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1,500 ISIS Fighters Now in Europe – Report

As many as 1,500 Islamist terrorists with combat experience are now in Europe, according to the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

The fighters were sent by their chieftains to commit terror attacks, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov stated during a conference on international terrorism Thursday.

"Some 1,500 out of 5,000 terrorists have arrived in the European Union from the Middle East, according to experts’ estimates,” said Bortnikov. “A significant number of them are gunmen, who have been sent by chieftains to Europe to continue terrorist attacks.”

The Head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov (front), at the 2019 IPA CIS Conference on Countering International Terrorism at Tauride Palace | Peter Kovalev / Contributor / Getty

Despite ISIS' and Al-Qaeda’s recent losses in Syria and Iraq, they still pose a serious threat due to autonomous networks scattered around the world, he added.

"They managed to operate their forces based on a network principle,” said Bortnikov. “Interconnected and autonomous cells spread from the Middle East to Europe, Central and South East Asia, and major militant groups [that] go deep into the African continent, in particular to Libya.”

Similarly, in March, a Swedish politician cited a defense report warning how Salafist hardliners are utilizing modern tech to spread their messages across Europe.

"We see that some Salafist groups use social media, lectures with ministers, and collaborations with organizations abroad to spread their messages," said the report's author.

The attention span of the population has been shrinking for decades as the globalists seek even more control over the population. Dr. Nick Begich joins Alex in studio to expose the attack on our minds by Big Tech.

(PHOTO: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty)

Source: InfoWars

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Rep. Ilhan Omar Accuses Stephen Miller of Being ‘White Nationalist’

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., no stranger to saying how she feels, called a senior member of the Trump administration a "white nationalist" Monday afternoon.

Omar tweeted this in response to a claim senior White House adviser Stephen Miller was behind pulling the nomination of a candidate to serve as the director of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement:

"Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. The fact that he still has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage."

Acting ICE director Ron Vitiello was picked to serve as director of the agency, but the White House withdrew the nomination in a surprise move late last week. It has been alleged Miller was pushing for someone with a stronger stance on the subject of illegal immigration, which led to President Donald Trump pulling the nomination.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Fed Interest Rate Shift Good for Gold

Historically, a Federal Reserve shift from interest rate tightening to a neutral stance has boosted the price of gold, although the effect has not always been immediate, according to a report released by the World Gold Council this week.

It wasn’t long ago that the Fed was talking about multiple rate hikes in 2019 and balance sheet reduction was on “autopilot.” But all of that changed when the stock market started tanking last December. Now we have the “Powell Pause,” and an apparent end to balance sheet reduction on the horizon.

According to the WGC, it seems likely the central bank will keep interest rate increases on hold for the rest of the year and that will influence gold’s performance.

“In our view, the combination of rangebound US interest rates, a slowdown in the appreciation of the US dollar and continued market risks will continue to make gold attractive to investors.”


The economic boom has dramatically slowed down after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and uncertainty ahead of democratic control of congress. Peter Schiff joins Alex to break down the future if America votes for socialism in 2020.

The WGC report says previous research highlights the fact that interest rates have a bigger impact on asset price performance — including gold — when there is a shift in policy stance (e.g. from neutral to tightening or vice versa).

“Our analysis of gold’s performance in January suggests that, indeed, expectations of interest rates are starting to play a more influential role than they did in 2018.”

(Photo by Виталий Смолыгин / CC0 Public Domain)

The historical analysis shows that the price of gold does not always react in the early months of a policy shift. When the Fed transitioned from tightening to neutral and then to easing in 1999-2001, the price of gold fell in the first three months, but then showed 3.6% returns over 12 months. Post tightening cycle returns between 2004-2007 were more immediate, with a 7% return in one month, a 13.1% return over three months and an 18.8% return over 12 months.

“While no clear evidence points to an immediate positive impact on the price of gold after the Fed pauses, historical analysis suggests that gold eventually reacts positively as the pause cycle extends and/or the Fed eases monetary policy. Historical post-tightening periods have shown an eventual strong gold performance, counterbalancing the performance of risk assets such as stocks or commodities, and complementing – sometimes even outperforming – assets such as Treasuries and corporate bonds.”

