Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday, 20 November 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 19 Nov 2015 02:47 PM PST

At least 32 people were killed and 80 wounded after an explosive device went off at a market in the northeastern Nigerian city of Yola, humanitarian agencies say.
“Thirty-two people were killed and 80 have been injured,” Reuters quoted a Red Cross official as saying., Another official from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Alhaji Sa’ad Bello, later confirmed the same numbers of casualties.
It is still unclear who is responsible for the blast, but the ISIS-affiliated armed group Boko Haram has carried out attacks on Yola in the past, including suicide bomber attacks and other bombings and has recently claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The blast was reported at around 8 pm local time.
“The explosion happened in the midst of a large crowd because the area houses a livestock market, an open-air eatery and a mosque,” AFP quoted Red Cross official Aliyu Maikano as saying. “Our main preoccupation now is to save the injured.”
One witness described the horrific aftermath of the scene: “The ground near my shop was covered with dead bodies. I helped to load 32 dead bodies into five vehicles,” witness Alhaji Ahmed told Reuters.
Another local said there were up to eight ambulances on the scene attending to the victims.
The suspected perpetrators, Boko Haram, have pledged allegiance to Islamic State and killed thousands of people in the northeastern part of the country during the last six years. The militant group is fighting for a state that would strictly adhere to Sharia law.
The last time Boko Haram militants attacked northeastern Nigeria was in late October, when separate explosions in Yola and Maiduguri killed at least 37 people. Fighters from the group have been targeting public places, such as places of worship, local markets, and bus stations.
In the past, the extremist group has claimed responsibility for attacks in neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.
Boko Haram began its insurgency in 2009, and since then has killed at least 17,000 people and left another 2.5 million homeless
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Posted: 19 Nov 2015 04:16 AM PST
Donald Trump: US will “have no choice” but to shut some mosques down.
Republican US presidential candidate frontrunner Donald Trump says the United States would have “absolutely no choice” but to close down some mosques where “some bad things are happening,” in the wake of last week’s terror attacks in Paris.
“Nobody wants to shut down religion institutions or anything, but you understand it.” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday night. “A lot of people understand it. We’re going to have no choice.”
“Some really bad things are happening and they’re happening fast,” added the Republican frontrunner, known for his often controversial remarks.
On Monday, Trump said he would “strongly consider” closing mosques as part of a response to the Friday night attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 and injured more than 350 more.
ISIS terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, have claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in France. They now control parts of Syria and Iraq.
However, as usual some American nutcase conspiracy theorist like former White House official Paul Craig Roberts had to say the United States and NATO actually orchestrated the Paris attacks as a “false flag” to enter the Syrian war in order to counter Russia, which has been conducting air strikes in Syria against ISIL terrorists since September 30, despite ISIS openly claiming responsibility for the attacks.
Russian fighter jets have also attacked the CIA-trained militants fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to US officials.
“This was a false flag attack,” Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the US treasury, told Press TV on Monday. “It does not serve ISIL, but it does serve the Western political establishment.”
In his interview with Fox News, Trump again vowed to “blast the hell out of ISIS” in the wake of the Paris attacks.
“I’d get everybody together—this includes Russia—and I’ve been right about that too.”Trump said. “Now, all of a sudden [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s going wild with bombing ISIS, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Who needs to take the credit? Let him have some credit.”
Russia itself also got its share of Islamic State (ISIS) terror when a bomb was detonated on board the A321 civilian passenger plane, killing 224 innocent people.
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Posted: 19 Nov 2015 03:58 AM PST

The Islamic State terrorist group threatened to conduct terrorist acts in New York. In a newly released video, a male terrorist is seen hiding an explosive device underneath his jacket. Supposedly, it goes about the intention of the terrorist group to explode a bomb in a busy place of New York.
Earlier, Islamic State terrorists threatened to attack Britain, Italy and the United States.
On November 12, members of the Islamic State published a video, in which they threatened to attack Russia and Europe. According to them, the “world will soon shudder.”
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Posted: 19 Nov 2015 03:49 AM PST

Moments ago, ISIS released the 12th issue of its magazine profiled here previously, which had a cover page with a clear enough title: “Just Terror“
But while it has the usual content full of pro-Jihad propaganda, some 66 pages of it, as well as numerous images to commemorate the martyrs for the ISIS cause, what was most stunning about this edition was ISIS admission of how it brought down the Russian airplane above Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, which as even Russia admitted yesterday, was the result of an ISIS bomb.
On page 3, we find the following two photos: one shows what Dabiq alleges are passports belonging to the “dead crusaders obtained by mujahidin”…
… and more troubling, is the image of the IED used to bring down the Russian airliner: a bomb concealed in a can of Gold beer.

