After killing an important ISIS leader in battle, Kurdish forces in Syria found a huge bag of cocaine in the slain commander’s home, providing further speculation that militants often use narcotics despite the fact that its police units strictly enforce drug bans inside the group’s strongholds.

As Kurdish advancements in Kobane have allowed the People’s Protection Unit to push ISIS militants out of about 80 percent of the strategic Syrian border town, key ISIS leader Emir Abu Zahra was killed by the kurds in a recent gun fight.

Vice News‘ video footage shows that the during the Kurdish unit’s subsequent search of Zahra’s home in the Botan neighborhood of Kobane, the troops found a huge bag containing a white powdery substance.

With the Kurdish troops uncertain as to what the bag contained, Vice New’s journalist Joakim Medin, who was present during the search, wrote that he suspected that bag was filled with cocaine. Medin then dipped a finger into the powder and tasted the substance to confirm.

“It’s a big bag of cocaine,” Medin wrote. “I must admit, I am familiar with the taste of the drug. … The other guys have no knowledge of this drug or how people use it. It is nothing they have heard of or encountered before.”

Front Page Mag reports that judging by the estimated weight of the bag seen in the video and the UN-reported street prices of cocaine in Syria, the amount of cocaine contained in the bag is probably worth about half a million dollars.

The grand quantity of cocaine found in Zahra’s home gives reason to believe that the drug was intended to be distributed, to ISIS fighters. According to The Daily Mail, it’s believed that Zahra was known to distribute cocaine to ISIS militants to help ease their minds as they face the brunt of U.S.-led coalition aerial bombings.

“With the finding of what seems to be Abu Zahra’s cocaine in Kobane, this could be the first confirmed and concrete evidence of drug use among IS fighters — and of a double standard of men who preach fundamentalism, yet they are getting high as they commit massacres,” Medin wrote.

Although ISIS is preventing people within its strongholds from using drugs by placing bans on the use of narcotics, alcohol and smoking, Medin reports that Kurdish fighters have said that they found some ISIS fighters to be “drug-crazed” and have also found mysterious pills, capsules, and syringes on living and killed militants.

Some former ISIS fighters have claimed that they were drugged by leaders before battle to help them fight with more bravery, and create more courage for militants to carry out suicide attacks. A 15-year-old who claimed to have been forced into joining the jihadists’ ranks alleged that he was personally given an anti-anxiety medicine, similar to Zolam, and then given a suicide belt before going into battle.

“That drug makes you lose your mind,” the 15-year-old told CBS News. “If they give you a suicide belt and tell you to blow yourself up, you’ll do it.”

The prevalent drug use by the ISIS militants contradicts their religious police forces’ imposition of harsh punishments for non-militants caught using drugs in the caliphate.

A previous ISIS propaganda video showed militants whipping three drug users near the Syrian town of Damascus. One person who was caught smoking in Raqqa told Al-Monitor that he was punished for smoking by having all of his fingers broken by a militant, who bent his fingers back and forth with a set of pliers.

Source: Christian Today

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has confirmed the Palestinians will formally become a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on April 1 and the court’s registrar said on Wednesday that jurisdiction would date back to June 13, 2014. This means the court’s prosecutor could investigate the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip in July and August 2014, during which more than 2,100 Palestinians, 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed.

The Hague-based court handles war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It could exercise jurisdiction over such crimes committed by anyone on Palestinian territory. Israel, like the United States, is not a an ICC member, but its citizens could be tried on accusations of crimes on Palestinian land.

On Friday the Palestinians delivered to UN headquarters documents to join the Rome Statute of the ICC and other international treaties, in a move that has heightened tensions with Israel and could lead to cuts in US aid.

Ban announced in a letter posted to a UN website late on Tuesday that the Palestinians would formally become an ICC member on April 1. The United Nations is the official depositary of the Rome Statute and many other treaties.

The United States said on Wednesday it does not believe Palestine is a sovereign state and therefore does not qualify to be part of the International Criminal Court.

Experts said the only apparent way to challenge the Palestinians’ eligibility to be an ICC member would be in court.

“The most likely challenge would be if an Israeli national ever came before the court,” said Dov Jacobs, a law professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“A defence lawyer could try to challenge the case’s legality by arguing to judges that Palestine was not a state,” he said. Few scholars say that such an argument would be successful.

The Palestinian government signed the Rome Statute on December 31, a day after a bid for independence by 2017 failed at the UN Security Council.

