Terrorists shaped by Wahhabi petrodollars

The Woolrich butcher, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and the 9/11 hijackers were all products of a system of Wahhabi inculcation funded by Saudi Arabia over the last several decades.  This is the analysis of Jonathan Manthorpe writing for the Vancouver Sun—a judgment that is increasingly impossible to dispute.

Thanks to Gisele, David, Sal, and El Grillo for sending this in:

Jonathan Manthorpe: Saudi Arabia funding fuels jihadist terror

Big chunks of the country’s huge oil earnings have been spent on spreading a violent and intolerant variety of Islam

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun columnist May 28, 2013

The ultimate responsibility for recent atrocities like the Boston Marathon bombing and the butchering last week of an off-duty British soldier is very clear.

It belongs to Saudi Arabia.

Over more than two decades, Saudi Arabia has lavished around $100 billion or more on the worldwide promotion of the violent, intolerant and crudely puritanical Wahhabist sect of Islam that the ruling royal family espouses.

The links of the Boston bombers and the London butchers to organizations following the Saudi royal family’s religious line are clear.

One of the two London butchers, Nigerian-born Michael Adebolajo, was radicalized by the cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who headed the outlawed terrorist group Al-Muhajiroun.

The group follows Wahhabist teachings and advocates unifying all Muslims, forcibly if necessary, under a single fundamentalist theocratic government.

Similarly, the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, hailed from Russia’s southern predominantly Muslim province of Chechnya. Starting in the late 1980s, Saudi Arabia began dispatching Wahhabist clerics and radical preachers to Chechnya.

The spread of Wahhabism sparked not only a separatist war against the Russians, but also a good deal of violence among Muslims.

Wahhabism is now institutionalized in Chechnya and is particularly attractive to young men.

There are similar strands leading back to Wahhabist indoctrination in the histories of very many of the known Muslim terrorists of the last 20 years.

The founder of the sect, Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab, was an eighteenth century Muslim zealot allied to the Al-Saud clan who promoted an extreme version of Salafism.

Salaf is the Arab word meaning pious ancestor and refers to those who attempt to emulate the pure Islamic life of the Prophet Muhammad and his generation of followers.

But Wahhab and his modern disciples take this notion to extremes. The list of people whom Wahhabists should consider their enemies includes not only Christians, Jews, Hindus and atheists, but also Shiite, Sufi and Sunni Muslims.

And yet no western politicians seem prepared to accept the obvious.

The chances of disaffected young men being drawn into the evil web of Wahhabist murderous extremism would be significantly decreased if the Saudi funding was blocked.

The Saudis began exporting Wahhabism in the early 1970s when the country’s oil wealth began growing at an ever-increasing rate.

The amount the Saudi royal family, both by government donations and the generosity of individual princes, now lavishes on Wahhabist schools, colleges, mosques, Islamic centres and the missionary work of fundamentalist imams around the world is extraordinary.

In 2003, a United States Senate committee on terrorism heard testimony that in the previous 20 years Saudi Arabia had spent $87 billion on promoting Wahhabism worldwide.

This included financing 210 Islamic centres, 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges and 2,000 madrassas (religious schools).

Various estimates put the amount the Saudi government spends on these missionary institutions as up to $3 billion a year.

This money smothers the voices of moderate Muslims and the poison flows into every Muslim community worldwide.

Key figures in the September 2001 attacks on the United States were radicalized at mosques in Germany.

Britain is now reckoned by some to be the worst breeding ground anywhere for violent Muslim fundamentalists

Indian newspapers recently reported Saudi Arabia has a massive $35 billion program to build mosques and religious schools across South Asia, where there are major Muslim communities in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the divided territory of Jammu and Kashmir…

There is more—read the rest here.

While most readers will agree with Manthorpe’s statement that “Wahhabist murderous extremism would be significantly decreased if the Saudi funding was blocked,” they may be wondering how to accomplish a block.

Consider that the Indonesian and Philippine branches of the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization were once designated by the U.S. as terrorist entities, but the parent organization itself has never been sanctioned.  The Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth have never been named either, although their role in financing and fanning the flames of global jihad are clear to anybody paying attention.

