ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

It would appear that the United States did in fact strong arm at least one country to keep them from offering asylum to Edward Snowden or assisting him in procuring travel arrangements via their country, according to Snowden’s associate, Glenn Greenwald. The German Vice Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said this week that if they helped the NSA whistleblower in any way the United States would stop relaying all intelligence information to Berlin. “They told us they’d cease notifying us of schemes and other intelligence issues,” Gabriel said. Gabriel commended the work of other reporters and Greenwald as he presented a speech about the journalistic attempts made concerning the Snowden leaks. The Vice Chancellor expressed sorrow that the former Booz Allen employee was made to seek political refuge in “Putin’s autocratic Russia.” Greenwald questioned Gabriel as to why Germany did not offer Snowden asylum — because under international law, after asylum has been given, the subje...

Reuters / Christian Hartmann More than 70 German women, nine of whom are schoolgirls, have left their home country for Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, the president of the German Domestic Intelligence Service (BFV) said. According to Hans-Georg Maassen, 40 percent of those women are under the age of 25, Zeit Online reported . While the recruitment of young girls and women by the Islamic State is not a rare phenomenon, Maassen warned that jihadists have lately focused on luring females to join the 'caliphate' via social networks. Jihadists blog on the internet and are active on forums, where they look for women showing an interest in jihad, BFV’s president said. Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants then contact the girls and women to inspire them to marry jihadists. Maassen says they write blogs with “romantic descriptions” of life in extremist camps, and the females have no idea about the future they are actually agreeing to. Most often, those who travel t...

Sixty thousand copies of propaganda pamphlets dropped over Raqqa but experts question efficacy and tenor of the leaflet. The US military is dropping some gruesome propaganda on Syria. On March 16 an F-15E fighter jet dropped 60,000 copies of the above leaflet on Raqqa, the base of operations for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL. The image shows a "Daesh Employment Office" (Daesh is a pejorative nickname for ISIL in the Arab world). Two ISIL recruiters, one of whom appears more monster than man, feed young men into a meat grinder with "Daesh" written in blood on its side. A sign in the upper-right corner reads "Now Serving Number 6,001". When asked about the intended message of the leaflet, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren, said "If you allow yourself to be recruited by Daesh, you will find yourself in a meat grinder." Warren said the leaflet was created by the Army’s Military Information Support Operations, or MISO. ...