The Palestinians, who have been locked in a bloody conflict with Israel for decades, seek a state that covers Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – lands Israel captured in a 1967 war.

Momentum to recognise a Palestinian state has built since President Mahmoud Abbas succeeded in a bid for de facto recognition of statehood at the UN General Assembly in 2012, making Palestinians eligible to join the ICC.

Source: Christian Today

Two armed suspects in Charlie Hebdo shootings have been located in northern France, AFP reports.

A manhunt for brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi has been underway since yesterday’s shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris which killed 12 people.

A third suspect turned himself in to police in Charleville-Mézières, an official at the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

The hooded attackers stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a weekly known for lampooning Islam and other religions, in the most deadly militant attack on French soil in decades.

Police issued a document to polices forces across the region saying the men were being sought for murder in relation to the Charlie Hebdo attack.

The document named them as Said Kouachi, born in 1980, Cherif Kouachi, born in 1982, both from Paris, and Hamyd Mourad, born in 1996.

The police source said one of them had been identified by his identity card, which had been left in the getaway car.

BFM TV, citing unidentified sources, said the man had decided to go to the police after seeing his name in social media. It said other arrests had taken place in circles linked to the two brothers.

The police source said Cherif Kouachi had previously been tried on terrorism charges and served 18 months in prison.

He was charged with criminal association related to a terrorist enterprise in 2005. He had been part of an Islamist cell that enlisted French nationals from a mosque in eastern Paris to go to Iraq to fight Americans in Iraq. He was arrested before leaving for Iraq to join militants.

Police published pictures of the two brothers Thursday morning calling for witnesses and describing the two men as “armed and dangerous.”

The police source said anti-terrorism police searching for the suspects and links to them had carried out searches in Reims, Strasbourg and Paris as part of the investigation.

A Reuters reporter in Reims saw anti-terrorism police secure a building before a forensics team entered an apartment there while dozens of residents looked on.

EXECUTIONS

During the attack, one of the assailants was captured on video outside the building shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Greatest) as shots rang out. Another walked over to a police officer lying wounded on the street and shot him point-blank with an assault rifle before the two calmly climbed into a black car and drove off.

A police union official said there were fears of further attacks, and described the scene in the offices as carnage, with a further four wounded fighting for their lives.

Tens of thousands joined impromptu rallies across France in memory of the victims and to support freedom of expression.

The government declared the highest state of alert, tightening security at transport hubs, religious sites, media offices and department stores as the search for the assailants got under way.

Some Parisians expressed fears about the effect of the attack on community relations in France, which has Europe’s biggest Muslim population.

“This is bad for everyone – particularly for Muslims despite the fact that Islam is a fine religion. It risks making a bad situation worse,” Cecile Electon, an arts worker who described herself as an atheist, told Reuters at a vigil on Paris’s Place de la Republique attended by 35,000 people.

Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) is well known for courting controversy with satirical attacks on political and religious leaders of all faiths and has published numerous cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad. Jihadists online repeatedly warned that the magazine would pay for its ridicule.

The last tweet on its account mocked Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the militant Islamic State, which has taken control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria and called for “lone wolf” attacks on French soil.

There was no claim of responsibility. However, a witness quoted by 20 Minutes daily newspaper said one of the assailants cried out before getting into his car: “Tell the media that it is al Qaeda in Yemen!”

Supporters of Islamic State and other jihadist groups hailed the attack on Internet sites. Governments throughout Europe have expressed fear that fighters returning from Iraq or Syria could launch attacks in their home countries.

“Today the French Republic as a whole was the target,” President Francois Hollande said in a prime-time evening television address. He declared a national day of mourning on Thursday.

BARBARIC ACT

An amateur video broadcast by French television stations shows two hooded men in black outside the building. One of them spots a wounded policeman lying on the ground, hurries over to him and shoots him dead at point-blank range with a rifle.

In another clip on television station iTELE, the men are heard shouting in French: “We have killed Charlie Hebdo. We have avenged the Prophet Mohammad.”

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the assailants killed a man at the entrance of the building to force entry. They then headed to the second floor and opened fire on an editorial meeting attended by eight journalists, a policeman tasked with protecting the magazine’s editorial director and a guest.

“What we saw was a massacre. Many of the victims had been executed, most of them with wounds to the head and chest,” Patrick Hertgen, an emergencies services medic called out to treat the injured, told Reuters.

A Reuters reporter saw groups of armed policeman patrolling around department stores in the shopping district and there was an armed gendarme presence outside the Arc de Triomphe.