Peter Schiff has been saying the pause won’t be enough and the Fed will have to shift to interest rate cuts and another round of QE in the relatively near future.

“They don’t want to admit the real problem is in America. We can’t raise rates because we can’t afford it – because we have too much debt thanks to the Federal Reserve because they kept interest rates so low for so long, we borrowed so much money that it’s impossible to normalize interest rates because we have an abnormal amount of debt. The reason they have to stop shrinking their balance sheet is because they can’t do it because the budget deficits are exploding and they can’t add to the problem by shrinking its balance sheet. And what Powell hasn’t said is that by the way, what we’re going to have to do is go back to quantitative easing because the deficits are so big and air is coming out of this bubble we’re going to have to buy even more bonds, the balance sheet is going to get a lot bigger. In fact, we’re going to have to cut interest rates back to zero. They haven’t let that cat out of the bag yet.”


Mike Adams exposes the agenda of the private Fed as a war against the prosperity of Americans that simply want to make America great.

Source: InfoWars

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U.S. designates elite Iranian force as terrorist organization

FILE PHOTO - Members of Iranian revolutionary guard march during parade to commemorate anniversary of Iran-Iraq war, in Tehran
FILE PHOTO - Members of the Iranian revolutionary guard march during a parade to commemorate the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), in Tehran September 22, 2011. REUTERS/Stringer

April 8, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization, President Donald Trump said on Monday, marking the first time Washington has formally labeled another country’s military a terrorist group.

Critics have warned that the move could open U.S. military and intelligence officials to similar actions by unfriendly governments. The United States has already blacklisted dozens of entities and people for affiliations with the IRGC, but not the organization as a whole.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Source: OANN

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Benedict says Vatican legal system protected accused clergy

Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI says in a new document that protections built into the Vatican's legal protections worked in favor of clergy accused of sex abuse to the point of making a conviction "nearly impossible" in past decades.

Corriere della Sera on Thursday quoted from the 18-page document titled "The Church and the sex abuse scandal," which was published by the German monthly Klerusblatt. The diocesan association was unable to provide a copy of the original text.

Benedict wrote that during the 1980s and 1990s, "the right to a defense was so broad as to make a conviction nearly impossible."

Benedict took a hard line against clerical sex abuse as the Vatican's conservative doctrine chief, and later as pope, defrocking hundreds of priests accused of raping and molesting children.l

Source: Fox News World

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Haiti protesters vow to return to streets on Friday

The shadows of riot policemen are cast next to the casket of a man shot dead during anti-government protests in Port-au-Prince
The shadows of riot policemen are cast next to the casket of a man shot dead during anti-government protests in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 22, 2019. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

February 22, 2019

By Anthony Esposito

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – The cacophony of sirens, horns and street vendors in Haiti’s capital was quieter than usual this week as residents remained on edge after recent anti-government protests, which organizers have promised will start again on Friday.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Port-au-Prince and the island nation’s other main cities for days of protests that began on Feb. 7, calling for President Jovenel Moise to resign amid ballooning inflation, a weakening currency and allegations of misused funds.

“The protests hurt my business. We’re frustrated and the people are still scared,” said 33-year old Jocelyn Alexis, a street vendor in the city center.

Other small business owners said that customers were still staying away after the recent protests turned violent, even though the marches died down this week.

Opposition leaders are calling for an independent probe into the whereabouts of funds from the PetroCaribe agreement, an alliance between Caribbean countries, including Haiti, and Venezuela.

The agreement’s preferential terms for energy purchases were meant to help free up funds to aid development in Haiti, a poor country habitually hammered by natural disasters.

“The fight will continue … we will continue to seek the president’s resignation, and we need to have a PetroCaribe probe because we need to end the corruption in this country that has allowed a small minority to get majority of wealth,” said opposition leader Andre Michel.

“The new protests are set for Friday,” he said. “The fight will start again.”

In an address from the presidential palace on Feb. 14, Moise struck a combative note and defied calls for his ouster, saying he would not hand the country over to drug traffickers and that dialogue was the only way to stop a civil war.

