U.S. Forces Ready to Retake ISIS ‘Capital’ City of Raqqa

United States Defense Secretary Ash Carter released a statement on Wednesday that it would launch an all-out offensive to retake the city of Raqqa.

At a NATO meeting in Brussels, Carter told reporters that troops are now being mobilized for the siege of Raqqa that would take place in the next couple of weeks; he declined to give more specifics about the attack.

“The plan has us generating those forces in a matter of weeks … generating them and positioning them for the isolation of Raqqa,” Carter said.

Earlier this month, the U.S. backed the attack on Mosul. It has been “long planned” that the attack on Raqqa would be next, Carter added.

Ready to Attack

The assault preparation comes amid fears that the terror group would plot an attack somewhere in the world from inside of the city.

U.S. Commander in Iraq, Gen. Stephen Townsend, told reporters that it is “imperative to get isolation in place around Raqqa,” he added, “there are significant external operations attack planning” taking place inside the city.

“We actually aren’t sure how pressing it is, and that’s what’s worrying,” Gen. Townsend added, “We know they are up to something, and it’s an external plot. We don’t know exactly where; we don’t know exactly when.”

Secretary Ash Carter said the military has enough resources to launch the operation in both Mosul and Raqqa.

“We’re going to win this, and so if there’s anything we need to do to accelerate, I’m prepared to ask for it,” he said.

Secretary Carter and his NATO counterparts shared the same insight and committed that anti-ISIS operations would be its major focus.

The transatlantic alliance committed to increasing its participation and launch aerial surveillance flights in the Black Sea Region.

NATO has been training Iraqi military officers in Jordan as it avoids direct involvement in the anti-ISIS fight, leaving the decision to its members to be involved in the U.S. led coalition.

NATO’s commitment for Peace

NATO spokesperson Dylan White said on Tuesday, “We will improve the coalition’s overall air picture by providing surveillance and situational awareness, thereby making the skies safer,”

“This is a meaningful contribution to the (anti-ISIS) effort and a clear signal of NATO’s determination to help fight terrorism,” he added.

NATO showed its determination despite the recent criticism made by Presidential nominee Donald Trump.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “NATO has played a key role, has been in a front line in a fight against terrorism for many, many years with our operation in Afghanistan, training Iraqi officers supporting Tunisia, Jordan and many other ways.”
“As I stated many times, the adaptation of NATO — where you focus more on intelligence, where you step up of our efforts to fight terrorism, where we increase defense spending — is not related to (the) US election campaign,” he added.

Other than anti-ISIS operations in Syria and Iraq, NATO also focuses on Russia’s recent aggression in Eastern Europe.

Secretary Carter said that the U.S. will deploy rotations of U.S.-based armored brigade combat teams to Europe early next year to strengthen deterrence in the region

 

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Cyber Attacks Interrupt Access to Several Websites

Cyber attacks disrupted access to dozens of websites on Friday, blocking some users from accessing Twitter, Spotify and PayPal. The attack targeted Dyn, a slightly known internet infrastructure company.

Dyn said the outages that started in the Eastern United States spread to other parts of the country and overseas. The company, whose customers comprise some of the world’s most commonly visited websites, said it did not know who was responsible for the attack.

The outages were sporadic, making it difficult to identify all the victims. However, technology news site Gizmodo named a number of sites that the attack impinged on. They included Mashable, HBO Now, CNN, the New York Times, Yelp, People.com, and the Wall Street Journal.

Attacks were emanating from tens of millions of Internet-connected devices such as printers, thermostats, and webcams, Dyn said. They were infected with malicious software that converts them into “bots” that are capable of massive distributed denial of service attacks.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released an alert last week concerning this powerful new approach. The agency remarked its concern about the potential for fresh attacks following code for malware used in these attacks was posted on the internet.

Dyn said on Friday that it was fending off the third major wave of attacks. The attacks were getting harder to fight since they were being launched from sites scattered across the globe.

“The complexity of the attacks is what’s making it very challenging for us,” said Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said they were investigating the case.

The disruptions happened at a time of unparalleled concerns about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have violated political organizations and election agencies.

Dyn said an earlier attack, which interrupted operations for about two hours, had been resolved. However, a second attack a few hours later caused further disruptions.

The outage was restricted to the Eastern United States, Dyn said early on Friday. But Amazon later reported that the incident was affecting users in Western Europe. Some users in London could not access twitter and some news sites late on Friday evening.

PayPal Holdings Inc said that the outage inhibited some customers in “certain regions” from doing payments. It said that its networks had not been hacked and apologized to customers for the inconvenience.

