15 years after 9/11, America in perpetual war

WASHINGTON - The 9/11 attacks of 2001 forever changed America and upended its foreign and national security policy, leaving the country for the past 15 years in a war against jihadists -- without ending the upheaval in the Middle East.

Barack Obama, who will leave the White House in January, is the president who tried to get the US military out of the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan -- devastating "war on terror" conflicts launched by his predecessor George W. Bush in the wake of the suicide plane strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people.

But Obama's legacy on that front is mixed, with US forces still present in both countries.

And while he worked hard to bring America closer to the Muslim world, he will leave office with the United States bogged down in a seemingly endless conflict against Islamists at home and abroad, experts say.

"The evolving threat of Islamist terrorism compelled President Obama, against his own inclinations, to engage militarily in Iraq once again, and since then in Syria and Libya as well," said Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The wars in the Middle East, the metastasis of ISIS, online radicalization and a series of attacks in European and American cities have made the paradigm of a 'global war on terror' very hard to set aside, even 15 years after 9/11," she wrote on the World Economic Forum website.

The US is also still engaged militarily, in limited form or on a purely logistical basis, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen to counter myriad threats.

"The thinking of the Obama administration is that big wars make things worse," Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told AFP.

So instead, Obama launched a new era in American warfare -- one dominated by drones, special forces and training for local fighters.

The human and financial costs of such engagements are more limited -- a significant fact, after the 5,300 US military personnel killed, 50,000 wounded and $1.6 trillion spent from 2001-2014 in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional data.

Obama's strategy had its best success in May 2011, when US special forces killed Al-Qaeda leader Obama bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, at his home in Pakistan.

But for Ibish, such a use of "limited resources... looks like a continuous war."

"It is even more than a permanent war because the limited resources cannot change the instability. It accepts the current chaos as being unsolvable," he added.

Evolving threats

In Syria, a lasting peace is still not at hand, though a fresh truce brokered by the United States and Russia -- both now involved militarily in the deadly conflict -- is due to begin Monday.

And a US military re-engagement in the Middle East is not in the plans of either of the candidates looking to succeed Obama -- Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Fifteen years after the Twin Towers fell, forever changing New York's skyline, Obama said the terror threat facing America had "evolved," referring to lone-wolf attacks in the United States like the nightclub massacre in Orlando in June.

"So in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond, we'll stay relentless against terrorists like Al-Qaeda and ISIL. We will destroy them. And we'll keep doing everything in our power to protect our homeland," he said Saturday in his weekly address.

Mass surveillance

As Amy Greene -- an American researcher at the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris (Sciences-Po) -- pointed out, "there has not been an attack on US soil of the same scale" as the carefully planned 2001 attacks.

Of course, Washington still fears more small-scale attacks carried out by homegrown attackers, like the Orlando shooting that left 49 people dead or the San Bernardino attacks last December that left 14 dead.

Faced with ongoing threats, the United States has built up a massive surveillance apparatus in the post-9/11 era both at home and abroad.

The budget for the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency has nearly doubled since 2001.

"The threat that I think will dominate the next five years for the FBI will be the impact of the crushing of the caliphate, which will happen," Comey said this past week, referring to the Islamic State group.

Since the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11, legislation maintained by Obama, "Americans have accepted the idea of giving up some of their freedoms," Greene said.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of Americans fear that "the ability of terrorists to launch another major attack on the United States is greater than it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks."

That is the highest share expressing that fear since 2002.

On Saturday, the US State Department warned in its regular "worldwide caution" note to travelers on terror risks that the IS group had "called on supporters to attack US citizens and coalition partners wherever they are."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Islamic State claims attack in Texas

The Islamic State jihadist group on Tuesday claimed responsibility for its first attack on US soil, a shooting at an event in Texas showcasing cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed that left the gunmen dead.

"Two of the soldiers of the caliphate executed an attack on an art exhibit in Garland, Texas, and this exhibit was portraying negative pictures of the Prophet Mohammed," the jihadist group said.

"We tell America that what is coming will be even bigger and more bitter, and that you will see the soldiers of the Islamic State do terrible things," the group announced.

It marked the first time the extremist group, which has captured swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, claimed to have carried out an attack in the US.

US police said two men drove up to the conference centre Sunday in Garland, where the right-wing American Freedom Defense Initiative was organising the controversial cartoon contest, and began shooting at a security guard, who was wounded in the ankle.

Garland police officers then shot and killed both men.

According to US media reports, the two suspected jihadists were Elton Simpson, 31, and Nadir Soofi, 34, who shared an apartment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Simpson was being investigated by the FBI over alleged plans to travel to Somalia to wage holy war, court records show.

Many Muslims find drawings of the prophet to be disrespectful or outright blasphemous, and such cartoons have been cited by Islamists as motivation in previous attacks.

According to court records seen by AFP, Simpson was sentenced to three years' probation in 2011 after FBI agents presented a court with taped conversations between him and an informant discussing travelling to Somalia to join "their brothers" waging holy war.

