KANO, NIGERIA--Boko Haram launched renewed attacks around a captured town in restive northeast Nigeria this week, razing at least 16 towns and villages, a local government and a union official told AFP.

"They burnt to the ground all the 16 towns and villages including Baga, Dorn-Baga, Mile 4, Mile 3, Kauyen Kuros and Bunduram," said Musa Bukar, head of the Kukawa local government in Borno state.

Abubakar Gamandi, head of Borno's fish traders union and a Baga native, confirmed the attacks, which happened Wednesday, adding that hundreds of people who fled were trapped on islands on Lake Chad.

UNITED NATIONS — Chemical weapons investigators concluded "with a high degree of confidence" that chlorine gas was used as a weapon against three opposition-controlled villages in Syria last year, affecting between 350 and 500 people and killing 13, according to a report obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The third report by a fact-finding mission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons didn't apportion blame but said 32 of the 37 people interviewed "saw or heard the sound of a helicopter over the village at the time of the attack with barrel bombs containing toxic chemicals."

The investigators said 26 people heard the distinctive "whistling" sound of the falling barrel bombs containing toxic chemicals and 16 visited the impact sites and saw the bombs or their remnants. They said 29 people smelled "the distinctive odor of the gas cloud" released after the bombs hit the ground, mainly describing it "as intense, chlorine-like, similar to cleaning material used to clean toilets, but much stronger."

The report includes a description of 142 videos and 189 pieces of material obtained by the investigators as well as photos of impact sites and the inner chlorine cylinder from a barrel bomb.

The mission was established by the OPCW on April 29 to establish the facts surrounding allegations of the use of chlorine "for hostile purposes" in Syria. Chlorine gas is readily available and is used in industry around the world, but can also be used as a weapon.

The U.N. Security Council has been intensely involved in the issue of alleged chemical weapons use in Syria. After an August 2013 sarin gas attack near Damascus in which the U.S. says more than 1,400 people were killed, the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution backed by the U.S. and Russia on Sept. 27, 2013, ordering Syria's chemical weapons stockpile to be destroyed. U.N. investigators could not find enough evidence to assess blame for the sarin attack. Syria's declared chemical weapons stockpiles have since been destroyed under international supervision, but questions remain about whether it may still be hiding deadly chemical agents.

Chlorine gas is not listed as a chemical weapon. But eight council members, including the United States, said in a Dec. 30 letter accompanying the OPCW report that the 2013 resolution also states that any use of chemical weapons threatens international peace and security and must be condemned.

The 15 council members discussed the fact-finding mission's report behind closed doors Tuesday, and diplomats said the U.S. and other Western nations who signed the letter along with Jordan urged Security Council action in response to the findings. But Russia, Syria's closest ally, insisted that the report on chlorine attacks was an issue for the OPCW, which polices the Chemical Weapons Convention, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because consultations were private.

Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mekdad told an OPCW meeting on Dec. 1 that his government has never used chemical weapons or chlorine gas during the country's four-year civil war, which has claimed over 200,000 lives and displaced one third of the country's population. He said terror groups "have used chlorine gas in several of the regions of Syria and Iraq."

But U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power tweeted that "only Syrian regime uses (helicopters)." She also tweeted that the Syrian "Regime must be shown it is not enough to destroy declared CW (chemical weapons); must stop dropping chemical-laden explosives on civilians."

The investigators interviewed 14 people from the village of Talmenes in Idlib governorate about barrel bomb attacks on April 21 and April 24. At two houses that were hit, a 7-year-old boy, a teenage girl, and the matriarch of a family died from exposure to chlorine gas, they said. Domestic animals including cows, goats and sheep also died at both houses.

Fourteen people from the village of Al Tamanah, also in Idlib, were interviewed by the mission's investigators about five incidents in April and May — all but one at night. Eight members of two families who had sought refuge in the village died shortly after separate attacks involving the toxic chemical, the report said.