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division also reported a related outage but was resolved early Friday afternoon, the company said

Dyn is a provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which function as switchboards connecting internet traffic. DNS servers direct requests to access sites that are transmitted through them to computers that host websites. The company is based in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Dyn said it was still investigating how the attack led to the outage but that its first priority was restoring service.

Attacking a large DNS provider can produce substantial disruptions because such companies are responsible for redirecting huge amounts of internet traffic.

 

 

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Pentagon Casts Cautious Stance on Latest Yemen Missile Attack

The Pentagon refused to say on Monday whether the USS Mason was targeted again by missiles launched from Yemen on Saturday, as originally believed. It said an investigation was under way to find out what happened.

Any indication that the Houthis targeted the guided-missile destroyer on Saturday could have military ramifications. The United States has warned to strike back again should its ships come under fire from Houthi-controlled Yemen territory.

After two confirmed attempts to hit the USS Mason with coastal cruise missiles last week, the United States executed missile strikes on radar sites in Yemen on Thursday.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told a new briefing that they are still evaluating the situation. He said that there are still some aspects that they are trying to clarify given the potential threat to “our people.”

Chief of naval operations Admiral John Richardson revealed the latest incident on Saturday during an event in Baltimore. He said that the USS Mason appears to have come under attack once again in the Red Sea.

Cook acknowledged that the crew of the USS Mason responded appropriately when they detected what appeared to be a missile threat.

Nevertheless, US officials warned that facts from the incident were still under evaluation. It was not known when a conclusion might be made about how many, if any, missiles were fired at the destroyer.

The retaliatory missile strikes by the US on Thursday knocked out three coastal radar sites in Houthi territory. It was the first military action by Washington against suspected Houthi-controlled targets in Yemen’s conflict.

The war in Yemen between the Houthi group, backed by troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the Saudi Arabia-supported internationally recognized government of Abd Rabbu Mansour al-Hadi, has been going on since March 2015.

The Houthi movement has denied firing on the USS Mason. However, it did promise to retaliate following a Saudi-led strike on a funeral assembled in Sanaa, Yemen’s Houthi-held capital, last week. the attack killed more than 140 people, according to one UN estimate.

The US has denounced the strike and vowed to reassess US military assistance to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen. Yemenis, closely associated the US military with the campaign.

On Saturday, a fact-finding body established by the Saudi-led coalition attributed a string of factors for the funeral strikes. The investigative body said the coalition received inaccurate information from Yemeni military officials that armed Houthi leaders were in the area at the time.

No justification for air-strike on 600 people

Rep. Ted Lieu, a leading campaigner in Congress for a pause in U.S. cooperation with the Saudi-led coalition, stated that explanation seemed to him like an acknowledgement of a war crime.

He said that even if some rebels had been present at the funeral, that would not justify an air-strike that targeted more than 600 civilians.

He added that the US also needs to instantly cease aiding and abetting a Saudi coalition that has committed war crimes.

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Rebel-Held Yemen Fires Missiles On US Navy Ship

A failed missile attack from Iran-aligned Houthi rebel territory in Yemen targeted a US Navy guided missile destroyer, a US military spokesman said. Neither of the two missiles struck the ship.

It was the second such launch targeting ships after a United Arab Emirates vessel came under attack from Houthis a week earlier.

The botched missile attack on the USS Mason started about 7 pm local time, the US military said. That time, the ship spotted two incoming missiles in the Red Sea off Yemen’s coast over a 60-minute time frame.

Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said there were no damage to the ship and injuries to the sailors as both missiles hit the water before reaching the ship.

The United States and Saudi Arabia accuse Iran for providing weapons to the Houthis. Tehran denies it equips them with weapons but sees the Houthis as the rightful authority in Yemen.

Missile alley

A US defense official said the first missile triggered counter measures from the USS mason but the ship did not return fire. He added that the incident happened just north of the Bab al-Mandab strait off Yemen’s southern coast, the same general area where last weeks attack on a UAE vessel took place.

Davis emphasized a duty to preserve freedom of navigation and safeguard US forces. However it was uncertain what actions the US military might take.

He said that the US will continue to take all necessary steps to ensure that its ships and service members are safe.

The attack also came the same day that Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s powerful former president and key Houthi ally, summoned for an increase of attacks against Saudi Arabia.

A projected 10,000 people have died in Yemen’s war. The United Nations holds the Saudi-led coalition accountable for 60 percent of close to 3,800 civilian deaths since they began attacks in March.

