Global terrorism thread

“They did not do the job,” Mohammad Rahami said Tuesday near his First American Fried Chicken takeout restaurant. The feds conducted a perfunctory two-month probe that turned up no links between Ahmad Khan Rahami and Islamic jihadists.

“Two years ago, I called the FBI,” the suspect’s dad recounted. “My son, he’s doing really bad, OK?”

The FBI told the father that Ahmad was “clear — he’s not (a) terrorist,” the elder Rahami said. “Now (they) say he’s a terrorist. I say OK.”

The father recounted reaching out to the FBI after Ahmad stabbed his brother Nasim in an unprovoked attack and attacked his mother.

While Mohammad Rahami pointed his finger at the feds, a source told the Daily News that he was the one who changed his story after reporting Ahmad to the FBI as a possible terrorist.

The elder Rahami later told the FBI that he was mistaken about his son — a U.S. citizen who was born in Afghanistan, the source said.

Details of the 2014 probe emerged as officials revealed the suspect was carrying a notebook filled with references to other domestic terrorist cases and one top Al Qaeda leader.

A bullet tore a hole in the notebook during Monday morning’s New Jersey gunfight before Rahami’s arrest, with its pages stained by his blood, officials said.

A police source described the notebook as filled with “various ramblings” about terror and terrorists.

The Economist: Assimilation report

A year after Angela Merkel welcomed migrants, two Syrians differ on whether integration can work

IF ALL of the roughly 567,000 Syrian refugees currently in Germany were like Firas Alshater (pictured), there would be no integration problem. Mr Alshater is living proof that alienation and trauma can be overcome with a good attitude. In Syria, he was tortured in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons for nine months. “You sit there, hear the torment of others, and you don’t know when it’s your turn,” he recalls. In 2013 he escaped to Germany. “I had heard that the Germans are closed,” he says. “No, they’re not!” Now 25, he rarely looks back.

But Mr Alshater fled to Europe at a time when the flow of migrants was still manageable. That changed a year ago, during the night of September 4th-5th. Masses of refugees who had trudged through the Balkans were stranded in a train station in Budapest. Fearing a humanitarian disaster, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, allowed the whole lot into Germany. What was meant as a one-off exception was interpreted in the Middle East and Europe as a new open-borders policy, attracting even more refugees. Germany’s initially euphoric “welcome culture” soon soured, especially after New Year’s Eve, when crowds of mainly Arab men, including refugees, robbed and sexually assaulted women during festivities in Cologne and other cities. Now, as Germans mark the first anniversary of their experiment, many worry that integrating refugees will prove harder than they ever imagined.

Mr Alshater burst into the public eye shortly after the Cologne assaults, like an angel of cross-cultural mingling. Speaking fluent German by now, he put his Syrian theatre-studies degree to good use with a self-produced You Tube clip. “Who are these Germans?”, he promised to explain, sitting on a couch with a scraggly beard and body piercings. As with all his succeeding clips—called Zukar Stückchen, mixing the Arabic for “sugar” with the German for “cubes”—the video has negligible intellectual content but oozes comedy and goodwill. In one stunt, Mr Alshater stands blindfolded in a Berlin square until people spontaneously begin hugging him.

The clips went viral, helping Mr Alshater to launch a promising career in German media. With a partner, he is producing more Zukar Stückchen and will air his first television film this month. All this makes integration look easy. Is he a role model? “I don’t even know what ‘integration’ is,” he shrugs. “I accept them, they accept me, and I don’t bother anybody.”

Others are less sanguine, among them Germany’s best-known Syrian immigrant of an earlier generation, Bassam Tibi. The 72-year-old Mr Tibi was born into an aristocratic family in Damascus. He learned to recite the Koran as a child, and grew up imbibing the anti-Semitism that pervaded his environment. But in 1962 he came to Germany, studied with renowned German-Jewish philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and embraced the West’s tolerant and open society. As a professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen for four decades, he popularised the term “Euro-Islam”, arguing that Muslims can and should integrate by blending their traditional and adopted cultures into a secularised and modern faith.

