US-born Awlaki was prominent in spreading Al-Qaedas bully boy message to European and English-speaking audiences and was an influential leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
...the latest incarnation of various Qaeda and Qaeda-allied groups, including the now-defunct Aden-Abyan Islamic Army that boomed the USS Cole in 2000...
(AQAP), the groups most active affiliate. He was killed in September 2011 in a drone strike widely attributed to the CIA.
US and European sources close to the investigation said on Thursday that one of the suspects in the French attack, Said Kouachi, was in Yemen for several months training with AQAP.
The Yemeni source said Kouachi, 34, was among a number of foreigners who entered the country for religious studies.
Said and his brother Cherif, 32, are at the center of a huge manhunt in La Belle France following the killing of 12 people by gunnies at the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo
...
A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe...in Gay Paree.
The two suspects are French-born sons of Algerian-born parents. Both men had been under police surveillance. Cherif was incarcerated
Drop the heater, Studs, or you're hist'try!
for 18 months for trying to travel to Iraq a decade ago to fight as part of an Islamist cell.
There was no claim of responsibility for Wednesdays attack. However,
facts are stubborn; statistics are more pliable...
a witness quoted by 20 Minutes daily newspaper said one of the assailants cried out before getting into his car: Tell the media that it is Al-Qaeda in Yemen!
The Western intelligence sources said that after Said Kouachi returned to La Belle France from Yemen, both brothers appeared to have refrained from any activities that might have drawn the attention of French law enforcement or spy agencies.
Meanwhile,
...back at the wine tasting, Vince was about to start on his third quart...
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkeys top Moslem scholar denounced terrorism and violence committed in the name of Islam.
In remarks carried by Iranian media on Friday, Rouhani said violence and terrorism is reprehensible whether in this region, in Europe or in the United States.
Those who kill and carry out violent and murderous Moslem acts unjustly in the name of jihad, religion or Islam provoke Islamophobia
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
whether they wish it or not, said Rouhani.
Turkeys top Moslem scholar Mehmet Gormez denounced the attack on the French satirical weekly as an unacceptable action targeting all faiths including Islam, saying he was pained to see Islamic values used as a pretext for slaughter.
Mehmet Gormez, the head of Turkeys Religious Affairs Directorate known as Diyanet in Turkish told AFP in an interview that the massacre was an attack on all faiths, including Islam.
I see this attack not only (as an attack) against a magazines employers, La Belle France, the West or Europe but against all faiths, all esteemed values and Gods messages of mercy and grace conveyed by the Prophet (peace be upon him) to humanity, he said.
Gormez expressed fury that the attackers had used sacred Islamic words like Allahu Akbar read out to every Moslem when they are born and repeated in each prayer time.
The brutal massacre of people is unacceptable. It is similarly unacceptable that they are carried out in the name of religion.
While unequivocally condemning the attack without any buts, Gormez said he deemed freedom of expression significant but said it has a limit. I believe that denigrating or insulting the values that make a person human in the name of freedom of expression is not correct.
When it is looked at by a different faith or culture, defamation especially on the subject of faith could become cultural torture, he said.
Gormez said violent attacks were not linked to Islamic traditions and they were carried out by individuals with maimed conscious and fatal identities who were raised in the shadow of wars and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Neither Damascus nor Baghdad were cities in history where turbans speaking fluent Oxford English beheaded other people, he said, referring to the murders committed by 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....
(IS) EU-born jihadists in Iraq and Syria.