Forced marriage cases up 80 pc this year as investigators find parents using “bounty hunters”

.... A special Government unit dedicated to stopping teenagers being married off by their families dealt with 300 cases in the first half of this year, up from 168 in the same period of 2007.....

Iran receives al Qaeda praise for role in terrorist attacks

from Jihad Watch

So much for the notion that Sunnis and Shias can never cooperate. They certainly can -- at least where infidels are concerned. The-Enemy-Of-My-Enemy-Is-My-Friend Alert (a, coincidentally, Arabian proverb):

"Iran receives al Qaeda praise for role in terrorist attacks," by Con Coughlin for the Telegraph, November 23 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm):

Fresh links between Iran's Revolutionary Guards and al-Qaeda have been uncovered following interception of a letter from the terrorist leadership that hails Tehran's support for a recent attack on the American embassy in Yemen, which killed 16 people.

Delivery of the letter exposed the rising role of Saad bin Laden, son of the al-Qaeda leader, Osama as an intermediary between the organisation and Iran. Saad bin Laden has been living in Iran since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, apparently under house arrest.

The letter, which was signed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second in command, was written after the American embassy in Yemen was attacked by simultaneous suicide car bombs in September.

Western security officials said the missive thanked the leadership of Iran's Revolutionary Guards for providing assistance to al-Qaeda to set up its terrorist network in Yemen, which has suffered ten al-Qaeda-related terror attacks in the past year, including two bomb attacks against the American embassy.

In the letter al-Qaeda's leadership pays tribute to Iran's generosity, stating that without its "monetary and infrastructure assistance" it would have not been possible for the group to carry out the terror attacks. It also thanked Iran for having the "vision" to help the terror organisation establish new bases in Yemen after al-Qaeda was forced to abandon much of its terrorist infrastructure in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

There has been intense speculation about the level of Iranian support for al-Qaeda since the 9/11 Commission report into al-Qaeda's terror attacks against the U.S. in 2001 concluded that Iran had provided safe passage for many of the 9/11 hijackers travelling between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia prior to the attacks.

Scores of senior al Qaeda activists - including Saad bin Laden - sought sanctuary in Iran following the overthrow of the Taliban, and have remained in Tehran ever since. The activities of Saad bin Laden, 29, have been a source of Western concern despite Tehran's assurances that he is under official confinement.

But Iran was a key transit route for al Qaeda loyalists moving between battlefields in the Middle East and Asia. Western security officials have also concluded Iran's Revolutionary Guards have supported al-Qaeda terror cells, despite religious divisions between Iran's Shia Muslim revolutionaries and the Sunni Muslim terrorists.

Iran is active in Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland. The country has been a focal point for al-Qaeda, which has found relatively easy targets in its lawless environment. "Yemen is now a key strategic base for al-Qaeda's operations, as well as being fertile recruitment territory," said a senior Western security official. "Iran's Revolutionary Guards have provided important support in helping al-Qaeda to turn Yemen into a major centre of operations."

Apart from the terror attacks against the US embassy al-Qaeda has also threatened to attack the British and Saudi Arabian embassies in Yemen.

Intelligence Report Sees Higher Nuclear Risk as Technology Spreads

By Elaine M. Grossman

WASHINGTON -- The risk that terrorists will acquire and use atomic weapons will increase in coming decades as nuclear technology and expertise proliferate, according to a U.S. intelligence report released yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 19).

While the risk of a nuclear attack in the next 20 years remains "very low" -- probably lower than the possibility of a chemical or biological weapons strike -- it is "likely to be greater than it is today," according to the projection, published by the National Intelligence Council.

The panel, an arm of the national intelligence director's office, issued Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World to "stimulate strategic thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where they seem to be headed, and how they might interact," commission Chairman Thomas Fingar, U.S. deputy national intelligence director, said in a foreword to the report.

The 99-page document -- the fourth such report on long-term trends that the council has issued in recent years -- warns of the perils the United States might expect from the steady expansion of nuclear capabilities worldwide.

"The spread of nuclear technologies and expertise is generating concerns about the potential emergence of new nuclear-weapon states and the acquisition of nuclear materials by terrorist groups," according to the document.

The national intelligence director's office laid out the risks in a statement released yesterday.

"The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons," according to the DNI statement. "The likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used will increase with expanded access to technology and a widening range of options for limited strikes."

Of particular concern is the "growing risk of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East," where a number of states "are already thinking about developing or acquiring nuclear technology useful for development of nuclear weaponry," reads the global trends report.

A Middle East nuclear arms race tops the panel's list of dangerous developments that could threaten political or economic globalization. An act of terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction could have a similarly traumatizing effect, according to the assessment.

Fingar emphasized at an event this week that the publication is not meant to be predictive or inevitable. In fact, he said Tuesday, "even the word 'projection' is a little more determinative than we intend this to be."

Experts note that a number of nations have come close to gaining -- or actually acquired -- nuclear arms by masking illicit activities under the cloak of internationally permitted development of civil nuclear energy. For a time, Libya and Iraq maintained clandestine efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and Iran and Syria are now widely suspected of doing the same (see GSN stories on Iran and Syria, Nov. 19).

The global trends report "pulls its punch on exactly ... why the spread of nuclear power is a problem, said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "The way they describe the problem, it's not clear that you need to do very much to solve it other than to say something like, 'Well, we have diplomatic pledges or IAEA inspections to guard against these possibilities,' and then it just goes away."

The trend lines in the Middle East are discouraging, according to a February essay he wrote about the international community's challenges in verifying the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

"Since 2005, more than 15 countries have announced a desire to acquire large reactors of their own by 2020," wrote Sokolski, who serves on the U.S. Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (see GSN, Nov. 19).

"Nine of these states -- Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen -- are located in the war-torn region of the Middle East," he explained. "Most are interested in developing a nuclear program capable of more than merely boiling water to run turbines that generate electricity. At least four have made it clear that they are interested in hedging their security bets with a nuclear weapons option." ....