OAS

 

In the early 1960s, a mysterious French terrorist arrived in Portugal. His real name was Yves Guillou, but he usually went by a pseudonym, most commonly Yves Guerin-Serac. He had chosen Portugal because he admired its authoritarian government, which was waging a bloody war against the independence movements in its African colonies. Tens of thousands would die before the fascists were overthrown in 1974 and the new government agreed to independence for Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau.

This African bloodshed appealed to Guerin-Serac, who had been radicalized during France’s own disastrous colonial conflict in Algeria. Marked by horrendous brutality on both sides, the Algerian War killed hundreds of thousands and badly destabilized France. But the large European population in Algeria was determined to preserve the status quo and was horrified when President Charles de Gaulle announced a referendum on the issue, which produced large majorities for independence in both Algeria and France.

In response to this democratic betrayal, a group of right-wing Franco-Algerians formed the OAS (Organisation de l’Armee Secrete), which virtually took control of the European enclaves in Algiers and Oran and launched a series of terrorist attacks in France and Algeria, including multiple attempts to assassinate de Gaulle. As independence approached, the OAS oversaw a “frenzy of violence,” killing at least 2,360 people in the 15 months up to June 1962.

A decorated veteran of 1950s wars in Korea and Indochina, Guerin-Serac became an enthusiastic member of the OAS. But he wasn’t ready to give up terrorism after the organization collapsed in 1962: “The others have laid down their weapons, but not I. After the OAS, I fled to Portugal to carry on the fight and expand it to its proper dimensions—which is to say, a planetary dimension.”

9. Aginter Press

In Portugal, Guerin-Serac founded Aginter Press, supposedly a news agency along the lines of Reuters or the Associated Press. But this was simply a cover to allow Aginter’s operatives to travel freely. In reality, Aginter was a fascist paramilitary organization aimed at fighting communism around the globe. The group was openly hostile to democracy, which it viewed as weak, and developed the belief that false-flag terrorist operations could be a useful way of undermining the left and strengthening the extreme right.

An internal document summed up Aginter’s key beliefs:

The first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favoring the installation of chaos. [ . . . ] In our view, the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of communist and pro-Chinese activities. [ . . . ] Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups and obviously we will have to tailor our actions to the ethos of the milieu—propaganda and action of a sort which will seem to have emanated from our communist adversaries.

Read the Remainder at List Verse

RKBA News: Will Gun Control Stop Terror Attacks?

As a supplement to this article, check out this headline from Jihad Watch: During Ramadan in France, Muslim plans KNIFE and MACHETE Jihad Attacks on Tourist,

 This combined with the over 100 Palestinian knife attacks on Israeli civilians and military this year only verifies the authors statement below and something I have been saying for some time: INTENT by these Terrorist is the operative word we need to focus on, not AVAILABILITY of Weapons. -SF

 

You’re angry. I get it. I’m angry too. The latest terrorist attack in Orlando is unbelievably tragic, but not at all surprising. The only thing surprising is that terrorist attacks like this have been this long in coming.

The signs have been there forever, and I’m not even counting dramatic Al-Qaeda type operations like 9/11. More recently, we’ve seen a series of smaller scale attacks right here at home. Fort Hood. Oklahoma. Garland, Texas. Chattanooga Recruiting Stations. San Bernardino. David French writes a compelling piece about this, and you can read it here.

Hold on to your shorts, because there’s a lot more attacks like this one on the way, and probably soon. They’ll have nothing to do with our gun laws. When someone out there is intent on killing, there are an infinite number of ways to do that. Just last night, an ISIS-inspired attacker killed a Paris police captain and his wife with a knife. Intent is the operative word, not availability.

Consider a few examples:

• The San Bernardino terrorists were running a bomb factory. In California.
• Ever heard of the Happy Land Nightclub in the Bronx? While the motivation was different, he killed 87 people there with nothing more than a can of gasoline.
• Or how about the Monterrey Casino narco-terrorist attack? Again, terrorists used nothing more than a few cans of gas to kill 61 people.
• We seem to have already forgotten the Boston Marathon attack. A couple of homemade pressure-cooker bombs killed three and wounded 264. Two hundred and sixty-four. Only thanks to the ineptness of those terrorists was the death toll that low.
• Then, of course, there were the attacks in Paris, arguably one of the gun control capitals of the free world. 130 dead and 368 wounded. And Charlie Hebdo. 11 dead and 11 wounded.
• Don’t forget Mumbai, another bastion of near total gun control. 164 dead and 308 wounded.

Sadly, I could go on, and on, and on. Do you know what all these attacks have in common? Either guns were not used, or the attacks occurred in areas of heavy firearm regulation or outright restriction.

