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Terrorism Tag

France's parliament on Wednesday passed a new anti-terrorism law that gives law enforcement sweeping powers to search homes, carry out surveillance, and set up borders checks. The new law replaces the state of national emergency that came into effect after the 2015 Paris attacks, which killed 130 people. The state of emergency was extended six times and due to expire next month. Despite the unprecedented powers given to the police and the security forces, France has been hit by a series of attacks leaving 241 people dead since the imposition of the emergency.

The Islamic State (ISIS) has held Raqqa, Syria, for four years and made it the the group's de facto capital. That appears to have ended as US-backed Syrian forces have declared they retook the city from the terrorists. From CNN:
"Major military operations in Raqqa are finished but they are now clearing the city of sleeper cells -- if they exist -- and mines," Talal Salo, spokesman for the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, told CNN. The SDF is a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters.

Kirkuk, Iraq has become a centerpiece in the Iraqi government's rejection of the overwhelmingly successful Kurdish Independence Referendum. Monday, Iraq took control of Kirkuk, which has been under Kurdish control since they took it from ISIS in 2014 as Iraqi forces fled.  It is surprising that the Kurds did not stand and fight for the hard-won Kirkuk, but it's not yet clear this was the case as there have been reports of gunfire and "clashes" in the city.  The resistance by Kurdish forces appears to have been somewhat minimal. The BBC reports:
The Iraqi military moved into Kirkuk three weeks after the Kurdistan Region held a controversial independence referendum.

Two truck bombs detonated in Somalia's capital Mogadishu on Saturday, killing at least 230 people and wounding hundreds more.  Reports indicate that the Somali government believes al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab is responsible. The United States has condemned the attack, calling it "cowardly," and has vowed to continue to fight the "scourge of terrorism." The BBC reports:
A massive bomb attack in a busy area of the Somali capital Mogadishu on Saturday is now known to have killed at least 230 people, police say. Hundreds more were wounded when a lorry packed with explosives detonated near the entrance of a hotel. It is the deadliest terror attack in Somalia since the Islamist al-Shabab group launched its insurgency in 2007.

Pakistan officials announced that the Taliban has freed an American woman, her Canadian husband, and their children after five years of imprisonment. From ABC News:
Caitlan Coleman, 31, and her husband Joshua Boyle, 34, who were abducted while hiking in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province in 2012, were secured in an exchange between Pakistani military and U.S. commandos late Wednesday in a secret operation to bring them home after one of the longest -- and strangest -- American hostage ordeals in recent history, counterterrorism officials revealed.

Not surprisingly, the political left is claiming there is an inherent racism in not calling Stephen Paddock, who murdered 58 people with rifle fire from the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, a terrorist. This tweet by Glenn Greenwald pretty much sums up the claim that the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be called a terrorist:

French police have charged three men with "attempted murder in an organised group in connection with a terrorist enterprise" after they found several gas canisters placed in an apartment block in Paris.  It's not clear why the canisters were not detonated or why an apartment complex was targeted. The Times of Israel reports:
Three men have been handed preliminary terror-linked charges in the failed attack at a residential building in an upscale Paris neighborhood with gas canisters that failed to ignite. The three, identified as Amine A, his cousin Sami B, and Aymen B., were charged late Friday with “attempted murder in an organized group in connection with a terrorist enterprise” and placed in pre-trial detention, a judicial source said.

There have been three reported terrorist attacks.  One occurred in Marseille, where two women were killed, and two occurred in Edmonton, where at least five people have been wounded. Edmonton police believe the two attacks there are related, possibly involving the same terrorist.  The terrorist was later arrested and is now in police custody. At a railway station in Marseille, a terrorist stabbed two females, killing them both.  Witnesses report that he yelled "Allahu Akbar" before being shot dead by French military personnel who were patrolling the station.

On Friday morning, a bomb was detonated in the London Underground near Parsons Green.  Two men have since been arrested, Prime Minister Teresa May has downgraded the UK threat level from critical to severe, and British police are searching the Surrey home of an elderly couple who fostered "refugee children."  The two men arrested are reportedly aged 18 and 21. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Investigators probing a bomb blast that injured more than two dozen people in London’s subway last week on Sunday combed through a house in this suburban town owned by elderly foster parents that neighbors said had recently been caring for two “refugees.”

A homemade bomb went off on a filled London Underground subway car this morning near Parsons Green that left 22 people injured. The police have announced they are treating it as a terrorist attack. From The London Times:
Officers believe that the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device and hundreds of detectives are now investigating, with the assistance of MI5.

Remember the Left's chorus of "build bridges not walls", condemning every sane move from limiting mass migration into Europe to President Trump's proposed border wall? With Jihad warfare fueled by mass migration rocking one European city after another, Europe's ruling class is finally having an unpleasant rendezvous with the reality. Though it's still "open borders" for the ordinary citizens of the street, the ruling class is protecting itself as it senses the approaching disaster of its own making. Austrian government has taken the first steps by constructing blast walls -- capable of withstanding vehicle bombs -- around its vital state buildings in the capital city of Vienna, including the Federal Chancellery, the President's Office, and a few other key government ministries, local newspapers report.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian terrorist organization, has been allowed to run in this month's German election. The PFLP is not only a designated terrorist organization in both the European Union and in the United States, but  it has also committed acts of terror against German citizens. An Arab Marxist-Leninist outfit, PFLP first gained notoriety in the 1970s for carrying out aircraft hijackings, including that of a Lufthansa plane in 1977, in an unsuccessful attempt to free the ringleaders of the Left-Wing 'Baader-Meinhof Gang' that were languishing in the West German prisons.

With the Western leaders divided in their strategy to counter the rising threat of Islamic terrorism, the Islamist terror groups continue to work on new ways of attacking the West. According to Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), modeled after the American FBI, Islamic State might be planning to sabotage railway networks to inflict heavy civilian casualties in the West, as part of its evolving Jihad warfare strategy.

With less than a month until the German elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her Open Borders Policy for illegal migrants on German television over the weekend. "German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her controversial decision to admit over a million refugees in 2015, and insisted she had no regrets, saying she would take the big decisions 'the same way again,'" British newspaper Daily Express wrote. She also placed the blame ironically on the border restrictions already in place -- prior to the autumn of 2015 -- to check the unregulated inflow of the refugees into Europe. "She criticized the so-called 'Dublin Regulation' on refugees, which requires those seeking asylum to register in the first EU state they enter," German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported. Merkel's arbitrary suspension of the Dublin Regulation, in fact, started the migrant influx from the Middle East and North African countries that continues to this day.

The Telegraph revealed that authorities conducted a mock terrorist attack on the UK Parliament earlier this year that exposed actual terrorists could easily break in and kill at least 100 Members of Parliament in a matter of five minutes:
In a simulated attack, which took place in the middle of the night, officers posing as extremists used a boat to gain access from the river. They then navigated the corridors and stormed the House of Commons chamber in an exercise that could have caused mass casualties if replicated in real life.