But of late Mr Tibi has turned pessimistic. Mrs Merkel’s welcome last year, he thinks, could even turn Germany into a “failed state”. Recently, he spoke with ten young Syrians. “Two of them spoke German, were doing well, and reminded me of myself back then,” he says. “The other eight were telling me that ‘Allah gave us Germany as a refuge, not the Germans’.” Most Syrians and other Muslims, he now thinks, will never integrate, instead retreating into misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic worldviews and segregating themselves in radicalised enclaves.

Many Germans share his worries. Anxiety has risen since July, when a Syrian refugee blew himself up outside a concert in Bavaria, injuring 15 people, and an Afghan refugee hacked several passengers on a train with an axe. Both claimed to be acting on behalf of Islamic State. The government knows of 340 cases in which Islamic extremists have infiltrated refugee camps in search of recruits.

Hard information on the progress of integrating refugees is elusive. Crime statistics suggest that “refugees, on average, are as likely or unlikely to become delinquent as the local population”, according to the interior ministry. Indeed, relative to their numbers, Syrians are under-represented among criminal suspects. (Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians are over-represented, but rarely qualify as refugees.) Other objective measures of integration—such as the speed with which the newcomers learn German, acquire vocational skills and find jobs—will take years to assess. As of July, the backlog of unprocessed asylum applications was still more than half a million cases. With so much unknown, anxiety only increases.

Mr Alshater is always cheerful in his videos, but in person can appear tired and sad at times. He tries bravely to remain optimistic. Integration just takes a lot of time, he says. “When I came, just that fucking paperwork took a year,” he says, displaying an idiomatic command of German expletives. “But those now crammed in the camps with hundreds of other refugees— how are they supposed to integrate? Speaking to a wall? To an oak tree?”

Mr Tibi, convinced that integration will fail, blames not only the refugees. The German government thinks the challenge of integration boils down to teaching refugees German and getting them jobs. But it is really about identity, he says, and this is where German society fails. During his own stints at American universities, he was always impressed by how quickly he felt a sense of belonging. In Germany, even after writing 30 books in German and marrying a German wife, people still make him feel foreign. “I suffer from an identity crisis, but I go to a psychoanalyst and lie on the couch,” Mr Tibi says. “These 16-year-olds go to Islamic State.”

According to the Iraqi media, a large amount of publications that were promoting SIS ideology, were destroyed, and an unidentified number ISIS guards killed in the blaze.

There are frequent attacks against ISIS by residents of Mosul who are wishing for the end of the terrorist group in their hometown, while the Iraqi army backed by the US-led coalition are now preparing for an ultimate assault to oust ISIS out of Mosul.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces are expected to play a key role in the operation that is expected to take place before the end of 2016.

As he begins to speak, he shifts nervously and fiddles with the ring on his finger.

"Islamic State members may find this place. We cannot run that risk," he tells Al Jazeera, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group. "I am from Mosul. I was there when ISIL came into the town during the summer of 2014. I managed to escape with my family, but we lost everything."

Musalli, 28, is one of the founders and managers of Alghad FM, which he describes as the first radio station to broadcast music and cultural programmes into an ISIL stronghold 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

After his family fled Mosul in June 2014, leaving all their possessions, friends and relatives behind, Musalli said that he began to feel guilty for those still trapped in the ISIL-held city.

"It was impossible to keep in contact with those who were besieged inside. I thought that a radio could be the only way to communicate with my people," he said.

Musalli, who studied engineering technology in the United States, quickly began to develop his plans, researching how such a station could be set up and learning the process as he went along. In March 2015, after obtaining authorisation from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), he and two other station founders went to a frontline location to install transmitters to broadcast the FM signal into ISIL-held areas.

The location was only a few kilometres from ISIL outposts, he said.

"The hardest and most dangerous part was to reach those areas and to put the transmitters near the frontlines without being intercepted," Musalli said, sitting at his desk in front of a battered computer. "We drove to the place in the early morning. I was thinking more about the distance between us and Mosul [for the signal strength]."