The point here is that determined attacks like these aren’t about guns or no guns. They’re about determined attacks. That’s the key word – determined.

My wife made an observation that I wholeheartedly agree with. In response to situations like this, people need something tangible to latch onto. Subconsciously they know the cause of the problem is really, really hard to solve. In a fear and shock-induced state, they need something corporeal to grasp so they can begin to process. It’s in our nature to latch onto a way to just fix it, thereby bringing some peace and hope that it won’t happen again.

If you recorded the last couple of days of news and played it back later when emotions settled, you’d be shocked at the knee-jerk solutions that normally rational people called for. Secret government lists. Confiscation. Arrest and punishment without due process. Guilt by investigation, not prosecution. Our willingness to drop all pretense of our most cherished principles when driven by fear is truly stunning.

The problem is that quick and easy tactical fixes don’t work – especially those that are based on half-baked understanding of the issues and driven by fear and emotion. That’s not my opinion or theory; one only has to look back in time to see that proven out again and again. Coming to rational, and most importantly effective, solutions requires that people step away from the temptations of knee-jerk reactions and think.

The even more horrible thing about ill-conceived, fear-based “fixes” is that they are dangerous. The ill-conceived “gun free zone” “fix” has directly CAUSED the needless deaths of untold numbers of innocent people. Murderers and terrorists seek out these “fixed” areas exactly because of that stupid sign on the door. That’s why I’m so passionate about this. It’s not because “I like guns.” It’s because my heart breaks when people die needlessly because of stupid, ineffective, and emotional “fixes” that cause more needless death than they prevent. If you’re going to get actively involved in fixing problems, great! Just don’t do it from a position of emotion and fact-free opinion. If you do, you’ll be partly responsible for more needless death.

Zeroing in on the tools that terrorists use won’t help future attacks any more than it helped the victims of Paris and Mumbai – two places that implemented incredible levels of the tactical fixes that people are now suggesting. Does the conceptual approach of limiting “tools” work any better when trying to solve drunk driving? Would low capacity beers reduce the number of drunk driving murders? How about making crack and heroin illegal? If we just outlaw easily available means of distribution that’ll cause addicts to stop using it, right? The same conceptual plan worked well during the prohibition, right? In all of these examples, the root cause – desire – is ignored.

There’s a reason I chose examples of drunk driving murders and drug abuse. Those are both scenarios where the offending “product” has no societal value. Banning those substances wouldn’t have a boomerang effect and cause more harm as a result.

Guns are a different story. While many gun control proponents leap to the assumption that guns only impact one side of the balance sheet – they only cause bad things – they neglect to factor in the positive impact. When you ban the ability for law-abiding people to defend themselves, you also remove all the cases where someone used a gun to defend against crime or attack. It’s intellectually dishonest not to factor that into the overall cost-benefit math. Depending on whose numbers you read, that happens between one and two million times a year. Wave the magic wand and figure out how much death and injury occurs if you remove the tools for self-defense from law-abiding citizens.

While few will want to hear this, there was nothing magic or incredibly destructive about the weapons used in the Orlando terrorist attack. There weren’t any military machine guns involved here. Just a well-planned plot and a guy with a rifle. A regular, everyday rifle. Against a defenseless and captive victim community, a determined attacker can inflict unbelievable harm in minutes using the most basic of weapons. In this case, he had hours.

Only because details matter, there’s nothing special about a semi-automatic rifle. It shoots once each time you pull the trigger, and as far as rifles go, the one used in Orlando is on the lower end of the power scale. People get worked up about the theoretical issues of magazine capacity, but if you go back and look at what actually happened in previous terrorist killing events, regardless of the type of weapon used, all of them could have been completed by the murderer, to equal effect, using an 1860’s-era lever-action rifle. People won’t want to hear this, but the actual rates of fire and magazine issues were simply not a factor. Rarely have one of these sick killers fired more than 10 rounds from a magazine. Rarely has their rate of fire exceeded 12 rounds per minute. We can assume and suppose hypotheticals, but they’re just that. “Yeah but imagine if…” arguments. If you really are serious about solving the hard problems, you have to take an objective look at what actually happened in previous events.

My point isn’t to get nitty gritty or defend certain models of guns, it’s to point out that what has been the determining factor in every one of the prior cases has not been the specifics of the equipment. I has been the will, determination, and planning (usually of location) of the murderer. That’s exactly why I’m so focused on the fact that nothing gets fixed until we look to the root cause – the people willing to do these horrible things.

