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The U.S. military conducted airstrikes against the senior ISIS attack planner and other terrorists in Somalia on Saturday. President Trump said on his Truth Social network that the strikes, the first military action since he took office Jan. 20, were carried out Saturday morning. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement the U.S. worked with Somalian authorities to carry out the offensive. “This morning, I ordered precision military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia,” Trump wrote in his post. The airstrikes took out ISIS operatives in the...

Available online at: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/01/al_qaedas_operations.php Osama al Kini, also known as Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam. The US killed al Qaeda's chief of operations in the New Year's Day missile strike in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled tribal agency of South Waziristan, according to a report. The Jan. 1 attack in the town of Karikot in South Waziristan killed Osama al Kini and his senior aide Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, intelligence officials told The Washington Post. Two other unnamed operatives were also killed in the airstrike. Osama al Kini's is an alias for Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam, a Kenyan national and a senior al Qaeda...

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) - A series of witnesses place six top al-Qaida fugitives in Africa buying up diamonds in the run-up to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a confidential report by UN-backed prosecutors obtained by The Associated Press. The first-person accounts detailed by the prosecutors add to long-standing claims that al-Qaida laundered millions of dollars in terror funds through African diamonds before launching its deadliest offensive. Al-Qaida figures, including some already wanted in pre-Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. targets, dealt directly with then-president Charles Taylor and other leaders and warlords in the West African country of Liberia from 1999...

A New Year's CIA strike in northern Pakistan killed two top al-Qaeda terrorists long sought by the United States, including the man believed to be behind September's deadly suicide bombing at a Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital, U.S. counterterrorism officials told The Washingon Post today. Agency officials determined in recent days that among the dead in the Jan. 1 missile strike were a Kenyan national who used the name Usama al-Kini and who was described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations in Pakistan and his lieutenant, identified as Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, the sources said. Both men were associated with...

Daniel Joseph Maldonado, a former Houston resident who convereted to Islam and admitted training with terrorists, was sentenced today to 10 years in prison and given a $1,000 fine. Maldonado, 28, pleaded guilty in April to training with al-Qaida in East Africa. He is the first American charged with joining the terrorist organization in Somalia. The charge carried a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a fine up to $250,000. He admitted his association with terrorists in exchange for no further prosecution by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Houston. Maldonado came to the attention of federal investigators in late...

Someone moved the UK's oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why. Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa's east coast to relay communications for British forces. When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean. But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas. Orbital mechanics mean it's unlikely the...

In the wake of yet another foiled ISIS-inspired terrorist plot, this one by a Canada-based Pakistani seeking to kill Jews in New York on the anniversary of last year’s Hamas attack in Israel, everyone is loudly proclaiming: “ISIS is back.”And yet, this analysis is wrong.For someone or something to “be back,” it has to have left in the first place. This return can be surprising or expected, but in the end it is of note. With respect to the ISIS terrorist group, it has not “resurged” because it never went away in the first place.The group has been around since...

It was morning in East Africa. The day was May 26, 1886, and along the shore of Lake Victoria the mist still hung thickly in the jungle undergrowth, although the sun had risen well above the horizon. The night-time cacophony of wildlife had long since subsided, and the land was quiet except for the buzzing of insects and the murmur of hushed voices.In a wide clearing on a hill above the lake, a dramatic scene unfolded. Uganda's King Mwanga was holding court in the open-air gathering place in front of his temporary residence, his royal palace being under repair after...

In the latest twist to the document scandal, investigators said the revelation about translators was among several criticisms of America’s ability to deal with the looming al Qaeda threat contained in the “after action” memo on the millennium terror plot that is at the center of the Berger probe. Officials said an appeal to hire more translators familiar with Arabic, Pashto and other key “counter-terrorism” languages at the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency was among 29 proposals to tighten security contained in the report. The report written by former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke also warned of the...

One U.S. service member and two American Department of Defense contractors were killed in a terror attack on a military base in Kenya that houses some U.S. military personnel. The Somali terror group al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for the attack that Kenyan authorities said had been repelled with four militants killed in the fighting. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of our teammates who lost their lives today," U.S. Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in a statement Sunday afternoon. "As we honor their sacrifice, let's also harden our resolve. Alongside our...