US President Barack Obama described the attack as cowardly and evil, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel was among European leaders condemning the shooting.

The dead included co-founder Jean “Cabu” Cabut and editor-in-chief Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Council of the Muslim faith (CFCM), condemned an “immensely barbaric act also against democracy and freedom of the press” and said its perpetrators could not claim to be true Muslims.

Source: Christian Today

At least 11 people have been killed in Paris after two masked gunmen stormed the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, French President Francois Hollande confirmed. The newspaper attracted controversy and was burned in 2011 after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, deemed insulting to the Muslim world.

Hollande called the shooting a terrorist attack, according to The Associated Press, and noted that several other terror attacks have apparently been thwarted in France in recent weeks.

Another 10 people are believed to have been injured in the shooting.

AFP reported that a source close to the Paris police investigation said that the attackers were “armed with a Kalashnikov and a rocket-launcher.” The men apparently exchanged fire with security forces after they stormed the building, located in a central part of the city.

French news channel BFMTV said that a worker in the office opposite of Charlie Hebdo saw two hooded men dressed in black enter the building, carrying Kalashnikovs.

“We then heard them open fire inside, with many shots,” the witness said. “We were all evacuated to the roof. After several minutes, the men fled, after having continued firing in the middle of the street.”

The witness, who wasn’t named, said that he also saw a rocket launcher in the gunmen’s possession.

It is not yet clear what happened to the gunmen, and if they are still at large.

Police union official Rocco Contento said that the scene inside the offices was “carnage,” Reuters noted.

Charlie Hebdo has a long history of attracting controversy for its drawings, and has been accused of insulting Islam. In February 2006, it reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that had originally appeared in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten.

In November 2011 Charlie Hebdo was hit by a fire-bomb after it published more cartoons of Muslim Prophet Mohammed, and in September 2012 it depicted the Islamic prophet in a naked state. The published cartoons caused French schools, consulates and cultural centers in 20 Islamic countries to fear retaliatory attacks.

Islamic militants have also reportedly vowed to attack French citizens because of the government’s continued military operations against terrorists, including aiding the U.S.-led coalition in the Middle East.

The eastern city of Dijon experienced an attack in late 2014, after a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” rammed a vehicle into a crowd, and injured 13 people.

Source: Christian Post

Search teams looking for underwater wreckage from a crashed AirAsia passenger jet have located the tail of the aircraft, the section where the crucial black box flight recorders are housed, Indonesia’s search and rescue agency chief said on Wednesday.

Flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens over the northern Java Sea on December 28, less than half-way into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. There were no survivors among the 162 people on board.

“We’ve found the tail that has been our main target today,” Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, the head of the search and rescue agency, told a news conference in Jakarta.

The tail had been identified using an underwater remote operated vehicle, Soelistyo said, adding that the team “now is still desperately trying to locate the black box”.

Forty bodies and debris from the plane have been plucked from the surface of the waters off Borneo, but strong winds and high waves have prevented divers from reaching larger pieces of suspected wreckage detected by sonar on the sea floor.

An Indonesian naval patrol ship captain had said on Monday that his vessel had found what could be the tail, but there had been no confirmation of the find.

Locating the tail has been a priority because the cockpit voice and flight data recorders crucial for investigators trying to establish why the plane crashed are located in the rear section of the Airbus A320-200.

“I am led to believe the tail section has been found,” AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes tweeted minutes after the announcement.

“If right part of tail section, then the black box should be there … We need to find all parts soon so we can find all our guests to ease the pain of our families. That still is our priority.”

Soelistyo said a total of 12 objects had now been found, but he did not confirm whether all are parts of the aircraft. The wreckage is thought to also include parts of the fuselage, where many of the bodies of victims may still be trapped.

Indonesia AirAsia, 49 percent owned by Fernandes’s Malaysia-based AirAsia budget group, has faced criticism from authorities in Jakarta in the 10 days since the crash.

The transport ministry has suspended the carrier’s Surabaya-Singapore license, saying it only had permission to fly the route on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Flight QZ8501 took off on a Sunday, though the ministry said this had no bearing on the accident.

AirAsia has said it is cooperating fully with the ministry’s investigations. That investigation will be completed by Friday evening, the transport ministry said.

Indonesia has also reassigned some airport and air traffic control officials who allowed the flight to take off and tightened rules on pre-flight procedures in a country with a patchy reputation for air safety.

Source: Christian Today