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ISIS militant ‘Jihadi John’ unmasked as middle-class Brit By Yaron Steinbuch February 26, 2015 | 7:16am The infamous masked ISIS madman seen in gruesome videos beheading Western hostages was identified by media outlets Thursday as Mohammed Emwazi — a middle-class Briton with a degree in computer programming. The BBC reported that the Kuwaiti-born Emwazi is in his mid-20s and from West London. British authorities chose not to identify him earlier for operational reasons. “I have no doubt that Mohammed is Jihadi John,” one of Emwazi’s close friends told the Washington Post. “He was like a brother to me. . . . I...

As the Islamic State seeks to export its brand of barbaric terror to would-be affiliates, the U.S. faces a growing challenge to find the sources of ISIS funding and blunt its flow to allied militants. The terror army's most recent atrocity was the mass beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya. It remains unclear how closely tied those militants are to ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but the Islamic State's underground economy continues to thrive. Even as the U.S.-led coalition strikes at what was long the heart of ISIS' revenue stream -- oil fields and refineries -- officials say the...

As Congress mulls America's war with the Islamic State terror group, more than 4,000 Fort Carson soldiers prepared Thursday to leave Colorado for Kuwait, where they will take over as America's largest ground force in the troubled region. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team bid farewell to the post in a ceremony and will head off soon to serve as U.S. Central Command's Reserve force in the Middle East - the first soldiers into battle if a major combat force is used to battle Islamic State fighters. The unit is Fort Carson's heaviest force, armed with tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles....

1. Ahmad Abu Adass In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated. The best way to describe him was simple, one said. He was generous and a little naïve. He was very weak, physically. A Sunni Muslim of Palestinian descent, Adass had become interested in religion and now spent many hours at the Arab University Mosque near his home. It was there, after a prayer session,...

The rope used to execute ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could be yours for the right price. Ex-Prime Minister Mowaffak Al-Rubaie has put the item up for sale more than eight years after he witnessed Saddam hanged in 2006. An unidentified senior Iraqi political official told the Middle East news site Al-Araby al-Jadeed this week that several individuals from Israel, Iran and Kuwait are vying to purchase the rope — with one making a $7 million bid.

The US military has deployed aircraft and troops to northern Iraq to boost its ability to rescue downed coalition pilots, after a Jordanian airman was captured and killed by jihadists in Syria, a defense official said Thursday. "We are repositioning some assets into northern Iraq," a US defense official told AFP. The move is designed to shorten the response time needed to reach pilots who end up in territory held by the Islamic State group, officials said. Search-and-rescue crews had been based in Kuwait, but officials said Wednesday the military was reviewing where its hardware and specialists were located following...

FORT HUACHUCA — The Renegades of the 40th Expeditionary Signal Battalion are leaving. Well at least 60 percent of the 500 soldier-strong battalion are heading to Afghanistan, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates on a nine-month deployment. The last remaining battalion of the 11th Theater Tactical Signal Brigade on the fort, the 40th has been deployed to global hot spots, even prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States. Symbolically, the battalion’s commander Lt.Col. David A. Thomas and the unit’s Command Sgt. Maj. John E. Reinburg cased the battalion’s colors held by Spc. Edward...

FORT HUACHUCA — It was about 9:57 p.m. Wednesday when a Delta commercial jet touched down at Libby Army Airfield. Inside the plane were 257 soldiers of the 40th Expeditionary Signal Battalion returning from a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The plane’s main cabin door door opened at 10:07 p.m. and soon the soldiers began walking down the steps to be greeted by senior post officers and others of the 40th who were on hand to welcome them back to their home turf. At the bottom of the steps was the commander of...

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday that countries behind the fall in global oil prices would regret their decision and warned that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would suffer alongside Iran from the price drop. "Those that have planned to decrease the prices against other countries will regret this decision," Rouhani said in a speech broadcast on state television as oil plunged to near six year lows on international markets. [O/R] "If Iran suffers from the drop in oil prices, know that other oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will suffer more than Iran," he added. Oil prices...

Representatives of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait stressed a dozen times in the past six weeks that the group won’t curb output to halt the biggest drop in crude since 2008...The global oversupply is 2 million barrels a day, or 6.7 percent of OPEC output, Qatar estimates.

