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Tunisian Ben Nasr Mehdi was discovered Oct. 4 attempting to infiltrate Italy on a boat with 200 other migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea Warnings about terrorists infiltrating the ranks of the Muslim boat people washing ashore daily on Europe's beaches are no longer just warnings. For the second time in the past few months, a known terrorist with direct ties to an international terror organization has been caught trying to enter Italy posing as an asylum seeker.

Rinelle Harper was left for dead on a Winnipeg riverbank, beaten and sexually assaulted. Omar Khadr was imprisoned in Guantanamo, captured in 2002 by American forces in Afghanistan and charged with war crimes. Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped by Somali criminals, and held hostage for 460 days. The three Canadians have little in common, beyond the recognition of their names from the news. But they have each suffered immensely more than most of us can understand. ... She became a symbol for racist violence against Aboriginal women - though her alleged attacker was himself Aboriginal. That girl on the right is...

NEW YORK – As former Sectary of State Hillary Clinton prepares to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, new documentary evidence of a secret State Department gun-running operation is adding fuel to the controversy over the Department of Justice prosecution of arms dealer Marc Turi. A member of the independent Citizens Commission on Benghazi claims the publication Tuesday of new evidence that the State Department under Hillary Clinton’s leadership approved a California company to deliver arms to Libya with the goal of ousting Moammar Gadhafi exposes the hypocrisy of prosecuting Turi. Turi believed he also had State...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on Wednesday called for a coalition to combat terrorism in the Middle East. Opening a meeting with Putin in Moscow, el-Sissi said "the Egyptian people" are hoping for broader ties with Russia in all areas, particularly in fighting terrorism in the Middle East. El-Sissi's Russian visit, his second in the past three months, highlights Moscow's attempts to expand its influence in Egypt at a time when Egyptian-U.S. relations have soured in the aftermath of the ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Supporters of al-Qaida in Yemen The Yemen branch of al-Qaida has put out a call for terror attacks against Americans, saying lone wolf radicals ought to launch immediate strikes on U.S. soil. “We urge you to strike America in its own home and beyond,” read a letter believed to be written by Ibrahim al-Asiri, the leading bomb-maker with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, CNN reported. SITE Intelligence Group said the letter states, “America is first.” The letter comes just as another AQAP leader, Khaled Batarfi, released a video containing a similar call to arms. The United States...

There are growing fears that Syria's second city, Aleppo, could be taken over by Islamic State (IS) as fighting to the north between government and rebel forces intensifies. With the military being driven out of the adjacent province of Idlib by a newly-formed rebel alliance, the Army of Conquest, focus has shifted to the fate of Aleppo, an ancient trading hub near the border with Turkey that has been a battleground for the past three years.

..the man US terrorism analysts call “the most influential living jihadi theorist” has turned his ire toward Isis – and emerged, in the last year, as one of the group’s most powerful critics. Soon after the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of a caliphate last June, Maqdisi released a long tract castigating Isis as ignorant and misguided, accusing them of subverting the “Islamic project” that he has long nurtured. Maqdisi’s war of words with Isis is emblematic of the new fratricidal split within violent Islamic radicalism – but it is also a sign that al-Qaida, once the...

The decision comes after an interview in which a former militant revealed the government collaborated in attacks carried out in 2007. Spain's top prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, called on Monday to investigate claims of links between the former Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh and al-Qaida. The decision comes after an investigation made by Qatar's Al Jazeera TV network, which revealed in an interview earlier this month that a former member of the designated terrorist group confirmed that Saleh had collaborated with the group. The revelation has sparked the prosecutor's reaction as one of the case cited by the former al-Qaida member...

Al-Qaida-linked militants in eastern Libya declared holy war — or jihad — on the local Islamic State affiliate after one of their senior leaders was killed Wednesday by masked gunmen, which set off clashes between the rival groups that left 11 people dead on both sides, including a top militant commander. The hours-long fighting in the eastern coastal city of Darna erupted after gunmen opened fire on Nasser Akr, an al-Qaida-inspired militant once held in the United Kingdom on terrorism charges. The 55-year-old veteran jihadi, who fought in Afghanistan, was killed along with his aide.