Since the beginning of people, there has been and always will be a minority percentage who are willing to inflict harm on others. That won’t ever change, so the only remaining question is what do we do about it.

There’s a lot we can do starting with getting rid of these attractive targeted killing zones. Every single mass murder case since the 1950’s (except two) has one thing in common – a sign on the door (literally or legally) says “Hey, the people in here aren’t able to protect themselves.” That’s an invitation to terrorists, mass murderers, or whatever you want to call them. Time after time, in the post-event analysis, it comes to light that the murderers chose their location specifically for the reason that they knew they would have a period of time of total domination with no opposition.

I’m all for cracking down on people with documented (“documented” is the key word) histories and records. If you’re convicted of a crime, you already don’t pass the FBI background check. However, if someone thinks bad thoughts but never crosses paths with law enforcement, there’s no way to “catch them” with a background check, which is exactly why you also have to plan for stopping these people in their tracks. Wouldn’t it be even better if that plan could also discourage the perpetrators from even trying?

There are 13 million “good guys and girls” with concealed carry permits across the US, and that number is growing rapidly. These people jump through hoops to obtain their permits and statistically are the most law abiding demographic measurable. During the past 30 years, they’ve demonstrated themselves to commit crimes at a rate multiple times less than that of active duty police officers. Yes, while I have limitless respect for our law enforcement community, you read that right.

One or two people like this, who aren’t prohibited from carrying in a whole slew of places can put a stop to these things before they become tragic events. In Florida, about eight people out of every 100 have a concealed carry permit. In this nightclub crowd of 320, that means 25 people may have left their gun in the car due to the “gun free zone” legal status of that space.

Concealed carry in a bar? Well, yes. In bars, you’ll find designated drivers who choose to stay sober in order to drive their friends home. What’s so hard to believe about the most law-abiding group of people measurable choosing not to drink when they carry? After all, it’s against the law to drink and carry in most, if not all, places, and concealed carry permit holders have proven they follow laws.

Would an armed citizen have stopped this? Maybe or maybe not, but they certainly would have disrupted it. This terrorist had three hours of complete and total dominance over his victims. One person can disrupt that plan. One person. That person may or may not succeed, or even survive, but that person has the opportunity to provide disruption, potentially changing everything about the outcome. While it would be great if they were, that person doesn’t need to be a DeltaNinjaSeal. As Larry Correia explains, they only need to be a speed bump and provide delay and disruption. That makes all the difference and may even end the event altogether.

For an example of the power of disruption, look up Clackamas Mall, Oregon. You won’t hear much about it on the news simply because it never became a mass tragedy. One citizen with a pistol disrupted the plan of a mass murderer – enough to cause him to flee to a stairwell and shoot himself. There are lots of cases just like this that don’t make NBC news exactly because they never became mass tragedies, simply because of disruption.

Setting aside the incredible impact of disruption, these attacks all end exactly the same way – every single time. Good guys arrive with guns. If the thing that immediately stops a bad guy is the arrival of a good guy with a gun (every single time) I’d prefer to have the good guy already there.

The average police response time during a terrorist attack like this is nine minutes. That includes calling 911, dispatching law enforcement teams, assessment of the situation, formulation of a plan, and execution of that plan. That nine minutes is an eternity when people are at the mercy of a terrorist. Everyone is happy and thankful when the cops show up with a thousand or so guns. But many are freaked out by the thought of that cop’s next door neighbor, who is also trained and proven to be law-abiding, having one.

None of us want to accept or endure pure evil. But guess what? It exists. It always has, and it always will. There are people out there who want nothing more than to kill you and others. Are you going to deal with that reality by burying your head in the sand? Are you going to succumb to the temptation of a simple feel-good “fix” knowing deep down inside that it will accomplish nothing?

Or are you going to lift your chin up and address the real problem?

Read the Original Article at Ammo-Land

Examining Terrorist Tactics: Know Your Enemy

Instead of wasting time reading the multitude of articles about the Orlando Shooting, as bad as it was, as Responsible Armed Civilians, the best thing we can do IMO is PREPARE TO FIGHT THESE BASTARDS so something like this does not happen again.

One of the best ways we can begin to do that is to learn everything we can about our enemies.

For those of you that have not read ISIS’ Training and Strategy Manuals, here are a couple worth a look.

The first one, The Management of Savagery, was written over a decade ago by an Al-Qaeda Sympathizer.

The Management of Savagery

The second one, How to Survive in the West, was weitten by an ISIS soldier two years ago and is in reality a Guerilla Warfare manual for Terrorist.

How To Survive in the West

Stay Alert, Stay ARMED and Stay Dangerous!