The FBI is hoping to engage the public in rooting out traitors joining ISIS while helping to identify an English-speaking leader of the terrorist network in new propaganda video. Meanwhile, Turkey warns airstrikes alone will not save town near its border with Syria from being overrun.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Uncle Sam wants you in the fight against the Islamic State.
The FBI asked the public Tuesday for help in identifying homegrown jihadis headed to and from overseas battlefields.
“We need the public’s assistance in identifying U.S. persons going to
fight overseas with terrorists groups or who are returning home from
fighting overseas,” Michael Steinbach, assistant director of the FBI’s
Counterterrorism Division said in a statement on the bureau’s website.
The call for help came after the arrest on Saturday of 19-year-old
Chicago-area man who was about to board a flight to join ISIS fighters
in Syria.
The FBI’s attempt to engage the public in rooting out traitors joining
ISIS also included an appeal to help identify an English-speaking leader
of the terrorist network.
The agency posted an ISIS propaganda video of the masked man in combat
fatigues, who speaks with an American accent. In the footage, released
by the militant group on Sept. 19, the brown-eyed jahadi totes a pistol
as prisoners behind him dig their own graves.
The menacing militant says the prisoners were taken during a fight at
Syria’s 17th Division military base outside the city of Ar-Raqqa in
northern Syria.
“You can see them now digging their own graves in the very place where
they’re stationed, the very place where they were stationed terrorizing
the Muslims in Ar-Raqqa,” the man says.
Steinbach said the FBI suspects the video was intended to appeal to a Western audience.
“We’re hoping that someone might recognize this individual and provide
us with key pieces of information,” Steinbach said. “No piece of
information is too small.”
FBI Director James Comey has said that about a dozen Americans are known to be fighting with the Islamic State in Syria.
In August, American citizen Douglas McArthur McCain, 33, who grew up in
Minnesota, died while fighting alongside Islamic State militants in
Syria.
British police busted four suspected terrorists on Tuesday.
The Metropolitan Police in London said the men — two 20-year-olds and
two 21-year-olds — were preparing acts of terror. Cops used a Taser to
subdue one of the suspects.
The men were arrested during a series of early morning anti-terrorism
raids across London. Police said the raids were part of their ongoing
investigation into Islamist-related terrorism.
Meanwhile, ISIS fighters appeared to have the upper hand in a battle
against Kurdish forces for the Syrian town of Kobani on the border of
Turkey.
A man and a young boy brandish AK-47 rifles as they prepare to defend Kobani from ISIS.
“Kobani is about to fall,” a worried Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Syrian refugees Tuesday.
Erdogan said ISIS combatants were overrunning the outgunned Kurdish fighters defending Kobani.
U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in the area Tuesday helped slow the ISIS
advance on Kobani, but Erdogan warned it will not be enough.
Turkish military tanks and troops were posted at the border within a few hundred yards of the battle, but were not intervening.
Ismet Sheikh Hassan, the Kurdish defense chief for the Kobani area,
said the Turkish government was hindering the defense of the border
town.
On a mobile device? Click here to watch the video.
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