At a minimum, these organizations, which are quasi-governmental foundations with direct backing of the Saudi government, should be designated in the same fashion that other Islamist charities and banks have been sanctioned by the U.S. elsewhere.

Benghazi terrorists masquerade as charity

Ansar al-Sharia, the terror group widely believed to have played a leading role in the attack against the U.S. mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11 last year, now claims that it is carrying out humanitarian and charity work in Libya.

The militants were forced out of Benghazi following the murder of the U.S. ambassador, but they returned in February.  The Globe and Mail reported at the time that “Observers say Ansar al-Sharia is regaining ground in Benghazi by portraying itself as a humanitarian and security organization, protecting the city from external threats and hazardous goods,” in addition to providing “security” at Benghazi’s central hospital.

The Jamahiriya News Agency subsequently reported that Ansar al-Sharia was offering social services for free, suggesting a “hidden agenda” designed “to proactively win people’s trust,” according to a Benghazi resident.

More recently, the Washington Free Beacon reports that, “The group has downplayed its military activities and played up its social service work.  It opened a women’s clinic in late 2012 and has reported on its Facebook page that it delivered food to needy families in regions outside the city.”

Ansar al-Sharia’s philanthropic activities appear to be exaggerated; the Globe and Mail found that a box of allegedly expired medicine seized by Ansar al-Sharia in the interests of public safety actually had not expired yet.

But the charitable efforts and public relations campaign are an indication that Ansar al-Sharia is attempting to follow the example of other terrorist groups that provide social services such as Hamas, and may be trying to fulfill the dying wish of Osama Bin Laden to rebrand the global jihadist movement by implementing relief programs to gain supporters.

SIMI hotbed gets Saudi support

Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in northern India, the birthplace of the militant group Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), receives support from Saudi Arabia, which also funds SIMI itself:

• In 2006, SIMI and Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out a pressure cooker bombing that killed 209 train passengers in Mumbai.  SIMI was involved with other smaller but still lethal bombings throughout the 2000s.  This February, three SIMI activists were detained for questioning in regards to explosions that killed 18 in Hyderabad.
• SIMI was founded at AMU, a public university in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1977.
• AMU mostly makes the news today for “violent incidents in campus, arrest of its students and alumni for involvement in various terrorist attacks in India,” the possible presence of Al Qaeda on campus, and the financial improprieties of AMU vice chancellor P. K. Abdul Azis.
• Last year, Vice Chancellor Azis traveled to Riyadh and announced his intentions to obtain financial support from public and private Saudi entities for the expansion of an Arabic teaching and research facility at AMU.  Azis also indicated that a high-powered delegation from a Saudi university met with AMU officials the previous year to identify areas of joint cooperation within AMU’s engineering and technology college.
• The South Asia Terrorism Portal also reports that SIMI itself receives “generous financial assistance” from Saudi Arabia:

…SIMI reportedly secures generous financial assistance from the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Riyadh, and also maintains close links with the International Islamic Federation of Students’ Organizations (IIFSO) in Kuwait.

It also receives generous funds from contacts in Pakistan. The Chicago-based Consultative Committee of Indian Muslims is also reported to have supported SIMI morally and financially…

• SIMI considers the United States as an “enemy of Islam” and held demonstrations across India in 1998 against American military presence in Saudi Arabia at the time, and adopted a “pro-Taliban stance” after 9/11.

Kazakh jihadists sent money abroad

The Kazakh terrorist group Jund al-Khilafah, or the Soldiers of the Caliphate, has the financial means to support militants beyond Kazakhstan’s borders, according to a think tank report earlier this year.  Jund al-Khilafah has sent money to fellow fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and possibly even to Mohamed Merah, the North African terrorist who killed seven people in France last year.