Haiti has a long tradition of corruption and international partners and anti-graft watchdogs have often blamed Haitian politicians for failing to crack down on the scourge.

The government’s “mismanagement of the economy” has also fueled Haitians’ frustrations, said economist Kesner Pharel at consultancy Group Croissance.

Annual inflation of 15 percent as of December and a currency that weakened nearly 20 percent versus the dollar last year, and continued to depreciate in 2019, has made buying basic necessities more difficult in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

“People are living in misery. We won’t stop until we get what we need. We need better leaders in government that give people hope. Until then the battle will continue,” said senator Evalliere Beauplan.

(Reporting by Anthony Esposito; editing by Darren Schuettler)

Source: OANN

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Wisconsin judge blocks Republican-backed laws curbing Democratic governor’s powers

FILE PHOTO: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers speaks at an election eve rally in Madison, Wisconsin
FILE PHOTO: Tony Evers speaks at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. November 5, 2018. on the eve of his election as governor REUTERS/Nick Oxford/File Photo

March 21, 2019

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) – A Wisconsin judge on Thursday blocked legislation passed by Republican lawmakers during a December lame-duck session intended to curb the powers of newly elected Democratic Governor Tony Evers, calling the measures unconstitutionally approved.

The governor immediately moved to withdraw Wisconsin from a multistate lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Obamacare healthcare law, the signature domestic achievement of former Democratic President Barack Obama and a longtime target of Republicans, including President Donald Trump.

One of the statutes passed in December prevented Evers from pulling out of the lawsuit absent legislative approval, until Thursday’s decision set the law aside. [nL1N1YJ1CW]

Democrats had criticized the legislation as a last-minute power grab. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina and Michigan pursued similar lame-duck moves after Democratic victories in November.

“The legislature overplayed its hand by using an unlawful process to accumulate more power for itself and override the will of the people,” Evers said in a statement.

Wisconsin Republican legislative leaders vowed to appeal the ruling from Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess, who issued a temporary injunction stopping the laws from taking effect.

“For decades the legislature has used extraordinary sessions that have been widely supported by members of both parties,” Robin Vos, the state Assembly speaker, and Scott Fitzgerald, the state Senate majority leader, said in a joint statement.

“Today’s ruling only creates chaos and will surely raise questions about items passed during previous extraordinary sessions, including stronger laws against child sexual predators and drunk drivers,” the statement added.

In his decision, Niess said the legislature’s use of an “extraordinary session” was not explicitly permitted under the state constitution.

“The bottom line in this case is that the legislature did not lawfully meet during its December 2018 ‘extraordinary session,'” he wrote.

Lawyers for the legislature had argued that an injunction would cause disruption by making thousands of statutes vulnerable to legal challenges, but Niess rejected that claim.

“Is there anything more destructive to Wisconsin’s constitutional democracy than for courts to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities by knowingly enforcing unconstitutional, and therefore, non-existent laws?” he concluded.

The ruling came as part of a lawsuit filed by several left-leaning groups.

Several other lawsuits have been filed challenging the lame-duck legislation. In January, a federal judge in Wisconsin blocked a Republican-backed law that would limit early voting across the state to two weeks. [nL1N1ZH1KR]

(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

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Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

April 26, 2019

Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.

Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.

“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”

That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.

He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.

“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”

He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.

And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.

Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.

“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.

Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.

“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.

“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.

Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.

“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”

Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.

Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.

Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.

WHO IS MARIA BUTINA, THE RUSSIAN WOMAN ACCUSED OF SPYING ON US?

In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.

Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.

Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.

However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.

“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.

SRI LANKA AUTHORITIES SAY EASTER ATTACK LEADER KILLED IN ONE OF NINE HOTEL BOMBINGS

She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”

“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.

Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.

Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”

On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.

Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.

“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”

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Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Easter Sunday, in Colombo
FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, five days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Catholic churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran was 12 years old when he began his studies at the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College. He was a nobody, with no claim to scholarship other than ambition.

Zahran and his four brothers and sisters squeezed into a two-room house with their parents in a small seaside town in eastern Sri Lanka; their father was a poor man who sold packets of food on the street and had a reputation for being a petty thief.