A sign commemorating the arrival of the first Africans is displayed at Chesapeake Bay, in Hampton, Va., August 24, 2019. (Michael A. McCoy/Reuters) It didn’t begin or end in the United States. The same people most obsessed with slavery seem to have little interest in the full scope of its history. There has been an effort for decades now — although with new momentum lately, as exemplified by the New York Times’ 1619 project — to identify the United States and its founding with slavery. To the extent that this campaign excavates uncomfortable truths about our history and underlines...

A multinational law enforcement investigation led to the arrest of three alleged human smugglers in Brazil. The ring is charged with trafficking migrants from East Africa and the Middle East to Brazil and then to the U.S. Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations announced on Wednesday, the arrest of three alleged human smugglers by law enforcement authorities in Brazil. Statements from ICE and the Department of Justice report that Brazilian authorities executed search warrants leading to the arrests of Abdifatah Hussein Ahmed (a Somalian national); Abdessalem Martani (an Algerian national); and Mohsen Khademi Manesh (an...

Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago... The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time. The team has concluded that many forms of life survived the super-eruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks. According to the team, a potentially ground-breaking implication of the new work is that the species responsible for making the stone tools in India was Homo...

"We found the very first evidence for archaeological assemblages in association with the Toba ash", says Petraglia. "We found Middle Palaeolithic assemblages below and above the ash indicating the technologies being used at the time of the event. When the stone tool assemblages were analyzed from contexts above and below the ash, we found that they were very similar........We therefore concluded that the Middle Palaeolithic hominins survived the eruption and there was population continuity. This is not what would have been expected based on general theories that the Toba super-eruption decimated populations." Moreover, similar findings published by Christine Lane, et...

...a team of archaeologists excavating in India then claimed to have found evidence that modern humans were there before the eruption possibly as early as 120,000 years ago, much earlier than Europe or the Near East were colonised. These findings, based on the discovery of stone tools below a layer of Toba ash, were published in Science in 2007. Now Professor Richards working principally with the archaeologist Professor Sir Paul Mellars, of the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh, with a team including Huddersfield University s Dr Martin Carr and colleagues from York and Porto has published his...

The idea that humans nearly became extinct 75,000 ago because of a super-volcano eruption is not supported by new data from Africa, scientists say. In the past, it has been proposed that the so-called Toba event plunged the world into a volcanic winter, killing animal and plant life and squeezing our species to a few thousand individuals. An Oxford University-led team examined ancient sediments in Lake Malawi for traces of this climate catastrophe. It could find none... Researchers estimate some 2,000-3,000 cubic kilometres of rock and ash were thrown from the volcano when it blew its top on what is...

Super-eruption: no problem?Tools found before and after a massive eruption hint at a hardy population. Katharine Sanderson Massive eruptions make it tough for life living under the ash cloud. A stash of ancient tools in India hints that life carried on as usual for humans living in the fall-out of a massive volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago. Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia —...

Kenya will fast-track laws to make wildlife poaching a capital offense as part of the country's bid to conserve flora and fauna, a senior government official said late Thursday. Najib Balala, the Minister for Tourism and Wildlife, said that once the laws are enacted, the offenders of the wildlife crimes will face the death penalty in accordance with the laws of the land. "We have in place the Wildlife Conservation Act that was enacted in 2013 and which fetches offenders a life sentence or a fine of 200,000 U.S. dollars. However, this has not been deterrence enough to curb poaching,...

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA—The massive Toba volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra about 74,000 years ago did not cause a six-year-long "volcanic winter" in East Africa and thereby cause the human population in the region to plummet, according to new University of Arizona-led research. The new findings disagree with the Toba catastrophe hypothesis, which says the eruption and its aftermath caused drastic, multi-year cooling and severe ecological disruption in East Africa. "This is the first research that provides direct evidence for the effects of the Toba eruption on vegetation just before and just after the eruption," said lead author Chad...

Two workers at Mercy Hospital and Abbot Northwestern Hospital, both located in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area and owned by Allina Health, have been diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB). “I can confirm that one hospital worker at Mercy Hospital and one hospital worker at Abbott Northwestern Hospital were diagnosed with active TB,” Allina Health Vice President of Marketing and Communications David Kanihan tells Breitbart News.