In just 100 days, nearly 1 million people were killed in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. This documentary explores how decades of colonial division, civil war, and the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana led to one of the most horrifying massacres in modern history.
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[ColonelCassad] The FSB has begun publishing KGB data on Nazi collaborators hiding in the West.
A new section, "The Red Book of the KGB of the USSR," has been launched on the agency's website. For the first time, it will publicly display information on individuals who committed war crimes and other crimes against Soviet citizens and hid in Western countries.
The FSB clarified that the publications will be based on the 1964 "List...," which included traitors, members of anti-Soviet organizations, punitive forces, and foreign intelligence agents.
The intelligence agency emphasized that the database is based on materials the FSB began collecting as early as 1941: over 50,000 Nazi crimes were recorded, and over 250,000 victims were interviewed. This data formed the basis for the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission and was used at the Nuremberg Trials.
The investigation revealed that after the war, Nazi criminals and their collaborators found refuge in 40 countries. Now the FSB promises to gradually release declassified and digitized KGB materials, regularly adding to the new section.
On November 29, the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia published for the first time the "Red Book" of the State Security Committee (KGB) of the USSR, which contains a list of traitors to the Motherland, foreign intelligence agents, and Nazi criminals hiding abroad after World War II.
"During the course of investigative work, state security agencies established that after the end of World War II, Nazi war criminals and their accomplices, as well as members of anti-Soviet organizations, found refuge in 40 countries around the world, " the agency's website states.
Soviet state security agencies began painstaking work to identify war criminals as early as the fall of 1941. The intelligence agencies documented crimes against Soviet citizens, collected evidence, and recorded victim testimony.
The results of this extensive work formed the basis of the Extraordinary State Commission's materials. At the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviet delegation presented over 50,000 documented facts of Nazi crimes. Over 250,000 victims were interviewed, and irrefutable evidence of atrocities was collected, the commission reported.
The published materials are taken from the "List of traitors to the Motherland, foreign intelligence agents, members of anti-Soviet organizations, punitive forces, and other state criminals identified as residing in capitalist countries," published in Moscow in 1964. The documents are systematized by the criminals' countries of residence.
The FSB plans to regularly update this section with new declassified materials from the archives.
In November 2024, the Kherson Oblast FSB Directorate published declassified archives detailing the brutality of police officers who served the Nazis in the region during the Great Patriotic War. Testimonies from victims were made public regarding the traitors' abuse of civilians.
[Breitbart] Terrorist leaders in the Middle East have a tradition of using an alias, pseudonym, or "nom de guerre," even when their true identities and given names are common knowledge.
This serves the symbolic purpose of demonstrating commitment to the cause, with the civilian man "reborn" into a second life as a murderous Moslem leader. It also confuses Western media and helps to preserve the political viability of bully boy leaders who adopt conventional political roles.
The paramount current example of this is Ahmed al-Sharaa, the interim president of Syria. Sharaa was known for many years by his alias "Abu Mohammad al-Jolani," under which name he became a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda and was tangentially involved in the creation of the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems.... Sharaa was born in 1982 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start... , but his family comes from the Golan Heights in Syria — an origin alluded to in his choice of "al-Jolani" as an alias. His family was reportedly displaced from the Golan Heights by Israeli occupation after the Six-Day War in 1967 and his father went from owning an olive grove in rural Syria to working as an oil industry economist in Saudi Arabia.
The alias of "Abu Mohammad al-Jolani" helped Sharaa stress his familial ties to Syria and his connection to the Paleostinian cause when he traveled to Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, joined al-Qaeda, and became the leader of a terrorist cell. He was captured by U.S. forces in 2005, and by his own account spent much of his captivity rededicating himself to overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators... This focus on Assad led Sharaa to grow more estranged from al-Qaeda’s agenda. He founded a branch of al-Qaeda called the Nusra Front in Syria, but later renamed it Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else ...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State... (HTS) and broke with his old terrorist masters.
When he finally achieved his goal of knocking Assad off his throne in December 2024, Sharaa dropped the Jolani alias for good, traded his combat fatigues for a three-piece suit, and reinvented himself as a statesman. The U.S. government sportingly decided to drop the $10 million bounty it had placed on the head of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and embraced the interim president named Ahmed al-Sharaa.
The al-Qaeda official who dispatched Jolani/Sharaa to Syria to create the Nusra Front was named Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, but he was better known by a pseudonym of his own: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a name hinting at his family’s history in Iraq. Under that name, he founded the Islamic State and became the most wanted man in the world.
