FORT RILEY, Kan. — Here on the Kansas plains, thousands of soldiers once bound for Iraq or Afghanistan are now gearing up for missions in Africa as part of a new Pentagon strategy to train and advise indigenous forces to tackle emerging terrorist threats and other security risks so that American forces do not have to. The first-of-its-kind program is drawing on troops from a 3,500-member brigade in the Army ...

One can’t talk about recent news from Somalia — the deadly attack by Shabab militants on a U.N. compound in June, the decision in August by Doctors Without Borders to pull out of the country, the massacre last month at a shopping mall in Kenya, for which Al Shabab took responsibility — without in some way speaking about Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheik Mohamud.   Just a year into his presidency, Mr. M ...

The National Security Administration (NSA) has intercepted communications of the Mexican government for years, has read text messages and listened to phone calls of its current President Enrique Pena Nieto, and has hacked into the email servers of private companies in Latin America, according to a report published on Sunday by Der Spiegel, a German newspaper.   The report is based on documents leaked b ...

(NBC News) South Africa – The jihadist speaks with an unmistakable London accent, railing against “disbelievers who dominate our lives and our lands” in a glossy propaganda video for al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamic extremist group that claimed responsibility for last month’s attack on Kenya's premier shopping mall.   The masked militant who appears to have featured in similar videos in the past makes a ...

LAGOS, Nigeria — In a striking glimpse into Nigeria’s escalating war with Islamist militants, mortuary records from a single Nigerian hospital show that the number of detainees who died in military custody more than tripled in June, after a state of emergency was declared in the northeast.   Overall, the records obtained by the Associated Press for the nine months from Oct. 5, 2012, to July 5 indicate ...

Bad news in the five-year-old U.S. proxy war against al-Qaida–allied Somali insurgents. Half of the U.S.-supplied weaponry that enables cash-strapped Ugandan and Burundian troops to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab terror group is winding up in al-Shabab’s hands.   The kicker: It’s the cash-strapped Ugandans who are selling the weapons to the insurgents.   This revelation, buried in U.N. reports and high ...

A prominent British Muslim commentator is being protected by police following concerns over his safety following the release of a video by Somali-based terror group, al-Shabaab, which singled out several British Muslims for having criticised jihadists in the aftermath of the Woolwich murder.   Mohammed Ansar, a filmmaker and journalist who has spoken out against extremism in Islam and the far right, sa ...

He is speaking from Somalia in the name of Al Shabab, but he has an impeccable British accent and he’s appealing directly to Muslims in the UK. He wants another Woolwich-style attack. “If you can’t afford one of these,” he says, shaking an AK47 in the air, “a simple knife from B&Q will do the job.”   This is a terrorist recruitment video with a difference. Not only is it in the English language, it ...

(msnbc.com) Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency who lead the NSA during some of its toughest political challenges, is stepping down from the post early next year, according to Reuters. Alexander is the longest serving director of the NSA, having held the position for eight years. During the last four months, Alexander found himself faced with the greatest political and securit ...

By Harar24′s Editorials team Al-Shabaab’s media wing, Al-Kataib released a 58 minutes long video today. The title of the video “Woolwich attack: It’s an eye for an eye” appears to have been taken from the words of Michael Adebolajo, who after killing Lee Rigby at Woolwich said in front of a camera said: “An eye for an eye & tooth for a tooth”. The video was taken down several times and digitally corrupt ...