The prosecution was unable to prove that Simpson had committed a terror-related offense, but did establish he had lied to investigators when he denied having discussed going to Somalia.

The White House said that President Barack Obama had been briefed on the investigation, which Texas police said was ongoing.

"There is no form of expression that justifies an act of violence," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

'Bad choice'

The American Freedom Defense Initiative, a group listed by civil rights watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group, had organized the event, which drew about 200 people.

At the event, attended by Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders and AFDI co-founder Pamela Geller, supporters held an exhibition of entries to a competition to draw caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

AFDI had offered a $10,000 prize for the winner of the contest, which was billed as a "free speech" event.

Commentators were quick to draw parallels to the January mass shooting at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris that killed 12 people and wounded 11 more.

But the magazine's film critic, Jean-Baptiste Thoret, the magazine's film critic who only avoided the attack because he had been late for work said "there is absolutely no comparison."

"You have a, as you said, a sort of anti-Islamic movement (in Texas)... the problem of Charlie Hebdo is absolutely not the same," Thoret told Charlie Rose on PBS, according to an advance transcript released on Monday.

Gerard Biard, chief editor of the magazine, added: "We don’t organize contests. We just do our work. We comment on the news. When Mohammed jumps out of the news, we draw Mohammed.

"But if he didn’t, we didn’t. We don’t... We fight racism. And we have nothing to do with these people."

On Twitter, jihadist Abu Hussain Al-Britani, who extremist monitoring group SITE identified as British IS fighter Junaid Hussain, described the gunmen as "two of our brothers."

But Simpson's father Dunston told ABC News that his son, who he said worked in a dentist's office, simply "made a bad choice."

"We are Americans and we believe in America," Dunston Simpson said. "What my son did reflects very badly on my family."

'Just shocked'

Wilders told AFP in an e-mail that he was concerned he may have been targeted because he, like one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists killed in January, is on a hit list circulated by Al-Qaeda supporters.

"I am shocked. I just spoke for half an hour about the cartoons, Islam and freedom of speech and I had just left the premises," he said.

"This is an attack on the liberties of all of us."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Mother of US journalist Foley 'never prouder' of son

WASHINGTON - The mother of American journalist James Foley, apparently executed by Islamic State jihadists, on Wednesday paid tribute to her son who she said had died trying to expose the suffering of the Syrian people.

Condolences and shocked messages poured in after the Islamist group released a video showing a masked militant beheading a man resembling Foley, who has been missing since he was seized in Syria November 2012.

"We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people," Foley's mother Diane said in a Facebook message to supporters.

"We implore the kidnappers to spare the lives of the remaining hostages. Like Jim, they are innocents. They have no control over American government policy in Iraq, Syria or anywhere in the world.

"We thank Jim for all the joy he gave us. He was an extraordinary son, brother, journalist and person."

A second captive, said to be US reporter Steven Sotloff, was shown alive in the video, along with a warning that his fate rests on US President Barack Obama ordering a halt to strikes against the jihadist group which seized swathes of Syria and Iraq.

On Twitter, fellow journalists implored users not to view the graphic video of the execution, instead sharing images of Foley in the field.

Dick Costolo, the CEO of the social media network, tweeted: "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery."

Thousands posted messages of sorrow on the Facebook site Free James Foley, while British Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted that if true, the murder was "shocking and depraved."

- 'Finally found his passion'-

Foley was an experienced correspondent who had covered the war in Libya before heading to Syria to follow the revolt against Bashar al-Assad's regime, contributing to news site GlobalPost, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and other media outlets.

He came to journalism as a second career, enrolling in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University aged 35. He had previously instructed inner-city students and taught reading and writing to prison inmates.

"He realised that the stories he wanted to tell were real stories - stories about people's lives -and he saw journalism as a vehicle for talking about what's really happening in the world," Diane Foley said in an earlier interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.

His father, John, told the same publication that before his ill-fated trip to Syria "Jim said that he finally had found his passion."

AFP chairman Emmanuel Hoog hailed Foley as a "brave, independent and impartial journalist."

"His work for AFP and other media organizations was widely admired. Nothing could justify his incarceration or any threats against his life. Our thoughts are with his family at this very difficult time."

GlobalPost co-founder and CEO Philip Balboni said: "On behalf of John and Diane Foley, and also GlobalPost, we deeply appreciate all of the messages of sympathy and support that have poured in since the news of Jim's possible execution first broke."

According to witnesses, Foley was seized in the northern Syrian province of Idlib on November 22, 2012.

Sotloff, whose kidnapping in August last year has not been widely reported, has written for several US newspapers and magazines, including Time, Foreign Policy and The Christian Science Monitor.

The White House said US intelligence was studying the video.

"If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

In the nearly five-minute video, titled "A Message to America" and distributed online by known Islamic State sources, the group declares that Foley was killed after Obama ordered air strikes against IS positions in northern Iraq.

The execution is carried out in an open desert area with no immediate signs as to whether it is in Iraq or Syria by a black-clad masked militant who speaks English with a British accent.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com