Baghdadi was a fierce Islamist from an early age who later embraced the harsh fundamentalist doctrine of Salafism. Like Sharaa, he organized terrorist attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and he became the spiritual leader of the cell he co-founded. He was captured in the hard-fought city of Falluja and incarcerated at Camp Bucca, the same prison that held Sharaa.
Baghdadi was a fairly cooperative model prisoner, which led U.S. intelligence to underestimate the threat he posed. His terrorist cell was folded into al-Qaeda’s organization into Iraq, known as AQI, and when AQI’s leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was liquidated by a U.S. Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... in 2006, the first version of the Islamic State was born.
ISIS was originally led by a different Baghdadi but, after he was killed by a U.S. raid in 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over and transformed the group into the rapacious, savage, hyper-Islamic "caliphate" that conquered a hefty amount of territory in Iraq and Syria to build its "caliphate." One of the useful features of a nom de guerre is that it helps terrorist leaders to sculpt their biographies, playing up details such as Baghdadi’s alleged descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammad — a necessary qualification to lead the Islamic "caliphate" he wanted to create.
Baghdadi became a reclusive, security-obsessed leader during the salad days of the Islamic State and, when he died an ignominious death at the hands of U.S. special forces operatives on the orders of President Donald Trump ...Never got invited to a P.Diddy party... in 2019, his fading caliphate collapsed. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi brought a certain mystique to his leadership of the world’s worst terror state, but nobody remembers Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Baghdadi’s old boss from al-Qaeda in Iraq, used a pseudonym as well — his real name was Ahmad Fadil Nazal al-Khalayeh. He was born and raised in Jordan, racking up dozens of criminal charges for assault, robbery, and drug abuse while living the life of a petty thug. He reinvented himself as a jihadi in 1989, at a training camp in Afghanistan established by the late Osama bin Laden ...... who is now among the dear departed, though not among the dearest...... The name "Zarqawi" alludes to Zarqa, the impoverished mining town in Jordan where the future terrorist criminal mastermind grew up. More than most of his peers, he felt the need to create a new identity for himself and build a jihadist mythology, becoming an elusive figure of legend instead of a violent mostly peaceful punk from a ramshackle town.
Zarqawi initially tried to wage jihad against the government of his native Jordan, but that did not go terribly well, so he became a rootless fire-breathing ideologue and an early pioneer of using the Internet to spread his teachings. This put him on al-Qaeda’s leadership radar, although bin Laden supposedly found him boorish and unreliable.
After a few years of working with the Afghan Taliban ...Arabic for students... against U.S. forces, and a somewhat awkward interlude where he unilaterally declared himself to be in charge of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi finally received bin Laden’s seal of approval in 2004.
The actual man behind the myth always seemed to be unpopular with other al-Qaeda leaders, but Zarqawi’s preaching brought in recruits, his camps were very effective at training them, and he was an aggressive terror operative. He was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in June 2006, and by the time of his death, he had arguably become too extreme for al-Qaeda. His carefully constructed identity remains one of the great enigmas of Islamic terrorism — a legend filled with countless stories that no one can absolutely confirm or deny.
Al-Qaeda leaders usually employ pseudonyms, although there are prominent exceptions, like the group’s infamous founder Osama bin Laden. The current de facto leader of the organization is believed to be an Egyptian named Mohammed Salah al-Din al-Halim Zaidan, better known by his alias Saif al-Adel ...holed up in Iran from 2002 until 2010, when he made bail and moved back to the Pak-Afghan border... , and possibly the last surviving al-Qaeda leader from the pre-9/11 era. He took over from Ayman al-Zawahiri ...Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area assuming he's not dead like Mullah Omar. He lost major face when he ordered the nascent Islamic State to cease and desist and merge with the orthodox al-Qaeda spring, al-Nusra...> , an Egyptian doctor who used his real name and was killed by a U.S. dronezap in July 2022.
Terrorists like to use pseudonyms for one more, very simple reason: the Middle East is a confusing place, most of its countries are not noted for having well-organized high-tech bureaucracies, and using an invented name can be surprisingly effective at confusing law enforcement.
The background of Saif al-Adel is surprisingly murky, given that he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian special forces. Separating the true details of his biography from the stories told about him is challenging, and he has been shrewd about playing up that ambiguity. It is likely that the next generation of bully boyz will learn many techniques from their forerunners about creating artificial identities in the Information Age.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...