The Jamestown Foundation offered this analysis in January:

…Jund al-Khilafah is based in the North Caucasus and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, and it carried out three separate attacks in Atyrau, Taraz and Almaty in late 2011 (Tengrinews, September 28, 2012). As evidenced by slain Tunisian-born Jund al-Khilafah amir Moez Garsallaoui’s connections to Mohammed Merah, who killed three Jews and four French paratroopers in southwest France in March 2012, Jund al-Khilafah also has international operational capabilities. There are an estimated 200 to 300 Kazakhstani militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, many of whom have financial relationships with Jund al-Khilafah supporters in Kazakhstan (September 9, 2011). This became apparent with the sentencing of Aidos Kusanov on October 8, 2012, who transferred 380,000 tenge (approximately $2,500) to Jund al-Khilafah in Pakistan through the Aqtobe-based [Kazakh] militant group Ansar al-Din. Ansar al-Din has not claimed any attacks in Kazakhstan, but has issued numerous video statements condemning the Kazakhstani government on jihadist websites, such as hunafa.com and Kavkaz Center, and seeks to “establish links of material support” to “assist the families of the mujahideen,” according to its own propaganda (http://hunafa.com/?p=3839)…

Despite Jund al-Khilafa and Ansar al-Din’s operational links to Kazakhstan, the flow of militants and funds still appears to be from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan or elsewhere—not the other way around. This could soon change, however. In a November 2011 Islamic Jihad Union video statement, a Kazakhstani fighter said that that after victory in Afghanistan, their “goal” is Central Asia, while another fighter, who claimed to be the “amir,” said their “sphere of interest” is Central Asia, in particular Kazakhstan (Kavkazcenter.com, December 2011). Other experts in the region argue that the IMU and other militants are already in Kazakhstan, using the country effectively as a “terminal” linking Europe, Central Asia and Afghanistan, and therefore the militants do not want to destabilize Kazakhstan, yet (Tengrinews, September 6, 2011)…

How Jund al-Khilafah acquired the money that it was able to transfer to Afghanistan and Pakistan is unclear, although the Saudi-backed Wahhabi foundation known as the Muslim World League is active in Kazakhstan.  The MWL has financed the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist groups globally, particularly in countries at the fringes of the Islamic world.

A case in late-2011 revealed a Jund al-Khilafah suicide bomber who “was part of a group that planned to rob a number of stores, banks and currency exchanges and to attack law enforcement personnel,” and whose leader wanted operatives “to commit both jihad and economic crimes.”  Reliance on theft can sometimes be an indicator of a terrorist group with limited funds, but the ability to send surplus funds outside their home base undercuts that possibility.

Kazakhstan, with its population of young, male, ethnic Kazakhs who are increasingly falling under the spell of jihad, has come under renewed scrutiny following the arrest of two Kazakh associates of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who once launched fireworks with Tsarnaev on the banks of the Charles River, helped Tsarnaev dispose of evidence after the bombing, and subsequently lied to investigators about their activities.

How one of the two Kazakhs, Dias Kadyrbayev, who drove a BMW, obtained money for travel, rent, and tuition in Massachusetts has yet to be determined.

Canadian subsidiary invests in genocidal Sudan

Despite Sudanese state sponsorship of terrorism and its campaign of massacres by Arab Muslims against black Muslims and Christians, a Vancouver-based firm, Statesman Resources, has an African subsidiary that maintains an oil exploration concession in the Sudan.

This information comes from Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  Schanzer points out that although he believes such investment is legal, it is totally out-of-step with Western expectations about refraining doing business with the Sudanese:

Why is the West Doing Business with Sudan?

Jonathan Schanzer
5th April 2013 – National Post

What does Canada have in common with the regime in Sudan, which perpetrated genocide in Darfur, while allying with Iran and providing weapons to the Palestinian terror group Hamas?

In practical terms, they share very little. Ottawa withholds commercial support services and government-to-government development co-operation from Sudan. Canada’s parliament also has enforced sanctions mandated by the United Nations Security Council, including an arms embargo, as well as an asset freeze and travel ban on certain individuals.

Yet, somehow, it is legal for Canadian firms to invest in Sudan’s oil sector.

Just consider Vancouver-based Statesman Resources. The company owns 50.1% of an African subsidiary, Statesman Africa. In July 2012, Statesman Africa was awarded 75% of an oil exploration area known as “Block 14” in northwest Sudan, along Egypt’s southern border.

Preliminary estimates by Statesman Africa indicated that the block might have a “mean potential resource of 600 million barrels.” By November 2012, Block 14’s prospects looked even brighter. One estimate suggested that it held “1.5 billion barrels of gross un-risked prospective resources.”

