Al Qaeda and its affiliates have retired to five African and Middle East deserts as safe, remote launching pads for their re-energized campaign of terror in the Middle East and beyond.

Five Grads hit Beersheba and a shell explodes in Metulah on the Lebanese border minutes after
the announcement in Cairo by Egyptian foreign minister Mohamed Kamel Amr and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Cairo Wednesday, Nov. 21. A statement from Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Avigdor Lieberman follows half an hour before the ceasefire is due to go into effect at 9 p.m. debkafile: Prime Minister earlier called President Barack Obama to inform him of Israel’s consent to the ceasefire.

Obama is keen on Muslim Brotherhood collaboration in the war on al Qaeda and other terrorists, including those sponsored by Tehran, and offered to build a hi-tech security radar fence to defend the Suez Canal from the terrorists and smugglers infesting Sinai.

CIA director David Petraeus arrived in Cairo to lead a new anti-terror campaign against al Qaeda in cooperation with Egyptian security. It was launched after the discovery that Ayaman al-Zawahiri has set in motion a new wave of terror after reconstituting his old Egyptian Islamic Jihad and turning Sinai ...

Washington acted fast to hold back Lebanon’s anti-Syrian Lebanese forces from avenging the assassination of Lebanon’s top intelligence chief, Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan to save Lebanon from being ripped apart by a civil war. Assad and Nasrallah were allowed to get away with it.

Saudi armed forces are on top war alert after Riyadh decided that the war with Iran had already begun between their undercover agencies in Syria and Iran was on the warpath even now and certainly after an Israeli strike against its nuclear program.

Tehran accuses the new Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of engineering bombing attack which killed half of Assad’s top team in Damascus. It sought to drive home the message that enemies of Assad are enemies of Iran and will be punished.

The team which set up the suicide bombing of a Bulgarian bus which killed five Israelis and the local driver has vanished without a trace. Even the bomber’s body did not yield up a scrap of information or lead to the perpetrators or their controllers.

The suicide bomber who killed six people in an attack on an Israeli bus at Burgas airport  July 18, had accomplices, was “extremely experienced” and may have entered Bulgaria from Europe’s Schengen passport-free area, said Bulgarian Prime Minister Boygok Borisov. He spoke Tuesday, July 24, at a new conference with visiting US presidential anti-terror adviser John Brennan. The European Union turned down Israel’s request to blacklist Hizballah as a terrorist organization after Israel blamed it and Iran for the attack.

Beset on two fronts, Bashar Assad rushed his elite Presidential Guard to Damascus Thursday, May 10, as two massive car bombs demolished the command center of the Syrian military security service’s reconnaissance division in the al Qaza district killed 55 people and injured more than 300. Over to the southeast, debkafile reports 12,000 special operations troops from 17 nations, including the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are poised on the Jordanian side of the Syrian border.

Monday, April 24, the Obama administration stepped in to damp down the military frictions developing between Jerusalem and Cairo, fanned further this week by a dispute over the suspension of Egyptian gas to Israel. Earlier that day, Egypt’s military ruler Field Marshal Muhammad Tantawi said: “If anyone comes near Egypt’s border, we will break their leg.” Egyptian Islamists and Bedouin groups have since announced they would mark Israel’s Independence Day Thursday with a mass assault on the Sinai memorials of Israel’s fallen soldiers.

The French-born al Qaeda killer, Mohammed Merah - who shocked the world by murdering three Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher in Toulouse by shots to the head, after killing three French paratroopers - was found dead after jumping out of a window still shooting Thursday, March 22. First, he injured three police officers searching his apartment, bursting out of the bathroom firing madly. To capture him alive, French police and security forces conducted the longest siege in their history against a lone terrorist.

Toulouse police with reinforcements are hunting the motorcyclist who attacked the Jewish Ozar Hatorah school Monday, March 19, and murdered a teacher, Yonathan Sandler, 30, his sons Arieh, 3 and Gavriel, 6 and the principal’s daughter, Miriam Monstango, aged 8. The killer dressed in black continued shooting 9mm and 11.43mm pistols at children inside the school yard before escaping. President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered extra security for Jewish institutions. All French schools will observe a minute’s silence Tuesday.

 

Shrugging off Western sanctions and Israeli recriminations, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad played a starring role in a widely televised spectacle by inserting his country’s first domestically-made fuel rod into the Tehran Research Reactor Wednesday, Feb. 15. The scene came after the announced cutoff of Iranian oil exports to six European countries - Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Portugal. Two hours later, the Iranian oil ministry challenged the announcement, spoiling the show by showing up differences in high regime ranks.

Notwithstanding the loud and angry Israel official contentions that the three explosions in Bangkok Tuesday Feb. 13 were part of an Iranian global terror drive, senior Israeli intelligence sources told debkafile that no connection – other than circumstantial - has been uncovered as yet between that incident and the sticky-bomb attacks on Israeli official cars in New Delhi and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi 24 hours earlier. In fact, Israeli counter-terror agencies are not absolutely sure of the source of the last two.

Straight after terrorists targeted Israeli embassies in New Delhi and Tbilisi, Monday, Feb. 13, Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz convened an urgent conference with Military Intelligence Director Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavy, Air Force commander Ido Nehushtan and Operations Division chief Maj. Gen. Yaakov Ayash. Their discussion went beyond the immediate import of the two incidents to focus on the broader ramifications of a potential attack with Israeli fatalities and its impact on the prospects of war.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Monday, Feb. 12: “We know exactly who was responsible for attacking Israeli officials abroad and we shall respond.” He referred to the bombs attached to the cars of two Israeli officials. One blew up in New Delhi, injuring Talya Yehoshua-Koren, wife of Defense Ministry representative to India, and three others. The other bomb was discovered in time by the car’s owner, a local embassy employee in Tbilisi, Georgia. Israeli diplomats and foreign officials were ordered to stop using their own vehicles. 

Syrian President Bashar Assad has hired hit squads to kill top Lebanese government, intelligence and security officials whom he suspects of helping insurrectionists and Saudi and Qatari agents smuggle fighters and weapons into the country to fight his regime. debkafile's counter-terror sources report that one Lebanese hit squad was captured and confessed to being armed and assigned by Syrian Military Intelligence to murder the two heads of Lebanese Internal Security by rigging bomb cars in Beirut. A second plot targeted a Lebanese lawmaker.

Argentine has captured a three-man Iranian-Hizballah cell and is hunting for the rest of the network, debkafile exclusive sources reveal. It was nabbed in San Carlos de Bariloche, popular with Israeli backpackers touring the Andes. Their network is suspected of plotting attacks on the local Habad center, one of ten in the country, part of a worldwide terrorist offensive against Israeli and Jewish targets which was stopped short twice this month in Thailand and Azerbaijan. Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Mexico are also on terror alert.

By Friday night, Dec. 23, Western intelligence sources were attributing the twin suicide car attacks which claimed 53 lives and injured more than 100 outside the Syrian Security Directorate in Damascus earlier in the day to President Bashar Assad and his security chiefs. His motive? To keep the Arab League team, just arrived for an effort to start brokering peace in Syria, busy in Damascus instead of inspecting Homs where the bloody military crackdown continued during the day.