“His father didn’t do much,” recalled the school’s vice principal, S.M. Aliyar, laughing out loud.

The boy surprised the school with his sharp mind. For three years, Zahran practiced memorizing the Koran. Next came his studies in Islamic law. But the more he learned, the more Zahran argued that his teachers were too liberal in their reading of the holy book.

“He was against our teaching and the way we interpreted the Koran – he wanted his radical Islam,” said Aliyar. “So we kicked him out.”

Aliyar, now 73 with a long white beard, remembers the day Zahran left in 2005. “His father came and asked, ‘Where can he go?’.”

The school would hear again of Mohamed Zahran. And the world now knows his name. The Sri Lankan government has identified him as the ringleader of a group that carried out a series of Easter Sunday suicide bombings in the country on April 21.

The blasts killed more than 250 people in churches and luxury hotels, one of the deadliest-ever such attacks in South Asia. There were nine suicide bombers who blew apart men, women and children as they sat to pray or ate breakfast.

Most of the attackers were well-educated and from wealthy families, with some having been abroad to study, according to Sri Lankan officials.

That description does not, however, fit their alleged leader, a man said to be in his early 30s, who authorities say died in the slaughter. Zahran was different.

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Sri Lanka’s national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services – at least three in April alone – that an attack was pending. But Zahran’s path from provincial troublemaker to alleged jihadist mastermind was marked by years of missed or ignored signals that the man with a thick beard and paunch was dangerous.

His increasingly militant brand of Islam was allowed to grow inside a marginalized minority community – barely 10 percent of the country’s roughly 20 million people are Muslim – against a backdrop of a dysfunctional developing nation.

The top official at the nation’s defense ministry resigned on Thursday, saying that some institutions under his charge had failed.

For much of his adult life, Zahran, 33, courted controversy inside the Muslim community itself.

In the internet age, that problem did not stay local. Zahran released online videos calling for jihad and threatening bloodshed.

After the blasts, Islamic State claimed credit and posted a video of Zahran, clutching an assault rifle, standing before the group’s black flag and pledging allegiance to its leader.

The precise relationship between Zahran and Islamic State is not yet known. An official with India’s security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that during a raid on a suspected Islamic State cell by the National Investigation Agency earlier this year officers found copies of Zahran’s videos. The operation was in the state of Tamil Nadu, just across a thin strait of ocean from Sri Lanka.

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

Back in 2005, Zahran was looking to make his way in the world. His hometown of Kattankudy is some seven hours’ drive from Colombo on the other side of the island nation, past the countless palm trees, roadside Buddha statues, cashew hawkers and an occasional lumbering elephant in the bush. It is a town of about 40,000 people, a dot on the eastern coast with no clear future for an impoverished young man who’d just been expelled.

Zahran joined a mosque in 2006, the Dharul Athar, and gained a place on its management committee. But within three years they’d had a falling out.

“He wanted to speak more independently, without taking advice from elders,” said the mosque’s imam, or spiritual leader, M.T.M. Fawaz.

Also, the young man was more conservative, Fawaz said, objecting, for instance, to women wearing bangles or earrings.

“The rest of us come together as community leaders but Zahran wanted to speak for himself,” said Fawaz, a man with broad shoulders lounging with a group of friends in a back office of the mosque after evening prayers. “He was a black sheep who broke free.”

Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed Thaufeek, a friend who met Zahran at school and later became an adherent of his, said the problems revolved around Zahran’s habit of misquoting Islamic scriptures.

The mosque’s committee banned him from preaching for three months in 2009. Zahran stormed off.

“We treated him like a spoiled child, a very narrow-minded person who was always causing some trouble,” said the head of the committee, Mohamed Ismail Mohamed Naushad, a timber supplier who shook his head at the memory.

Now on his own, Zahran began to collect a group of followers who met in what Fawaz described as “a hut”.

At about that time, Zahran, then 23, married a young girl from a small town outside the capital of Colombo and brought his bride back to Kattankudy, according to his sister, Mathaniya.