According to the Associated Press, as of December 2012, Statesman Africa was “in the process of being formally registered in Sudan and opening an operational office in Khartoum.” According to the company’s CEO, Sudan’s state oil company, Sudapet, is “essentially … a joint venture partner.” Statesman must also work with Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum, which is the regulatory authority.

To be clear, there is nothing illegal about Statesman’s investment in Sudan. Canadian companies are apparently free to do business with Khartoum. But in doing so, they are out of step with Canada’s otherwise sensible foreign policies in the Middle East.

Sudan, as noted above, is a patron of Hamas. It allows the group’s leaders to fundraise and train on Sudanese soil. It also was the origin point for Iranian-made Fajr 5 long-range rockets that were smuggled into Gaza and subsequently fired into Israel during the conflict in November 2012. This was not the first time Sudan helped Iran smuggle weapons into Gaza, either.

Canada has properly listed Hamas under its criminal code. There are severe penalties for “persons and organizations that deal in the property or finances of a listed entity. In addition, it is a crime to knowingly participate in, or contribute to, any activity of a listed entity for the purpose of enhancing the ability of the entity to facilitate or carry out a terrorist activity.”

Yet, somehow, it is legal to engage in business with Hamas’ patron, Sudan.

Sudan serves as an important hub for Iran’s terrorist training, financial investments, and the distribution of Iranian weapons to jihadi groups across the African continent. Canada has placed strong sanctions on Iran for its global terrorist activity and its pursuit of an illicit nuclear program. Yet, somehow, it is legal to engage in business with Iran’s close ally, Sudan.

This dissonance appears to be rooted in Canada’s focus on Sudan’s civil conflict, rather than its foreign policies. As one official government website notes, “Improved bilateral relations between Canada and Sudan are contingent on the Government of Sudan’s willingness to take steps toward maintaining a peaceful relationship with the Republic of South Sudan and its other neighbors, ending the current violence in Darfur and the transitional areas, and improving the overall human rights situation across the country.”

The United States, by contrast, lists Sudan as a State Sponsor of Terror. Khartoum earned this distinction in 1993 by allowing al-Qaeda to create its headquarters in the country during the 1990s. However, it remains on the list now for its close and continuing ties to both Iran and Hamas…

Read it all here.

By the way, Ken Rijock also advises entities doing business with Sudanese companies to obtain written assurances from them that their goods and services aren’t benefiting end users in Iran.  Statesman Resources wouldn’t want to run afoul of Canada’s sanctions on Iran by engaging in slipshod business practices in Sudan, would they?

Saudi-backed tycoon finances Jamaat-e-Islami

Mir Quasem Ali

Mir Quasem Ali serves as the de facto treasurer of Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI or simply “Jamaat”), the Islamist political party in Bangladesh with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and militant causes.  He has served for nearly 40 years as Saudi Arabia’s money man in Bangladesh, being involved major Wahhabi-backed institutions since the 1970s.

Mir Quasem Ali (also often spelled Mir Kashem Ali) is in jail at the moment for war crimes he and his Al-Badr group committed during Bangladesh’s struggle for independence in 1971, but he is still sometimes touted as the party’s next leader.

According to one account, Mir Quasem Ali fled to Saudi Arabia after Bangladesh secured its independence, and returned after amnesty was offered in 1974.  He landed a job at the newly founded Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited, Bangladesh’s biggest sharia bank (which itself has close ties to Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Bank), and he became IBBL’s director for many years according to an article by Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury:

…IBBL provides JEI an opportunity to launder money from abroad and also channel un-audited funds to various militant groups in the country and abroad. Islamic Bank Foundation (IBF), a JEI floated organization oversees all the projects of IBBL and profits generated by it and the interest / commission accrued on foreign donations goes to the IBBL account of IBF.

The IBF is headed by Mir Qasem Ali, JEI Executive Committee member and Country Director of the Saudi based Islamic NGO Rabeta-al-alam-al-Islami that funds a number of projects in Bangladesh. Mir Quasem Ali, the main brain behind JEI’s finances, is now in jail facing trial on war crimes charges. He remained Director of IBBL for a number of years since its inception in 1975…

Money Jihad readers will recall that Bangladeshi authorities say that IBBL has diverted 8 percent of its corporate zakat to terrorists.  The U.S. Senate also blasted HSBC last year for its banking relationships with IBBL.

