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The Al Nusrah Front, al Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, has released a statement saying its fighters have been ordered to withdraw from their frontline positions north of Aleppo. Al Nusrah’s jihadists had been fighting against the Islamic State in the area. The move comes in response to Turkey’s attempt to establish a buffer zone for forces fighting Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s organization. The statement, which was released via Twitter on August 9, does not indicate that Al Nusrah is siding with the Islamic State in the multi-sided conflict. The group makes it clear that it will continue to fight Baghdadi’s men elsewhere. Instead, Turkey’s cooperation with the US-led coalition, which has targeted veteran al Qaeda leaders in northern Syria, has forced Al Nusrah to change tactics. The al Qaeda arm says it is relinquishing control of its territory in the northern part of the Aleppo province. Other rebel groups will step into the void. Al Nusrah criticizes the proposed buffer zone in its statement, saying it is intended to serve Turkey’s national security interests and is not part of a real effort to aid the mujahdeen’s cause. The Turkish government fears a Kurdish state on its southern border, according to Al Nusrah, and that is the real impetus behind its decision. The Kurds are one of the Islamic State’s main opponents and have gained territory at the expense of Baghdadi’s jihadists in recent months.

There is an even simpler explanation for Al Nusrah’s rejection of Turkey’s buffer zone: the US has been striking select al Qaeda operatives in Al Nusrah’s ranks. The Pentagon announced earlier this month that it had begun flying drones out of the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Some of the air missions are reportedly backing up US-trained rebel forces on the ground. Those very same fighters have battled Al Nusrah, which has killed or captured a number of the “moderate” rebels.

Separately, the US has also repeatedly targeted senior al Qaeda leaders in Al Nusrah’s ranks. Labeled the “Khorasan Group,” this cadre of al Qaeda veterans has been plotting attacks in the West.

     The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv (Hebrew) has a splashing headline today warning that Israeli banks are preparing for a “political-economic tsunami”  due to the possibility of an impending European boycott. Unsurprisingly, the banks – Israel’s largest – have been holding meetings amongst themselves to prepare for this tsunami, albeit “quietly and under the radar”. According to Ma’ariv there is “increasing evidence in recent weeks” that the European Union is considering recommendations published in a policy paper last month by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Heavily reported at the time (our coverage here), ECFR’s policy paper warned that transactions between European states and Israeli financial institutions are obligated to adhere to EU policies based on international law when providing loans and financing to Israeli businesses, institutions and individuals in transaction with the illegal Israeli settlements enterprise. An unnamed senior banking official told Ma’ariv, “Beneath the surface this is a mega-event” and if this should happen the economic implications on the banks will have a “massive” impact on the Israeli economy.

This is same tsunami we’ve been hearing about for years now. The timing of the article is somewhat intriguing given there was no information provided indicating what this “increasing evidence” is. But there was this rather curious tickler (google translate): Further deterioration in relations between Israel and the United States downplays the chances that the Americans will try to curb this European action. Maybe the opposite is true. According to various diplomatic sources, the Americans have actually released the reins on Europe and are encouraging Europe to intensify its operations against the continuation of Israel’s settlement policy in the territories. Do tell. One wonders if an increase in pressure might be in relation to Israeli influence over looming U.S. congressional legislation seeking to tank the P5+1 deal with Iran over their nuclear program.

Quoting officials in the Israeli banking system, this is a national issue; there are no banks in Israel not involved in the settlements and there’s “no trick that can solve this affair”:

Despite talk of a pivot to Asia, the US military’s gaze has settled on Africa. That isn’t news for anyone who has followed the expansion of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) on the continent. But it’s a decisive shift that until now US officials have been loath to acknowledge. The veil lifted slightly on Wednesday when President Obama asked Congress for $5 billion to train and equip foreign governments for counterterrorism activities. Most of the countries he cited are in northern Africa, including Somalia, Libya and Mali. US Special Operations are reportedly already training new counterterrorism units in Libya and Mali, as well as Niger and Mauritania. “Today’s principal threat no longer comes from a centralized Al Qaeda leadership. Instead, it comes from decentralized Al Qaeda affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused in the countries where they operate,” Obama said. “We need a strategy that matches this diffuse threat; one that expands our reach without sending forces that stretch our military thin, or stir up local resentments.”