This corroborates what Russia FSB chief Aleksandr Bortnikov said: “traces of a foreign-made explosive substance” have been found. “During the flight, a homemade device with the power of 1.5 kilograms of TNT was detonated.”
And something else which is perhaps just as surprising: in the foreword to its magazine, ISIS says it had originally planned to bring down a plane “belonging to a nation in the American-led alliance” but changed its mind to blow up the Russian plane instead.
On “30 September 2015,” after years of supporting the Nusayr in the war against the Muslims of Sham, Russia decided to participate directly with its own air force in the war. It was a rash decision of arrogance from Russia, as if it held that its wars against the Muslims of al-Qawqz were not enough offence. And so after having discovered a way to compromise the security at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport and resolving to bring down a plane belonging to a nation in the American-led Western coalition against the Islamic State, the target was changed to a Russian plane. A bomb was smuggled onto the airplane, leading to the deaths of 219 Russians and 5 other crusaders only a month after Russia’s thoughtless decision.
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Posted: 19 Nov 2015 03:39 AM PST

Fatalities from terrorism are at a record high now with just two groups, Boko Haram and Islamic State responsible for half of them, a new report showed. The Nigerian militants kill more people than their Iraqi-Syrian allies.
Two terrorist groups were responsible for over a half of the killings in 2014 – Nigeria-based Boko Haram and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), which aims to expand its influence from the powerbase in Iraq and Syria globally. Together they were responsible for 51 percent of all global fatalities in 2014 claimed by any group, and almost 40 percent of all fatalities, according to the Global Terrorism Index published by the Institute for Economic and Peace (IEP).
The Nigerian jihadists, who pledged allegiance to IS in March 2015, killed more people than their fellow Islamists, claiming 6,644 lives compared to 6,073. Nigeria accordingly experienced a staggering 300 percent rise in terrorism deaths in 2014, although other militant groups take partial blame for the increase. In particular the Fulani militants killed 1,229 in Nigeria.
IS killed more people in combat than in acts of terrorism in 2014. It was responsible for at least 20,000 battlefield deaths over the year in clashes with various state and non-state combatants.
The Taliban, which was the deadliest group in 2013, was ranked third in 2014, despite killing 3,477 people in terrorist attacks, which is a 38 percent increase in fatalities. The group remains second-deadliest after IS in terms of battlefield kills, the report says.

Compared to previous year, the number of deaths from terrorism worldwide has increased by 80 percent in 2014. Over the last year 32,658 people killed, compared to 18,111 in 2013. It’s the largest number recorded and is almost ten times higher than in 2000, when 3,329 people were killed by terrorists.
Just five countries suffer the bulk of terrorist acts – Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria – accounting for 78 percent of all fatalities in 2014. Iraq bears the heaviest burden with 9,929 terrorist fatalities in 2014.
The threat is spreading. The number of countries experiencing more than 500 terrorism-related deaths rose from five to 11 in 2014 with the addition of Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Cameroon.
The report doesn’t include this year’s terrorist attacks like the gun violence in France, the bombing of the Russian plane in Egypt, the high-profile bombings in Lebanon and Turkey and other incidents that reflect the growing threat of terrorism.
In addition to loss of lives terrorism takes a heavy economic toll on affected countries. IEP says conservative estimates of damage from terrorist activity in 2014 stands at $52.9 million, a 61 percent increase from the previous year and a 10-fold increase since 2000.
Battling terrorism remains more costly than the direct damage caused by it, the report said. An estimated $117 billion was spent globally to provide national security from terrorism threats.
Western countries remain relatively safe from terrorism. In the last 15 years 2.6 percent of all terrorism-related fatalities happened in the West and the percentage drops to 0.5 if the September 2001 attacks in the US are excluded.
‘Lone wolf’ attacks account for 70 percent of all terrorist deaths in the West since 2006 and 80 percent of those deaths can be attributed to right-wing extremism, nationalism, supremacism, anti-government extremism and other types of political ideologies rather than Islamic fundamentalism.
Despite the alarming trends terrorism remains a relatively small threat to lives, the report points out. Globally 13 times as many people are killed by homicides than die in terrorist attacks.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 11:05