In his role as country director for the Saudi-backed Muslim World League’s branch in Bangladesh—Rabeta-al-Alam-al-Islami Bangladesh—Mir Quasem Ali collected funds for local militants, Rohingya fighters from Burma, and Afghan mujahideen, which Money Jihad blogged about in 2011.

Mir Quasem Ali also sits on the board of the Saudi-funded Ibn Sina Trust, whose website describes his position with the trust and his previous positions with Rabeta-al-Alam-al-Islami and IBBL without referring to his current status in jail.

An article from the Policy Research Group in 2009 laid out additional details about Jamaat’s money laundering, terrorist financing, and business operations, and Mir Quasem Ali’s role in overseeing them:

Article: “NGOs are now reemerging as sponsors of jihadi activity”

The important article in Foreign Policy by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Aaron Y. Zelin highlighted in Money Jihad‘s post yesterday deserves some further attention.

Gartenstein-Ross and Zelin’s analysis is insightful on the escalation of relief aid activities by Islamist rebel groups and Islamic charities themselves in Arab Spring countries.  But just one little quibble on their their statement that NGOs are “reemerging” as sponsors of jihad:  “reemerging” denotes that the phenomenon if Islamic charities funding terrorism stopped at some point and has resumed.

It would indeed be fair to say that there were several significant setbacks for terrorist financing in the 2000s:  the closure of seven terror-financing Islamic charities by the Bush administration after 9/11, the successful prosecution of the Hamas-funding Holy Land Foundation, and the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and their Iraqi financial network by coalition forces during the Iraq war.

But apart from those successes, there hasn’t been much of a lull in the flow of petrodollars to fund Wahhabi Islam and terrorist operations since Saudi sponsorship first ramped up in the 1970s.

It may appear as a reemergence because the Arab Spring is such a visible reminder of the power of the terror financiers to arm and fund Islamist rebels.  In any case, and whatever verbs we use, it’s good that mainstream counter-terror observers are recognizing that Muslim charities continue to play the starring role in the financing of terrorism in the world today.

AP deems terrorist ransom demands “pragmatic”

In reference to the Algerian hostage standoff that left 37 captives dead, the Associated Press has painted an almost sympathetic portrait of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the lead abductor.

Starting off with a headline claiming that Belmokhtar preferred making money to killing hostages, the AP further asserts that Belmokhtar was “known as the more pragmatic and less brutal of the commanders of an increasingly successful offshoot of al-Qaeda,” that “those who have dealt directly with him say his cell has never executed a captive,” and that Belmokhtar denounced actions that “caused many civilian casualties.”

Any exceptions to this history of Belmokhtar’s alleged benevolence, intimates the AP, may have involved friendly fire by security forces attempting to rescue hostages.  The AP inserts this whiff of suspicion about the rescuers twice in the article saying, “It’s unclear if the two died from friendly fire,” and later on, “It’s unclear how many were killed by friendly fire.”  Just once, couldn’t the AP have written, “It’s unclear how many were killed by Belmokhtar’s men”?

The AP does not even seem to consider that Belmokhtar may use the money from ransoms to purchase more arms, recruit and train more terrorist operatives, and carry out more abductions and terrorist attacks that kill people.  The AP appears to cast Belmokhtar’s motives as primarily financial without identifying his religious and ideological motivations.  Why didn’t Belmokhtar pursue a career as a businessman, or even as a crime boss, rather than as a terrorist, if his motives were mostly financial?

The one saving grace in this well-researched but sadly biased article comes in the dead last paragraph—the least important paragraph for journalists:

“Before he led this operation in Algeria, that was the sentiment I had, that Belmokhtar was less brutal,” [hostage negotiator Moustapha Chaffi] said by telephone on Friday. “Now I find myself thinking that they are all terrorists. That they all take hostages. That they are all fanatics. So to draw a difference between them is really, really relative. There’s in fact no difference anymore.”

