Taliban

An enterprising young Kabul businessman is enjoying a brisk new trade in the Afghan capital.

For about $2 a pop, shopkeeper Nasratullah Niazai, 22, uploads into customers' cellphones a collection of Taliban songs and ringtones. Mr. Niazai is no Taliban. Neither are most of his customers.

Instead, the songs and ringtones romanticizing the insurgents' jihad against the infidel invaders serve as potentially lifesaving travel insurance for Kabulis who brave increasingly perilous countryside roads.

Sentries at improvised Taliban checkpoints, some only an hour's drive away from central Kabul, routinely check travelers' cellphones. As a result, government officials, police, soldiers, security guards, university students, translators for Western companies, construction workers and scores of others go to extraordinary lengths to scrub their phones of any evidence of links to the coalition and the Afghan government—and to masquerade as Taliban sympathizers.

Business has boomed in the past year, Mr. Niazai said. The songs that buyers like best, he said, are "the emotional ones sung by children with beautiful voices."

One consumer is Haji Mohammad Khan, a 35-year-old Kabul grocer. Whenever Mr. Khan ventures out of the city, he deletes secular music clips from his cellphone, makes sure all his contacts are in Pashto—the predominant language of the Taliban—and uploads well-known insurgent hymns.

"If they search your phone and see your videos and songs, they will think you are their sympathizer," he explained. "On occasion, it can save your life."

One official of President Hamid Karzai's government said that whenever he leaves Kabul, he routinely carries two SIM cards for his cellphone. One contains the numbers of Afghan leaders, Western officials, military officers and other contacts he needs to do his job. The other is the Taliban-safe SIM card that he pops into his phone outside the capital.

The growing popularity of Taliban-safe phones highlights the increasing sense of insecurity across Afghanistan—and in particular in Kabul—as the U.S. is withdrawing one-third of its forces by September.

Under Afghanistan's pre-2001 Taliban administration, music was deemed un-Islamic, and was banned. Shopkeepers were arrested for selling music cassette tapes. Music was forbidden at weddings. Musical instruments were prohibited.

The Taliban government, however, created exceptions for religious songs and jihadi chants, as long as the singing wasn't accompanied by instruments. In the 10 years since the Taliban regime's downfall, these insurgent tunes have evolved into a mini-industry.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said the Taliban now have some 40 singers "with their beautiful and attractive voices," each of whom produces on average of one 12-song album every month.

Lyrics like these, with the sounds of machine gun fire in the background are common: 

Young hero, martyrdom seeker (suicide bomber), you went up into flames
You burned like a moth, young hero, martyrdom seeker 
You are the Muslims' atomic bomb 
Young hero, martyrdom seeker you went up into flames 
You astonished the entire world 
Young hero, martyrdom seeker, you went up into flames 

The songs "give a lesson in bravery, manliness and protecting the country from the invaders," and "feature the situation in an artistic way." Plus, he said, they ensure that people don't turn to ungodly secular music.

Indeed.

First it was the Taliban who jumped on the social media bandwagon and now it seems Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are joining in and going through a bit of a re-branding exercise to try to lose the negative "baggage" associated with the larger terror organization's identity.

The group is increasingly going by the name, “Ansar al Sharia” which means Army of Islamic Law. Apparently the al-Qaeda name doesn’t garner too much good will following the death of former leader Osama bin Laden, and to make matters worse for the group,  jihadi recruitment is down (except for the number of foreign fighters heading to Yemen - that’s on the upswing according to sources). 

Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, director of Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News that "moving away from the larger al Qaeda brand is something I think we're starting to see more of."  

With the death of bin Laden, it makes sense for groups to become more diffused from centralized leadership so they can focus on regional issues rather than brand-building, he said.

Would-be recruits are "finding that the al-Qaeda core is no longer beneficial to be associated with ... because their main leader is gone," Nelson said, noting that Osama bin Laden was a charismatic leader who offered a lot of financial backing and Ayman al-Zawahiri "is not an effective replacement."

Poor al-Zawahiri. He just doesn’t have that effervescent, je ne sais quoi, leader quality about him. Maybe he should take a leaf out of Ansar al Sharia’s book and consider getting himself a publicist to boost his public image a little. 

A video shot in an Al Qaeda camp shows boys as young as 3 years old being trained to wage war on British soldiers. These children are sons of Taliban “martyrs” being trained to replace their fathers. 

In Afghanistan, children are used as suicide bombers and human shields more and more. Similarly, there are reports that Hamas uses Palestinian children to carry out acts of terrorism against Israeli children. 

In radical Islamic countries, where the burning of a Quran in Florida and a cartoon in Denmark caused mass uprisings and violence, the use of tiny children for jihad generates no response.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has reportedly transferred new weapons to its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan in an attempt to speed up the U.S. withdrawals from these countries. 

Defense officials have said that weapons smuggled into Iraq by the Iranian regime have already resulted in the deaths of American troops. In June, 15 servicemen were killed in Iraq. The U.S. attributed all the attacks to militias trained by the IRGC. 

Iranian officials have denied the role of the IRGC in arming militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, and have claimed the U.S. concocted these stories to justify maintaining an American military presence in the region. 

The head teacher of a girls’ school in Afghanistan was killed by the Taliban after ignoring warnings to stop teaching girls.

Education for women was banned by the Taliban as “un-Islamic” from 1996 to 2001. Women won back some rights after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. 

Many girls have returned to school in the past decade, but the right to education is hard to enforce in remote and conservative areas of the country.

A Miami Imam and his 2 sons have been arrested for financially supporting the Pakistani Taliban. 

Watch AP's coverage below:

Osama Bin Laden's sons have lashed out at President Obama over the death of their father saying the U.S. violated basic legal principles by killing an unarmed man. 

They added that "arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems."

Maybe they should have shared that thought with their father.

See below.