The Counter-Terrorism Partnerships Fund, as the administration dubbed the program, would apparently add more money and a new name to an existing slate of security cooperation programs. Over the last few years the United States has spent millions training proxy forces to combat local insurgents in Africa; one example is a $500 million operation called the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative that provides training and equipment to ten African partners. According to the journalist Nick Turse, who has covered AFRICOM extensively for TomDispatch, the number of operations, programs and missions conducted by the US military in Africa has increased by more than 200 percent since the command was established in 2008. In 2012 alone the United States planned fourteen major training operations across the continent, including in Mali, Morocco, Uganda, Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal and Nigeria. “AFRICOM talks about this like it’s small-scale and low-key to the public, but when you listen to what they’re saying in private it’s really startling,” Turse told me. He’s heard officers refer to Africa as “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.” One AFRICOM official acknowledged to a room full of private contractors that the command had “shifted from our original intent of being a more congenial combatant command to an actual war-fighting combatant command.”

Counterterrorism cooperation sounds innocuous enough, particularly when presented rhetorically as an alternative to ground wars. However light-footed, the strategy Obama made explicit on Wednesday nevertheless endorses expanded US military activity on the continent. Unfortunately, the president was not so much signaling the end of the era of military adventurism as directing it towards a new arena in fresh packaging. And as with more conventional military endeavors, deeper involvement in Africa carries risks of blowback, particularly by drawing large militant networks into local conflicts.

President Obama's announcement that United States has deployed 80 troops to Chad came as a surprise to many. But as my colleague Craig Whitlock points out, the United States already has boots on the ground in a surprising number of African countries. This map shows what sub-Saharan nations currently have a U.S. military presence engaged in actual military operations.

It should be noted that in most of these countries, there is a pretty small number of troops. But it is a clear sign of the U.S. Africa Command's increasingly broad position on the continent in what could be described as a growing shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups. It also shows an increasingly blurred line between U.S. military operations and the CIA in Africa. More details of the troops deployed are below.

If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "F**k the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych. "Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he’s told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator," laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. "It used to be the CIA doing these things," he tells Democracy Now. "I know that for a fact." Now it's the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, twitter and facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.

Ahead of Thursday’s US House vote on a bill sold as reform of a major US government spying program, top technology firms like Google have joined civil liberties and privacy groups in calling the legislation inadequate in fighting mass surveillance. The Reform Government Surveillance coalition – AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo – offered a statement on Wednesday denouncing the USA Freedom Act as a weak attempt at ending the government’s bulk storage of domestic phone metadata.

The USA Freedom Act would take the mass storage of phone records away from the government. Instead, telecommunications companies would be required to store the data. The bill would require the National Security Agency to get approval to search the telecoms’ cache of records from the often-compliant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Last-minute changes to the bill rankled privacy groups on Tuesday, leading many of them to decry the backdoor dealings as responsible for a “weakened,” “watered down” bill compared to what had previously passed the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees earlier this month. On Wednesday, the tech coalition echoed these concerns, calling the amended legislation a move “in the wrong direction” of needed reform regarding mass surveillance. "The latest draft opens up an unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of Internet users' data," the coalition said. "While it makes important progress, we cannot support this bill as currently drafted and urge Congress to close this loophole to ensure meaningful reform." The loophole referred to by the coalition pertains to the USA Freedom Act’s definition for how and when government officials can search collected phone metadata records.

The new language – approved by House leaders and the Obama administration in recent days – modifies the prohibitions on bulk collection of domestic data to allow government officials to search for Americans’ phone records using a “a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the Government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought.” This revised standard for the USA Freedom Act’s reform of surveillance is too broad and leaves privacy protections at risk, civil liberties groups said on Tuesday. In addition, the legislation’s new language also weakens the bill’s transparency provisions which outlined how much technology companies can disclose to customers about the extent of government requests of user data.