That insight should have been the lead paragraph.

Money laundering expert accuses Venezuela of massive uranium exports to Iran

One of Money Jihad‘s favorites, the Financial Crimes Blog by Kenneth Rijock, is making a disturbing allegation:  that Venezuela is illegally exporting massive amounts of uranium for Iran’s nuclear program, and that U.S. officials have rejected the evidence.  The “reliable sources” aren’t named and the “irrefutable, documentary evidence” isn’t specified, so take it with a grain of salt, but Mr. Rijock has proved to be very insightful and prescient before.

From Jan. 10:

US POINTEDLY IGNORES VENEZUELAN URANIUM EXPORTS

The United States, for reasons not known to this writer, appears to be deliberately ignoring the mounting indications of massive exports of Uranium, from Venezuela, to its end user, the Government of Iran. Reliable sources have confirmed that irrefutable, documentary evidence of same, from unimpeachable sources, has been politely declined when offered. America opposes Iran’s WMD programme, somebody has chosen to ignore the truth, when  it comes from Venezuela.

Given that close monitoring of Iran’s developing illegal Weapons of Mass Destruction programme has become an American obsession, I am baffled as to why actionable intelligence, regarding these outbound shipments is of no interest to America’s intelligence community. Vessels laden with Uranium  are leaving Venezuela’s Caribbean ports, steaming direct to Iran with their illicit cargo…

There’s a little more to the full post including Rijock’s speculation on the reason for the U.S.’s hear-no-evil, see-no-evil attitude here.

Sharia money trail: British website pushes halal

Industry rag does sharia’s bidding

Meat trade news service calls for harsher halal slaughter methods

Elements of the British meat industry appear to have gotten in bed with sharia zealots.  Why?  They see a lucrative business opportunity to sell “true” halal meat to British Muslims and export halal meat to the growing market of the Islamic world.

Meat Trade News Daily, a website created by English slaughter-men, has run a series of broadsides against Masood Khawaja, president of the Halal Food Authority (HFA), for being too lax in enforcing draconian strictures of sharia law in livestock slaughter.

Meat Trade News Daily has published at least one letter from Abdul Raja, a pro-sharia instigator who has previously organized failed boycotts against halal meat that he deemed to be insufficiently halal, addressed to Khawaja.  A very similar writing style and perspective suggest that Mr. Raja is behind additional write-ups against Khawaja and the HFA, including a recent screed that suggested Khawaja should pay more attention to “the ‘Elders’ of the faith” and less attention to “the white community.”

The crux of the controversy is that Khawaja has said that machine slaughter can be permitted under Islamic law, while sharia fanatics like Raja insist on mass throat-slittings by hand and animal bleed-outs.

In addition to publishing seemingly off-topic news promoting the spread of Islamic micro-finance, Meat Trade News Daily posted an article this fall about the attack on the American mission in Benghazi that killed four with the scurrilous headline:  “USA – The CIA too busy torturing prisoners to help.”

Do the English businessmen behind Meat Trade News Daily (who ironically describe themselves as supporters of British pork industry), truly believe this garbage, or is Abdul Raja a convenient operative on their payroll to help them sell their particular brand of sharia slaughtered meat?

Prediction for 2013: web retailers face terror hit

Author and futurist Jack Uldrich has predicted that online retailers will be a primary target for an Iranian-backed attack on Cyber Monday, 2013.  Recent cyber-attacks have already shown how Iran has targeted U.S. banks and financial institutions.  It is logical to assume they would move on to a “softer” cyber target in online retailers that may not have as robust security layers as major international banks.

From Mr. Uldrich’s website—this item is his ninth out of 15 predictions for the new year:

“Cyber Monday” Does Dark. On the Monday following Thanksgiving 2013—the largest Internet retail day of the year—a sophisticated cyber attack will be directed against the world’s top online retailers. Although no group will claim immediate responsibility for the attacks, government officials will suspect the hackers were supported by the Iranian government and were launched in retaliation for the internationally imposed economic sanctions that have throttled Iran’s economy. Days later, a top Iranian military official will become the first victim of a self-guided bullet. Neither the U.S. nor Israel will confirm its involvement in the assassination.