“I didn’t have much of a connection with her – she was 14,” she said.

Despite being “a bit rough-edged”, Zahran was a skilled speaker and others his age were drawn to his speeches and Koranic lessons, said Thaufeek. He traveled the countryside at times, giving his version of religious instruction as he went.

Also, Zahran had found a popular target: the town’s Sufi population, who practice a form of Islam often described a mystical, but which to conservatives is heresy.

Tensions in the area went back some years. In 2004, there was a grenade attack on a Sufi mosque and in 2006 several homes of Sufis were set afire. Announcements boomed from surrounding mosques at the time calling for a Sufi spiritual leader to be killed, said Sahlan Khalil Rahman, secretary of a trust that oversees a group of Sufi mosques.

He blamed followers of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that some locals say became more popular after funding from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, flowed to mosques in Kattankudy.

It was, Rahman said, an effort “to convert Sufis into Wahhabis through this terrorism”. Rahman handed over a photograph album showing charred homes, bullet holes sprayed across an office wall and a shrine’s casket upended.

ONLINE RADICAL

It was an ideal backdrop for Zahran’s bellicose delivery and apparent sense of religious destiny.

He began holding rallies, bellowing insults through loudspeakers that reverberated inside the Sufis’ house of worship as they tried to pray.

In 2012, Zahran started a mosque of his own. The Sufis were alarmed and, Rahman said, passed on complaints to both local law enforcement and eventually national government offices. No action was taken.

The then-officer in charge of Kattankudy police, Ariyabandhu Wedagedara, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t arrest people simply because of theological differences.

     “The problem at the time was between followers of different Islamic sects – Zahran was not a major troublemaker, but he and followers of other sects, including the Sufis, were at loggerheads,” Wedagedara said.

Zahran found another megaphone: the internet. His Facebook page was taken down after the bombings, but Muslims in the area said his video clips had previously achieved notoriety.

His speeches went from denouncing Sufis to “kafirs”, or non-believers, in general. Zahran’s sister, Mathaniya, said in an interview that she thought “his ideas became more radical from listening to Islamic State views on the Internet”.

In one undated video, Zahran, in a white tunic and standing in front of an image of flames, boomed in a loud voice: “You will not have time to pick up the remains of blown-up bodies. We’ll keep sending those insulting Allah to hell.”

“HARD TO TAKE”

Zahran spoke in Tamil, making his words available to young Muslims clicking on their cellphones in Kattankudy and other towns like it during a period when, in both 2014 and 2018, reports and images spread of Sinhalese Buddhists rioting against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, Zahran’s confrontations boiled over. At a rally near a Sufi community, his followers came wielding swords. At least one man was hacked and hospitalized. The police arrested several people connected to Zahran, including his father and one of his brothers. Zahran slipped away from public view.

That December, the mosque Zahran founded released a public notice disowning him. Thaufeek, his friend from school, is now the head. He counted the places that Zahran had been driven away from – his school, the Dharul Athar mosque and then, “we ourselves kicked him out, which would have been hard for him to take”.

The next year, a group of Buddha statues was vandalized in the town of Mawanella, about five hours drive from Kattankudy. There, in the lush mountains of Sri Lanka’s interior, Zahran had taken up temporary residence.

“He was preaching to kill people,” said A.G.M. Anees, who has served as an imam at a small mosque in the area for a decade. “This is not Islam, this is violence.”

Zahran went into hiding once more.

On the Thursday morning before the Easter Sunday bombings, Zahran’s sister-in-law knocked on the door of a neighbor who did seamstress work near Kattankudy. She handed over a parcel of fabric and asked for it to be sewn into a tunic by the end of the day.

“She said she was going on a family trip,” said the neighbor, M.H. Sithi Nazlya.

Zahran’s sister says that her parents turned off their cellphones on the Friday. On Sunday, when she visited their home, they were gone.

She does not know if Zahran arranged for them to be taken somewhere safe. Or why he would have carried out the bombing.

But now in Kattankudy, and in many other places, people are talking about Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran.

(Reporting by Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Shihar Aneez and Alasdair Pal; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

Source: OANN

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