Investigators said they interviewed nine people from Kafr Zita in Hama Governorate in northern Syria and were told that the village had been the target of hundreds of attacks with conventional weapons and 17 attacks using toxic chemicals between April and August.

An Ontario-based open source intelligence research group, iBRABO, exposed a New Zealand ISIS fighter who was unwittingly broadcasting his location in Syria on twitter. Mark Taylor (known on twitter as "Kiwi Jihadi" or @M_Taylor_Kiwi) quickly deleted 45 tweets after realizing that he was broadcasting his twitter location to every intelligence agency in the world. 

"Unfortunately for him, we captured all of them prior to him removing the tweets and will discuss the value of the intelligence they contained," wrote Jeff R. Weyers on the iBRABO website.  

Image of tweets revealing "Kiwi Jihadi" location in Syria

Weyers explained to the Vancouver Observer that his group's 'open source intelligence' refers to data that can be found publicly from anywhere in the world. 

"Open source can be intelligence derived from any publicly available source. Traditionally this used to be newspaper, television, and radio," Weyers said. "However, with the growth of the internet and more specifically social media intelligence (SOCINT) in the last 10 years, it really has opened up the area."

He said "anybody" could find the data that iBRABO does, but that analysis and interpretation requires training. 

Tracking terror in Canada  

Intriguingly, iBRABO is based not in the U.S. or U.K., but in Canada, which didn't seem to have much get much international attention in relation to ISIS until the Ottawa shooting and Quebec terror attack last year. So does that mean Canada is a growing hot spot for terrorism?   

Tracking image of Mark Taylor in Syria provided by iBRABO  

On the iBRABO website, Weyers writes further in detail about Taylor's social media use, which gave away his location in Syria. 

"Taylor isn’t the first jihadist to broadcast his whereabouts via social media and in fact looking at the battlefield in Syria we see fighters from Canada, France, and other western countries making the same mistake. The benefit of material like this when examining foreign fighters is it allows investigators to establish the extent to which an individual is tied to a terrorist group like Daesh (ISIS).

In this manner, they can better justify potential criminal charges against the individual and at the very least build grounds for their detention and investigation upon their return."

iBRABO is an open source intelligence group, based in Waterloo, Ontario. A key part of iBRABO's research include "Terrorist Social Networks" and "methods for Identifying Persons at Risk for Recruitment to Violent Extremism."

Weyers wrote that in addition to twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Instagram all allow for geotag tracking, and that in some cases, will track geotagged related material whether the user turns on GPS encoding or not.  Weyers said Taylor's tweets revealed that in October, he was fighting in Kara Roma, an area occupied by foreign ISIS fighters. 

Aside from security intelligence groups like iBRABO, media like AP, CNN and Buzzfeed have also been using social media to track the geographic location of social media posts via Geofeedia. 

Islamist militants have abducted 20 Egyptian Christians in Libya, a source close to the government says.

The Ansar al-Sharia militia kidnapped 13 of them on Saturday in the coastal city of Sirte and the rest of them over the past few days, the source said.

Those abducted were believed to be Coptic Christians.

Thousands of Egyptians work in Libya, mainly in the construction and craft sectors, and several have been killed in recent years.

In February, the bodies of seven Egyptian Christians who had been shot were found near Libya's second-largest city of Benghazi.

Last week, an Egyptian Coptic couple were found dead in their home in Sirte, hometown of long-time dictator Moamar Gaddafi, who was overthrown and killed in a popular uprising three years ago.

The couple's 13-year-old daughter, who was kidnapped, was later found dead.

Local council chairman Yussef Tebeiqa said the attack might have been motivated by religion, as money and jewellery were not taken.

Sirte, 500 kilometres east of Tripoli, was in the hands of Islamist militias, including Ansar al-Sharia, which the UN Security Council last month added to its terror list over links to Al Qaeda and for running training camps for the Islamic State group.

Since Gaddafi's removal, Libya's small Christian minority has expressed fears over Islamic extremism, especially with the rise of armed militias enforcing their own law in the absence of central control.

Published on May 15, 2014