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| Terror Networks |
| In Photos, ISIS Shows How Brussels Terror Originated in Syria |
| 2016-04-14 |
| [NYTIMES] Somewhere, there is a digital archive containing the portraits of the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... ’s network of fighters in Europe. The image of each fighter was stored in this database months before last year’s attacks in Gay Paree, and after each new terror strike, the group has reached into it and released the photographs. So it was on Wednesday. The latest issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s slick online magazine, includes an image of Najim Laachraoui, the 24-year-old former Catholic school pupil who was last seen wheeling a suitcase bomb into the Brussels airport. He is wearing military fatigues and sadistically winking at the camera. Next to him is a man with a bloody knife, suggesting they had just beheaded a captive. It is worth noting that the two men’s uniforms exactly match those worn by the Gay Paree attackers last year, as shown in another set of photographs and an accompanying video, also pulled from the archive. Those were shot somewhere in Syria or Iraq before the attacks, and made public soon after. They have the same desert camouflage pattern, the same tan cap and tactical vest, the same cutoff gloves and grotesque scene of bloodshed. Before returning to Europe, both the Brussels bomber and the Gay Paree plotters posed for carefully choreographed scenes, showing the atrocities they committed in Syria and Iraq. The purpose is clear: to show the West that the attackers really were sent from the heart of the group’s terror machinery. In a short biography of Mr. Laachraoui, who is also identified by the nom de guerre Abu Idris al-Baljiki, the Islamic State says he was the bombmaker for both the Gay Paree and Brussels attacks. The biography also says the future jacket wallah’s first foray in Syria was as a recruit in the battalion of Amr al-Absi, the leader of a group calling itself the Mujahedeen Shura Council. In 2012, that group became a magnet for European jihadists, especially Belgians, who flocked to a walled villa in Kafr Hamra, just outside Aleppo, Syria, as Ben Taub reported in an excellent piece for The New Yorker. Later, Mr. Absi’s group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIS. The biography says Mr. Laachraoui "was one of the first, along with the rest of his group, to pledge allegiance." |
| Posted by:Fred |