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Our friends at the NEFA foundation have released a translation of a communique from the "Shebaab al-Mujahideen Movement in Somalia" condemning al Jazeera for passing along false information that they condemned piracy off the coast of Somalia. The message from the Shabaab stops short of supporting piracy, but it goes to great lengths in saying that the official position of the al Qaeda affiliated group is that they have not condemned the hijacking of a Saudi oil tanker, which kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it? While the crux of the statement is a condemnation of al Jazeera for it's...

November 26, 2008 BERLIN (AP) — Two German citizens suspected of distributing propaganda over the Internet supporting al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations were arrested Tuesday, German prosecutors said. The men — identified only as Daniel P., 26 and Harun Can A., 23 — were among eight suspects whose homes were raided on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said in a statement. A 19-year-old German citizen identified as Irfan P. was already in custody on separate charges before the morning raids in cities including Augsburg, Duesseldorf and Bremen, where investigators combed through the suspects' computer equipment.

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

Petraeus: Al Qaida Trying to 'Come Back In' U.S. military officials said there will be no significant reduction in coalition troops in the Baghdad area as part of an effort to stop the Al Qaida offensive in northern Iraq. They said Al Qaida was trying to reenter Baghdad and reverse its losses in 2007. "Al Qaida is trying to come back in," U.S. military commander Gen. David Petraeus said. "We can feel it and see it, and what we're trying to do is rip out any roots before they can get deeply into the ground." Read More Militants Assert...

An Austrian court on Wednesday sentenced a married couple to 22 months and four years in jail for posting a video on the Internet calling for attacks in Austria and Germany. Mona S, a 21-year-old Austrian, and her 22-year-old Egyptian-born husband Mohamed M, were found guilty of "belonging to a terrorist organisation" with links to Al-Qaeda, trying to blackmail the Austrian government and inciting a crime. The main defendant, Mohamed M., was given a four-year term while his wife was sentenced to 22 months in prison. Mona S. had translated the video, which was signed "Global Islamic Media Front", into...

VIENNA, Austria: Two men and a woman with suspected contacts to al-Qaida were arrested Wednesday in connection with an online video threat against Austria and Germany in March, officials said.

Al Qaeda 'Re-Emerging' in Pakistan Sanctuaries The U.S. military said Tuesday it expected Al Qaeda to continue its "re-emergence" in sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas from where it supported attacks in Afghanistan. Sanctuary was provided to Al Qaeda and Taliban rebels after Islamabad signed a peace deal with militants in a desperate attempt to quell the unrest in its federally administered areas in September 2006, a U.S. military official said. The militants called off the deal in July this year after Pakistani security forces raided a radical mosque in Islamabad where rebels had massed. Dozens were killed in those...

Recently, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) announced a new comprehensive media campaign titled "The Battar Media Raid to Defend the Islamic State [of Iraq] (ISI)," [1] whose declared purpose is to repel the intensive campaign against the ISI by Arab and Western media agencies and to stop the increasing military campaign against the ISI by Sunni organizations in Iraq. In a message titled "The Battar Media Raid: How to Participate? How to Help? What Is My Role?" the GIMF announces the beginning of the campaign and provides a detailed description of the campaign's goals and ways of accomplishing them,...

In response to the latest Islamist threat against Spain, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español - PSOE) thought it appropriate to assure Spaniards that "Afghanistan is not Iraq." PSOE officials told news agencies that while the war in Iraq was "illegal," the mission in Afghanistan is being supported by the UN and includes 37 countries. It turns out Islamic terrorists don't care all that much about the distinction. In a video issued this month by the Global Islamic Media Front, a hooded man warns that the presence of Spanish troops in Afghanistan "exposes Spain again to threats."...

As Jordan suffers the consequences for its friendship with the US and stance on Israel, intelligence experts have been dissecting a message from the al-Qaeda mouthpiece the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), unveiling its new secret weapon in the holy war. The warning comes in the form of a sarcastic and arrogant analysis of al-Qaeda's strategy, penned by an imaginary author calling himself Rakan ben Williams - or bin Wilyamz, as it is written in Arabic - published recently on Jihadi websites. Rakan ben Williams himself is the weapon, or "The next al-Qaeda soldier", as the analysis is titled. "Al-Qaeda's...