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BERLIN, Apr 18, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Germany has for the first time raised the possibility that a truck bombing at a Tunisian synagogue that killed 16 people was an al-Qaida terrorist attack. If verified, the blast would be the first terror attack by Osama bin Laden's terror network since Sept. 11. "We are considering all possibilities, but those that we must consider include al-Qaida structures," Interior Minister Otto Schily said on ARD television Wednesday. Schily said he intends to travel to Tunisia this weekend to meet with investigators and President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, possibly on...

Berlin, Apr 16, 2002 (EFE via COMTEX) -- German security services on Tuesday arrested an alleged Al Qaeda terrorist suspected of involvement in last week's bomb attack on a historic Tunisian synagogue in which ten German tourists were among the 16 people killed. The Federal Criminal Investigation Department (BKA) said they had taken into custody in the central city of Duisberg a person they believe had been in contact with the driver of the truck loaded with natural gas canisters that crashed into the synagogue. Tunisian authorities had said they believed the blast on the island of Djerba was...

Tunisia's prime minister says 19 people, including tourists, were killed Wednesday when gunmen targeted visitors to the country's Bardo Museum. Two of the gunmen were also killed when security forces moved in to end the standoff. Among the dead are 17 tourists from Poland, Italy, Germany and Spain. Two members of the security forces were also killed during the operation, Prime Minster Habib Essid said during a press conference. At least 24 others were injured in the attack near parliament.

At least 19 people have been killed in Tunisia after two gunmen stormed the Bardo national museum – one of the country’s leading tourist attractions in the capital, Tunis – sparking a three-hour hostage siege. Tunisia’s prime minister, Habib Essid, said on Wednesday afternoon that 17 of the dead were foreigners – from Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland – calling the attack a cowardly assault targeting the economy. Three hours after the attack started at about midday local time (11am GMT), an interior ministry spokesman said two gunmen had been killed, as well as one security officer, and that all...

Militants shot and killed at least eight people at a leading museum in Tunisia Wednesday and have taken several more hostage, the county’s interior ministry said. Interior Ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said on Radio Mosaique that only one of the dead in Wednesday's attack was a Tunisian. He did not provide nationalities for the others. Poland's Foreign Ministry announced that three Poles were among the wounded. Security forces filled the area around the National Bardo Museum in Tunis after the attack. Tunisia's parliament building, near the museum, was being evacuated, according to a tweet by parliament member Sayida Ounissi....

ISIS has released a videotape of the public beheading of twenty-one Coptic Christians somewhere along the coast of Libya. I hate to admit it, but I didn’t even know what a Coptic Christian was. So I looked it up. “Coptic” means “Egyptian” and Christians living in Egypt identify themselves as Coptic Christians. Pretty simple. Copts were organized between A.D. 42 – A.D. 62 and consider John Mark, the author of the Gospel of Mark, to be their founder. Over the years, Egypt fell under the colonial rule of Italy which demanded loyalty to Roman rulers. The Copts refused to show...

Militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized a university in the Libyan city of Sirte, a faculty member and residents said, days after a video showed them staging a convoy parade. Islamist militants have made inroads into parts of the North African oil-producing country, exploiting a power vacuum created by a violent struggle for control between two competing governments. Also read: Exclusive: ISIS chief Baghdadi in new pictures The incident came after the coalition of Islamist militias in control of the capital Tripoli known as Fajr Libya (Dawn of Libya) said they were sending armed units...

Harith al Nadhari recorded an audio eulogy for Mohammed al Zahawi, the leader of Ansar al Sharia Libya, shortly before his own death. Shortly before his own death in a US airstrike on Jan. 31, Harith al Nadhari, a senior sharia official in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), recorded an audio eulogy for another slain jihadist, Mohammed al Zahawi. Ansar al Sharia Libya confirmed earlier in the month that Zahawi, the group's leader, had died of wounds he suffered while fighting in Benghazi. And Nadhari wanted to make it clear that al Qaeda considered Zahawi to be...

The site of Zita contains remains of a Roman forum and a Punic child sacrifice precinct. During the summer of 2015, a team of archaeologists and other specialists and students will be exploring a large mound that contains the remains of an ancient city that once commanded the highest point on a peninsula that juts out from the southern coast of Tunisia into the Mediterranean. Visible from the island of Djerba, which was anciently known as Calypso of the Lotus Eaters in Homer's The Odyssey, the mound features the remains from a Roman bathhouse, ceramic kilns, evidence of metallurgy, and...

In a major positive development, Egypt's President Al Sisi has made an impassioned plea for a "religious revolution" in Islam. Speaking at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Sisi spoke directly to the religious establishment of Egypt: Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible! I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema – Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I'm talking about...