A Canadian judge ruled this week that Omar Khadr poses no public safety threat. Tell that to the children of Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer and the surviving American soldiers who valiantly fought Khadr on the battlefield. In 2012, Khadr pleaded guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty and guilty to five charges related to the killing of Speer, a 28-year-old medic with the U.S. Special Forces. This young American hero died in Afghanistan in 2002 during an ambush by al-Qaida operatives. Just days before he gave his life, Speer had fearlessly walked onto a minefield to rescue two wounded Afghan children....

Airstrikes by Saudi Arabia against Iran-backed Shiite rebels in turbulent Yemen have added a regional dimension to the conflict in the Arab world’s poorest country. Five reasons why the world should care about what is happening there: Yemen is home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, which Washington has viewed as the most lethal branch of the global network founded by Osama bin Laden. AQAP has been linked to several attempted attacks on the U.S., including the underwear bomb plot of December 2009, and it claimed the January killings at the offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie...

Nusra Front is the Sunni Muslim al-Qaida offshoot which is currently fighting the Iranian-backed axis of Bashar Assad and Hezbollah in Syria. Israel has opened its borders with Syria in order to provide medical treatment to Nusra Front and al-Qaida fighters wounded in the ongoing civil war, according to The Wall Street Journal. The prominent American newspaper reported that Nusra Front, the Sunni Muslim al-Qaida offshoot which is currently fighting the Iranian-backed axis of Bashar Assad and Hezbollah, "hasn't bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer" along the Golan Heights.

JOHANNESBURG — A video purported to be by Somalia's al-Qaida-linked rebel group al-Shabab urged Muslims to attack shopping malls in the U.S., Canada, Britain and other Western countries. In the video, released late Saturday, the extremist group again said its September 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, was in reprisal for Kenyan military involvement in Somalia. Sixty-seven people died in the attack. The video, using footage from major news organizations, showed the assault on the mall. The masked narrator of the 76-minute video warned of more attacks in Kenya and concluded by calling on Muslims to attack...

"What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as...

Political Correctness: The Army has announced that as a result of Congress' making victims of attacks by foreign terrorist acts eligible, the Fort Hood victims will get Purple Hearts, and civilians will get Defense of Freedom medals. That language broadened the definition of an attack on eligible victims to include an assault by "a foreign terrorist organization." The definition includes attacks by a perpetrator or perpetrators in contact with a foreign terrorist organization or "inspired or motivated by a foreign terrorist organization" prior to the attack. The Nov. 5, 2009, attack on Fort Hood by Maj. Nidal Hasan, in which...

Six Bosnian immigrants have been accused of sending money and equipment to terrorists oversees, including fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group and al-Qaida in Iraq, the U.S. attorney’s office announced Feb. 6. An indictment unsealed Feb. 6 in St. Louis said the defendants donated money themselves and in some cases collected funds from others in the U.S. and sent the donations oversees. It says two of the defendants used some of the money to buy U.S. military uniforms, firearms accessories, tactical gear and other equipment, which was shipped to people in Turkey and Saudi...

Iraq uncovers al-Qaeda 'chemical weapons plot' The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America. Defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months. Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added. Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops. Mr Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a "safe" distance of 1.5km...

Lynch said the classified 28 pages, which are drawn from intelligence collection and FBI investigations, "are consistent" with Moussaoui's testimony. The New York lawsuit argues that Saudi rulers were playing a double game in the years before the attacks, expelling Osama bin Laden and declaring opposition to al-Qaida, while secretly funding it to assuage the kingdom's religious conservatives. Moussaoui, in testimony from a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, told plaintiff lawyers it was "an absolute lie" that Saudi Arabia severed its ties with bin Laden and al-Qaida in 1994. "This is a complete misleading ... assumption of people who are...

Sanaa - A Shiite militia on Sunday set a three-day deadline for political parties to resolve the power vacuum in Yemen since the president and prime minister offered to resign last month. The Huthis and their allies urged parties "to reach a solution and fill the vacuum" within three days or "the revolutionary leadership" would "take care of the situation of the state". ... The militia, which overran Sanaa in September, seized the presidential palace and key government buildings on January 20, plunging the country deeper into crisis and prompting President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and his premier to tender their...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem — January 9, 2015 … Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with French Ambassador to Israel Patrick Maisonnave and made the following remarks at the start of their meeting: “I wish to send from this place our deepest condolences to President François Hollande, the bereaved families and the people of France. We grieve with our French brothers and sisters. We reaffirm our commitment to work together to defeat the enemies of the democratic values we all cherish. I know that you’re going from here to France, and I want you to take with you...