Britain’s terror threat level was dramatically raised to severe today amid fears that UK jihadists returning from Iraq and Syria could launch attacks. The severe warning means an attack is “highly likely”, rather than the earlier assessment of substantial where a terror strike is “a strong possibility”. Home Secretary Theresa May stressed there was no intelligence to suggest an imminent attack.
Statistics Norway (Statistisk Sentralbyrå – SSB) has counted the population of Oslo and found that Mohammed is the most common male name in Oslo for the first time ever. Jørgen Ouren of SSB said to NRK: “It is very exciting.
Sickening footage appears to show Islamic State militants parading around 250 captured soldiers through the desert in their underwear before they are killed and their bodies piled on the bare earth. An Islamic State fighter claimed the men were from the Syrian government’s Tabqa air base which extremists seized on Sunday, potentially handing them warplanes, tanks, artillery and ammunition. The video, which has not been independently verified, is too graphic to be published in full.
The Department of Justice has announced that it is suing the small town of St. Anthony, Minnesota, after a two-year investigation into the town’s denial of a permit to create an Islamic cultural center. The DOJ claims that the north Minneapolis town broke a federal law when it rejected the center in 2012.
Two polls released this week both ask a question that you would hope wouldn’t need asking: how many people support the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)? Unfortunately, in all four countries surveyed, the answer is greater than zero, and by a lot.
The Islamic State wants more than $6 million to free an American woman the Muslim extremists kidnapped a year ago while she did humanitarian work in Syria, according to her family, U.S. officials and news reports.
Boko Haram’s leader said a town in the north east of Nigeria seized by the insurgents earlier this month has been placed under an Islamic caliphate, in a video obtained by AFP on Sunday. “Thanks be to Allah who gave victory to our brethren in (the town of) Gwoza and made it part of the Islamic caliphate,” Abubakar Shekau said in the 52-minute video. The military however rejected the claim, saying in a statement the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Nigerian state is still intact”.
ISIS fighters managed to loot SA-16 man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), Sidewinder missiles, and even MiG-21B fighter jets. It is extremely unlikely that the militants have the manpower or the expertise to make use of the jets or the Sidewinder missiles. But the MANPADS pose dangers of their own.
Egyptian feminist Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, 23, challenges the strict nature of Islam on her blog and Facebook pages. She went a step further in her protest against the Islamic State (IS) with a photo of Elmahdy and a veiled woman pooping and menstruating on the black IS flag. Arab nations did not print the photo because the flag states “there is no God but Allah.
A Muslim man has admitted to multiple murder charges committed in two states, of which he told investigators were committed as retribution against the United States for its military operations in the Middle East. “My mission is vengeance for the lives, millions of lives [that] are lost every day,” Ali Muhamad Brown stated, according to reports. “Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan—all these places where innocent lives are being taken every single day … All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government.