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ISWAP Exploiting WhatsApp, Telegram To Destabilise Nigeria – Report

Published

3 years ago

September 19, 2022

A report by the Institute for Security Studies has revealed that the Boko Haram terrorists’ breakaway group, the Islamic State of West Africa, are skillfully exploiting digital platforms, particularly, WhatsApp and Telegram, to organise and carry out their criminal activities in the West African region.

This is as the institute urged governments across the African continent to pressure tech companies to deal with terrorism online.

The report noted that as the physical and online worlds fuse, many groups, especially Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, are embedding the internet deeper into their operations in the West African region.

“Groups such as the Boko Haram breakaway faction, Islamic State West Africa Province, appear to rely on messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram to communicate internally and externally because they prefer these apps’ encrypted nature. ‘Telegram is becoming the new frontline for terrorist groups in Africa,’ warns Mr Bukarti. ‘On last count, ISWAP had over 50 Facebook and Telegram accounts.’ Furthermore, ‘there’s no scrutiny; nobody seems to care in Africa.

“While larger platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have the resources to offer a degree of content moderation, many smaller operators don’t. These are the ones terrorist groups prefer’.

“According to researchers such as Bulama Bukarti of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. What’s more, given their decentralised character, these groups are proving harder to intercept and are achieving a reach online that would not be possible in the physical world,” the report said.

It noted that a recent workshop in Ghana organised by Tech Against Terrorism laid out the expansive nature of online terrorist content in West Africa and highlighted strategies to mitigate the risks. TAT is a non-governmental organisation established by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate to forge ties between tech platforms, academia and civil society.

The institute stated further that violent extremist groups in West Africa, especially in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, use the internet to deliver propaganda, recruit, radicalise and incite attacks, and finance and plan their operations.

“When al-Shabaab attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya in 2013, the group live-blogged the terrifying event on Twitter, taunting the authorities who were struggling to end the siege. It represented a chilling milestone in the weaponisation of social media platforms and demonstrated the audacity and adaptive nature of Africa’s armed groups.

“Nearly a decade later, terrorist groups in West Africa are fine-tuning their tactics to hijack social media platforms and messaging apps. Parts of the region have been home to the fastest growing and deadliest violent extremists, the Global Terrorism Index reveals. And there has been a steady rise in incidents where social media platforms and messaging apps have become an integral part of extremists’ modus operandi.

“A former head of Facebook’s Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations Policy section and now programming leader for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a TAT partner, Dr Erin Saltman, is a prominent voice in this field. She says greater efforts are needed to encourage tech companies to ‘prevent and respond’ to terrorism online by increasing their transparency and reporting while respecting human rights,” the September 15 report added.

It added that Anne Craanen, who monitors developments in West Africa, noted that extremists are now using smaller platforms to circumvent controls aimed at removing terrorist content,

“For example, AQIM – arguably the region’s most aggressive user of online communication – uses ‘beacon’ websites to draw internet traffic to smaller sites. It also uses ‘aggregators’ designed to offer viewers a cluster of links to the same piece of terrorist content, to evade content moderation.”

Headline

Trouble Looms As Trump Gives Iran Two Weeks To Avoid US Airstrikes

Published

9 hours ago

June 21, 2025

Editor

President Donald Trump said Friday that Iran had a “maximum” of two weeks to avoid possible US air strikes, indicating he could make a decision before the fortnight deadline he set a day earlier.

Trump added that he was not inclined to stop Israel attacking Iran because it was “winning,” and was dismissive of European efforts to mediate an end to the conflict.

“I’m giving them a period of time, and I would say two weeks would be the maximum,” Trump told reporters when asked if he could decide to strike Iran before that.

He added that the aim was to “see whether or not people come to their senses.”

Trump had said in a statement on Thursday that he would “make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks” because there was a “substantial chance of negotiations” with Iran.

Those comments had been widely seen as opening a two-week window for negotiations to end the war between Israel and Iran, with the European powers rushing to talks with Tehran.

But his latest remarks indicated Trump could still make his decision before that if he feels that there has been no progress towards dismantling Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump meanwhile dismissed talks that European powers Britain, France, Germany and the EU had with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva on Friday.

Europe ‘didn’t help’

“They didn’t help,” he said as he arrived in Morristown, New Jersey, ahead of a fundraising dinner at his nearby golf club.

“Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said after the talks in Geneva that Tehran would not resume negotiations with the United States until Israel stopped its attacks.

But Trump was reluctant.

“It’s very hard to make that request right now,” Trump said.

“If somebody’s winning, it’s a little bit harder to do than if somebody’s losing, but we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran, and we’ll see what happens.”

Trump meanwhile doubled down on his claims that Iran is weeks away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb, despite divisions in his own administration about the intelligence behind his assessment.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, said in a report in March that Iran was not close to having enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.

“She’s wrong,” Trump said of Gabbard, a longtime opponent of US foreign intervention whom Trump tapped to coordinate the sprawling US spy community.

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

AFP

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Trump Orders Mass Layoffs At Voice Of America, Other US-funded Media

Published

9 hours ago

June 21, 2025

Editor

President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday ordered mass layoffs at Voice of America and other government-funded media, moving ahead with gutting the outlets despite legal disputes and criticism that US adversaries will benefit.

Kari Lake, a fervent Trump supporter named to a senior role at the US Agency for Global Media, said the notices were a “long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.”

Lake said in a statement that she would work with the State Department and Congress to “make sure the telling of America’s story is modernized, effective and aligned with America’s foreign policy.”

Trump issued an order in March that froze Voice of America (VOA) for the first time since it was founded in 1942.

Termination notices were sent to 639 employees on Friday, after previous offers of voluntary departures and dismissals of contractors.

Some 1,400 positions have been eliminated, with only 250 remaining, Lake said.

Voice of America layoffs included journalists from its Persian service who had briefly been brought back to work after Israel attacked Iran a week ago.

Employees have filed a lawsuit challenging Lake’s actions, which come even though Congress had already appropriated funding.

The mass firing decision “spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds the US ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” the three plaintiffs wrote in a statement.

“Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and extremist groups are flooding the information space with anti-American propaganda. Do not cede this ground by silencing America’s voice,” said the three complainants, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the “decimation of US broadcasting leaves authoritarian propaganda unchecked by US backed independent media and is a perversion of the law and congressional intent.”

“It is a dark day for the truth,” she wrote on X.

Trump frequently attacks media outlets and has scoffed at the so-called editorial firewall at VOA which prevents the government from intervening in its coverage, something he at times has considered too critical of his administration.

One outlet preserved by the mass cuts has been Radio Marti, which broadcasts into Cuba and enjoys support from anti-communist Cuban-American Republican lawmakers.

Other outlets funded by the US government have included Radio Free Asia, which was set up to provide news to Asian countries without a free press and is now operating in a limited capacity.

Radio Free Europe, formed with a similar mission for Soviet bloc nations during the Cold War, has survived thanks to support from the Czech government.

AFP

Headline

Thousands Protest In Tehran Against Israel

Published

14 hours ago

June 20, 2025

Editor

Thousands of people joined a protest against Israel in the Iranian capital on Friday after weekly prayers, chanting slogans in support of their leaders, images on state television showed.

“This is the Friday of the Iranian nation’s solidarity and resistance across the country,” the news anchor said.

Footage showed protesters in Tehran holding up photographs of commanders killed since the start of the war with Israel, while others waved the flags of Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

“I will sacrifice my life for my leader,” read a protester’s banner, a reference to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

According to state television, protests took place in other cities around the country, including in Tabriz in northwestern Iran and Shiraz in the south.

AFP