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Another Apartment Stormed in Germany in Hunt For Refugee Planning Bomb Attack

Police commandos held a man in connection with a hunt for a Syrian refugee believed of plotting a bomb attack. They assaulted his apartment in the eastern city of Chemnitz on Sunday.

Saxony state criminal investigation office spokesman Tom Berhardt said that there were no casualties and no shots were fired during the incident. They’ve taken the man into custody and are questioning him now.

In another apartment the police stormed in the city on Saturday, they found explosives but lost track of Jaber Albakr, the 22-year-old suspect. He slipped through their hold after police spotted him at the door of the apartment block.

The quantity of explosive discovered suggests that the person was preparing to carry out an Islamist-motivated attack, a Federal Prosecutor’s Office spokesman said.

The apartment the police raided on Saturday yielded several hundred grams of explosives.

Unpopular policy

This development is unwelcome news for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her open-door migrants policy has caused her conservatives to lose support to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Merkel said last month that she wished she could turn back time by several years. She wanted to better plan for last year’s inflow of close to one million refugees. The leader has yet to declare if she will pursue a fourth term as chancellor in next year’s election.

Islamic State claimed responsibility in July for attacks at a music festival in Ansbach and on a train near Wuerzburg.

Albakr is still at large with hundreds of police officers trying to track him down.

The government officially recognized Albakr as a refugee after he entered Germany last year. The police did not previously know him when they raided the first apartment after a tip-off from the domestic intelligence service.

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Cooler Heads Prevail Amid Rising Tension Between India and Pakistan

War between two nuclear capable nations is what apocalyptic movies are made up off. However, this time, the threat of nuclear war looms not from the usual suspects between the US and Russia or from China for that matter, but between two warring countries fighting over their border.  The fight is between India and Pakistan.

The two nation have already clashed four times since the British relinquished its control over India in 1947. Three of the skirmishes were in Kashmir, over the Himalayan region. New Delhi and Islamabad are both claiming the entirety of the region. This resulted in a massive military buildup, which makes Kashmir one of the most militarized in South Asia. The two nation is divided by a de facto border known as the Line of Control (LoC). Since both countries have nuclear capabilities, a potential apocalyptic collision is a possible horrifying scenario.

World attention has been focused on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi since the attack on the Indian military outpost on Sept 18. Four gunmen were able to cross the LoC and killed eighteen soldiers in the Kashmir town of Uri. The attack is the worst of its kind in more than two decades. Pakistan rejects India’s presumption that the gunmen came across the LoC from the Pakistan side of the border.

Clamor for a strong response is growing among the people, as well as with close allies of the Prime Minister. Ram Madhav of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have upped the ante with a war-like rhetoric. He said that the days of Indian restraint is over. “For one tooth, the complete jaw. If terrorism is the instrument of the weak and coward (sic), restraint in the face of repeated terror attacks betrays inefficiency and incompetence. India should prove otherwise.”

Indian Media has also demanded that the country to show that it will not take the murder of 18 soldiers sitting down. The uncertainty is growing on what will be the next move by the Indian government following the Uri attack.

Last weekend, Prime Minister Modi gave a speech that had the world breathe a sigh of relief, at least for the time being. Modi is stepping up efforts to pressure Pakistan diplomatically rather than the use of military force. At a BJP meeting in southern India, Modi said. “I want to tell the people of Pakistan, India is ready to fight you,” he added. “If you have the strength, come forward to fight against poverty. Let’s see who wins. Let’s see who is able to defeat poverty and illiteracy first, Pakistan or India.”

Experts believe that Modi’s approach is a result of India recognizing the downside of a military confrontation. India’s growing economy which has one of the fastest growth in the world, would have adverse effect and would definitely pull down their sustained growth. Happymon Jacob, an expert from Delhi’s Jawaharla Nehru University stated. “Having gone through some discussion, the government of India has come to the conclusion that you can only escalate this diplomatically and politically, which is exactly what they are doing.”

Ashok Malik, a senior member at the Observer Research Foundation think tank sees India’s situation as volatile. The Prime Minister domestically faces pressure “to be seen to be doing something in response to this attack.”

On the global scale however, India needs to build “an even stronger case against Pakistan and emphasize that [terrorism linked to] Pakistan is a challenge not just for India but also the rest of the world.”

Adding Diplomatic Pressure

India also withdrew from the upcoming summit for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. The regional meeting will be in Islamabad. This is to add to the diplomatic pressure India is currently undertaking on Pakistan.

Although the world can sleep better with Prime Minister Modi’s approach, the possibility of a military confrontation will always be an available option.  Malik said. “I don’t think Modi has given up on the military option for the remainder of his term [in office, which expires in 2019].”

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