Since June, the U.S. military has been slowly stockpiling massive amounts of its gear coming out of Afghanistan at a depot in Kuwait adjacent to a bustling commercial port, in preparation for ultimately shipping it across the border into Iraq for an allied offensive against the Islamic State group, US News reports. Air Force Maj. Gen. Rowayne “Wayne” Schatz admitted, "from June to December, we’ve worked a lot on moving items into Kuwait," including 3,100 vehicles, most of them MRAPs. While the military stands by President Barack Obama’s repeated pledge that he will not put U.S. combat forces on the...

All politics are local, except for oil politics. The Russians think these low oil prices are an American-Saudi conspiracy. American commentators believe that the Saudis have driven down prices to punish North Dakota’s shale oil revolution and drive its high-cost producers out of the game. In Canada, the paranoia in Calgary is that the Saudis and other Gulf oil producers want to drive the oil sands out of business. But what are the Saudis up to and are they powerful enough to control prices? This week the Saudi minister blamed low prices on oversupply from North America. But that is...

The U.S. Navy announced Wednesday that a new laser weapon deployed into Persian Gulf earlier this year performed seamlessly during testing that wrapped up in November, and declared the weapon a success. Deployed for the first time aboard the U.S.S. Ponce in September, the Office of Naval Research released a video Wednesday of the LaWS (laser weapon system) taking out two test targets

...its lowest levels against the dollar for almost a year, amid investor nervousness about emerging markets. By evening trade in Istanbul the currency had fallen beyond TL2.30 to the US dollar, more than 1 per cent down on the day and the weakest level since January, when the Turkish central bank moved to increase interest rates -- a dramatic shift in policy that at the time halted a precipitous drop in its value. ...Turkey is far from alone in being affected by strong US economic data that has heightened expectations of a US Federal Reserve interest rate rise and so...

Every 10 or 20 years a series of watershed events come together that change the face of the international energy picture. The Saudi-led war on crude oil prices is one of these pivotal situations. And while others fret about what the OPEC production move means, I'm actually meeting with the guys who made the decision. I can tell you that what's unfolding here in the desert will have a decisive impact on producers, end users, and government/corporate policymakers worldwide. Of course, I've been involved in a fair share of all of this for over 40 years, from both the public...

President Vladimir V. Putin said Monday that he would scrap Russia’s South Stream gas pipeline, a grandiose project that was once intended to establish the country’s dominance in southeastern Europe but instead fell victim to Russia’s increasingly toxic relationship with the West. It was a rare diplomatic defeat for Mr. Putin, who said Russia would redirect the pipeline to Turkey. He painted the failure to build the pipeline as a loss for Europe and blamed Brussels for its intransigence. The decision also seemed to be a rare victory for the European Union and the Obama administration, which have appeared largely...

OPEC just declared war on everyone-including itself. The oil cartel’s hotly-anticipated meeting on Thursday ended with a whimper: No change to an output target that already wasn’t being observed. Oil prices, though, went bang: Brent crude fell 5% to around $72.40 a barrel after the decision was made. It will likely be years before we see triple-digit oil again. Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has a beef with a number of oil-market participants. It also appears to have woken up to the fact that OPEC has once again lost its grip...

A senior Kuwaiti official said on Sunday the Khafji oilfield, run jointly with Saudi Arabia, had been shut down for "purely technical and not political" reasons, state news agency KUNA reported. Crude production from the Khafji oilfield had been halted temporarily to comply with environmental rules, according to an industry source and an internal letter seen by Reuters. But the closure of the offshore field, which has an output of between 280,000 to 300,000 barrels per day, revived speculation of renewed tensions between the two countries. Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry undersecretary Khaled al-Jarallah, speaking in Riyadh after a meeting of Gulf...

A subtle shift may be taking place within OPEC as it heads into its most important meeting in years, according to delegates with the producer group, as the discussion over whether it needs to cut output to defend oil revenues quietly intensifies. OPEC's Secretary General Abudulla al-Badri this week urged markets not to panic over the drop in prices to a 4-year low near $81 a barrel, while Kuwait's oil minister said OPEC was unlikely to cut output when it meets on Nov. 27 in Vienna. But privately, more delegates within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are starting...

Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba) (AFP) - The United States is preparing to release more than a dozen Guantanamo detainees as President Barack Obama works towards his long-promised goal of closing the controversial military prison, an US defense official said Wednesday. The news comes the same day the Defense Department sent home one of two remaining detained Kuwaitis, bringing the total population at the jail on a US naval base in Cuba to 148. Fawzi al-Odah, 37 -- who spent nearly 13 years in US detention -- took off in a Kuwaiti government plane at 5:30 am (1030 GMT), Lieutenant...