It took them seven hours to install the necessary transmitters, antennae, internet infrastructure and backup electricity, he said.

Asked about the station, KRG spokesman Safin Dzayi told Al Jazeera: "[We] support all the initiatives to defeat Daesh [ISIL] in terms of military, cultural or psychological efforts. Military operations are not enough for the liberation of Mosul. It's necessary to have support from the local population."

When the station went live in March 2015, the reaction was almost immediate. With the transmitters outside the group's reach, ISIL banned the sale of radios in Mosul after just one week, Musalli said - but with a radio already installed in almost every car and most houses, it was impossible to silence the airwaves.

Instead, ISIL set up its own station in Mosul to broadcast on the same frequency and obstruct Alghad FM, he said, citing information from sources inside the city.

But Musalli and his colleagues were undeterred. After a few months, they returned to a different frontline location and installed more transmitters, giving themselves the ability to broadcast over multiple frequencies. They relied on the feedback of listeners to know whether they were being heard in the occupied city.

"Even today, ISIL is jamming one of our frequencies, but we were able to broadcast over their radio stations," he said.

Alghad FM broadcasts a range of programmes, from talk shows, to health coverage, to shows about food and sports. It also airs cultural programmes focusing on poetry, religion and entertainment.

One programme, called "I am a Citizen", allows people to vent their frustrations about everything from life under ISIL to more routine daily annoyances. In one recent episode, a woman named Fatima phoned in to complain about schooling: "My children have not been to school for two years. I hide them, because I don't want them attending [ISIL-run] schools. I hope that when all this will be over, they will be able to start studying again."

There are also call-in sessions to discuss major issues affecting Mosul, such as new rules or punishments imposed by ISIL.

"We have our network [of people inside Mosul] who help us to understand what is happening," Musalli said. "If we know that ISIL has a new policy or they are punishing people, we bring this topic to the centre of the show, and we let citizens pour out [their thoughts]."

Qassim Khidhir, a project manager with the Media Academy consultancy in Iraq, said that Alghad FM has broken a key barrier by becoming the only station to broadcast into Mosul, after ISIL destroyed radios and satellite dishes inside the city.

"Alghad FM is effective and influential for two reasons," Khidir told Al Jazeera. "ISIL tried to overcome their frequencies, and this shows that they are doing well, because [ISIL fighters] are upset. The second reason is the possibility for the people inside to talk and to be listened to ... It's the only way to express themselves."

Over the months, Alghad FM has become a space where people from Mosul can talk freely about their problems, their hopes and their dreams for the future.

"Some people are scared and they are just passive listeners, but we receive many phone calls, especially from women, to tell us about daily life in Mosul," Musalli said, noting that the station also receives calls from ISIL members.

In one recent incident, a caller purporting to be affiliated with ISIL warned: "I will be the one who will blow himself up when I come, because we will reach you soon." Despite such threats, Musalli has told contributors not to cut any phone calls.

Although the station only broadcasts in and around Mosul, listeners in Europe, Turkey and the US tune in via the internet stream. At the beginning of August, one man called in with a message for his mother: "Mum, if you are listening, I want to tell you that I'm alive and in Sweden," he announced.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, more than one million civilians are still living under ISIL rule inside Mosul. For many, Alghad FM has become not just a way to break their isolation, but also a form of resistance.

"If I chose to stay in Iraq," Musalli said, "it is because it is our duty do our best in order to bring back the city to what it was before, where all the communities coexisted in the same territory."

Alsumaria stated, “Today, an explosion took place amid a meeting of ISIS members in al-Mahawes village in Hawija district (55 km southwest of Kirkuk),” adding that, “The explosion resulted in the killing of 16 members of the Islamic State group, including senior leaders, as well as wounding of 16 others.”

“A number of the ISIS members were wearing explosive belts during the meeting, and the explosion took place due to a defect in one of them,” Sumaria explained. “The meeting was held to prepare for an attack on the positions of the security forces in Hamrin Mountains, al-Zawiya area and Ajil area in Salahuddin Province,” Sumaria added.