Free Republic

<p>PARIS (AP) -- Interpol has issued a global security alert in connection with suspected al-Qaida involvement in several recent prison escapes including those in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan.</p> <p>The Lyon, France-based international police agency says that the alert follows "the escape of hundreds of terrorists and other criminals" in the past month. The alert calls on Interpol's 190 member countries to help determine whether these events are coordinated or linked, the organization said in a statement Saturday.</p>

Two spectacular al Qaeda prison breaks in Iraq, freeing over 500 of its members in two separate prisons simultaneously this week, demonstrate the group is back with a vengeance. Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch is also the moving force behind the jihadist success in Syria. The resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq has sobering implications for what is likely to follow the drawdown of NATO forces in Afghanistan for the al Qaeda mother ship in Pakistan. The double jailbreaks at Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons were massive attacks. Suicide bombers, teams of attackers using mortars and small arms, and two dozen...

MEDAN, Indonesia (AP) — Authorities were searching for scores of inmates, including terrorists, who escaped a crowded Indonesian prison that was still burning Friday after prisoners set fires and started a deadly riot at the facility in the nation's third-largest city. Thousands of policemen and soldiers are deployed around Tanjung Gusta prison to blockade roads linking Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, to other provinces were blockaded while fire brigades were battling the fires. About 200 prisoners escaped following the riot late Thursday in which three prison employees and two inmates were killed. Officers deployed to hunt the escaped inmates...

BAGHDAD/MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them.

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility Tuesday for a jailbreak from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison that unleashed hundreds of militants into an already unstable region and boosted the group’s resurgent fortunes in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant said in a statement that hundreds of prisoners were freed late Sunday in two coordinated assaults in which fighters used suicide bombs and mortars to storm the two top security prisons on Baghdad’s outskirts at Abu Ghraib and Taji. Both were once run by the U.S. military and housed the country’s most senior al-Qaeda detainees....

Thomas Joscelyn, Long War Journal senior editor, and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD, in re: 500 prisoners or more released from Abu Ghraib, the most secure prison in Iraq. Global al Qaeda: Affiliates, objectives, and future challenges Testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, on al Qaeda, the nature of the group's central command and its relationship with its affiliates, and the future challenges the West faces in battling the terror organization. [more] Are the Iraqi police incapable of contesting al Q? Yes, rhe reality is that they needed our support...

By all accounts, the attack was planned with care and executed with precision. At two notorious Iraqi prisons, Abu Ghraib and Taji, al-Qaeda combatants last week used mortars, small arms, suicide bombers, and assault forces to free 400 prisoners, including several who had been on death row. AQ spokesmen hailed those released as “mujahedeen,” holy warriors, who will rejoin the jihad on battlefields throughout the Middle East and beyond. Soon after, we were seeing headlines such as this: “Al Qaeda Is Back.” Where had al-Qaeda gone? Dig deep in the memory hole — all the way to last summer. At...

The recent series of prison breaks is not coincidental. In less than a week, we have 500 senior Al Qaeda leaders escape during two assaults on prisons in Iraq, more than 1,000 in a prison assault in Libya, and another 250 in a particularly nasty Taliban assault on a Pakistani prison.