Speaking before Al-Azhar and the Awqaf Ministry on New Year's Day, 2015, in connection to Prophet Muhammad's upcoming birthday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a vocal supporter for a renewed vision of Islam, made what must be his most forceful and impassioned plea to date on the subject. Among other things, Sisi said that the "corpus of [Islamic] texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years" are "antagonizing the entire world"; that it is not "possible that 1.6 billion people [reference to the world's Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so...

Walking U.N. Perhaps Sen. John Kerry does have an advantage after all over President Bush in understanding the complex political issues of the Middle East. New research by Burke's Peerage reveals that Mr. Kerry is the only presidential candidate in U.S. history who has genealogical descent from Muslims, Jews and Christians. "Senator Kerry ... is a virtual walking United Nations," says Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's. Mr. Kerry is kinsman of the Shi'ite shahs of Persia (the most famous was Shah Abbas I, who reigned from 1587 to 1629), as well as the Muslim kings of Tunisia, all of...

The Islamic State Widens its Bridgehead in North AfricaPosted By Ari Lieberman On December 3, 2014 @ 12:05 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments As ISIS continues its brutal occupation of large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, effectively blurring the border between those two pseudo nations, a new, if not more menacing threat is emerging in North Africa where the Islamic State is looking to plant its cancerous roots.In Egypt, the Sinai based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, an Islamist organization responsible for dozens of terror attacks throughout the country announced on its Twitter account that it had...

President Obama has opened a new front in his hard line against the incoming Republican Congress by releasing more detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, against lawmakers' objections. The Pentagon announced Thursday that four al Qaeda fighters from Yemen, including a senior figure who facilitated travel to Afghanistan for Arab extremists, and a Tunisian extremist would be transferred to Slovakia and Georgia. The transfers leave 143 detainees at Guantanamo, which Obama has vowed to close. Republican lawmakers, who have been pressing the administration to stop releasing detainees amid reports that some former prisoners had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and...

A veteran State Department diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert is under federal investigation as part of a counterintelligence probe and has had her security clearances withdrawn, according to U.S. officials. The FBI searched the Northwest Washington home of Robin L. Raphel last month, and her State Department office was also examined and sealed, officials said. Raphel, a fixture in Washington’s diplomatic and think-tank circles, was placed on administrative leave last month, and her contract with the State Department was allowed to expire this week. Two U.S. officials described the investigation as a counterintelligence matter, which typically involves allegations of spying...

The Duke of Wellington said of his close-run victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo that the French "came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way." Something like that happened to the Democrats in Tuesday's midterm elections, as they lost the Senate, a few more seats in the House and additional governorships. They came on with the same old strategy, but this time they went down with it. Obama and the Democrats chose not to defend the administration's record of the last six years. On foreign policy, no Democratic chorus...

ISIL fighters in Syria forced children as young as 14 to watch videos of beheadings and beat them with cables during six months of captivity, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in late May abducted more than 150 Kurdish boys from the town of Kobane, now a focal point of ISIL’s offensive aimed at consolidating its presence in northern Syria. The children had been returning home after taking school exams in the city of Aleppo. ISIL subsequently freed all the captives, the last 25 being released on Oct. 29. ISIL has...

CAIRO — The Arab League warned Sunday that Israel has reached a “red line” after fresh clashes in Jerusalem, urging international pressure to stop what it branded “violations” in the holy city. Clashes around the flashpoint Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque compound — the third holiest site in Islam and Judaism’s holiest — prompted Israel on Thursday to close the site for a day. The Temple Mount and adjacent neighborhoods have seen months of violence, with the mosque compound a rallying point for Palestinian resistance to perceived Jewish attempts to take control of it...

(Reuters) - Inquiries into the bloody assault on an Algerian gas plant are uncovering increasing evidence of contacts between the assailants and the jihadis involved in killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya nearly a year ago.The extent of the contacts between the militants is still unclear and nobody is sure there was a direct link between the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the carnage at In Amenas, where 39 foreign hostages were killed in January.But the findings, according to three sources with separate knowledge of U.S. investigations, shed some light on the connections between Al Qaeda affiliates...

counterrevolutions against Islamist rule in Egypt and Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood fell hard and fast in Egypt. In Tunisia it’s been more of a slow drawn out fight ... now the Arab Spring wellspring has fallen. A few days ago the New York Times was predicting that the Islamist Ennahda party would rebound and portraying them as the victims. So much for that. ... Ennahda isn’t as done as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, it could still climb back, but this is a severe blow to the political Islamists and their Western backers who hoped to propel them to power through...