Two of the main rebel groups receiving weapons from the United States to fight both the regime and jihadist groups in Syria have surrendered to al-Qaeda. The US and its allies were relying on Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionary Front to become part of a ground force that would attack the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). For the last six months the Hazm movement, and the SRF through them, had been receiving heavy weapons from the US-led coalition, including GRAD rockets and TOW anti-tank missiles. But on Saturday night Harakat Hazm surrendered military bases and weapons supplies to Jabhat al-Nusra, when the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria stormed villages they controlled in northern Idlib province. The development came a day after Jabhat al-Nusra dealt a final blow to the SRF, storming and capturing Deir Sinbal, home town of the group's leader Jamal Marouf.

The collapse of the SRF and attacks on Harakat Hazm have dramatically weakened the presence of moderate rebel fighting groups in Syria, which, after almost four years of conflict is increasingly becoming a battle ground between the Syrian regime and jihadist organisations. For the United States, the weapons they supplied falling into the hands of al-Qaeda is a realisation of a nightmare. It was not immediately clear if American TOW missiles were among the stockpile surrendered to Jabhat al-Nusra on Saturday. However several Jabhat al-Nusra members on Twitter announced triumphantly that they were.

Also the loss of a group that had been held up to the international media as being exemplary of Western efforts in Syria is a humiliating blow at the time that the US is increasing its military involvement in the country, with both air strikes and training of local rebels. In Idlib, Harakat Hazm gave up their positions to Jabhat al-Nusra "without firing a shot", according to some reports, and some of the men even defected to the jihadists. In Aleppo, where Harakat Hazm also has a presence, the group has survived, but only by signing a ceasefire agreement with Jabhat al-Nusra, and giving up some of their checkpoints to the group. Activists circulated the ceasefire document on social media last week.

A political cartoon published Thursday by Hebrew daily Haaretz incited international controversy with its depiction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu piloting a plane labeled "Israel" toward a tower flying the American flag, intended to evoke the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Amos Biderman, the artist who authored the comic, told The Times of Israel the image was intended to imply Netanyahu is leading the country to "a disaster in Israel-US relations on the scale of 9/11," pointing to the Prime Minister's "arrogance" and his handling of settlement construction in Jerusalem as poor diplomacy. The cartoon was composed and published in response to an article in The Atlantic Tuesday that quoted an anonymous source inside the White House as calling Netanyahu a "chicken[expletive]" criticizing the Prime Minister as "cowardly" for his handling of relations with Palestine.White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said those comments do not reflect the administration's views on Israel and Netanyahu defended himself during a public appearance the following day, saying he is concerned with Israeli interests.

Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Israel have been deteriorating in recent years as Israel has struggled and at times failed to navigate its troubled relationship with Palestine without alienating the international community.The announcement of plans to construct a settlement of 1000 homes for Israelis in a section of Jerusalem considered territory claimed by Palestinians against the Obama administration's objections further strained relations already fraught with tension. Despite its timeliness, however, Biderman's lampoon was not well received on social media, with commenters calling the comic "tasteless" and "revolting" and "filth."

Hard-line Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado will be charged for her presumed link to an alleged plot to assassinate Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. In a letter that Machado published on her twitter account yesterday, the Attorney General’s office solicited her presence next 3 December to formally charge her. The opposition figure and former parliamentarian is one of several people suspected of having a role in the alleged plot, with six other figures linked to the opposition having arrests warrants out against them.

Details of the alleged plot were publicly announced by pro-government figures in May this year which state prosecutors have since been investigating. One email intercepted by intelligence services and allegedly sent from Machado’s account stated, “I believe the time has come to join forces, make the necessary calls, and obtain the financing to annihilate Maduro… and the rest will come falling down”.

long time opponent of the Bolivarian government and member of one of the country’s most influential families, Machado was a leader of the movement of opposition protests and street barricades named “The Exit” which brought several Venezuelan cities to a halt from February to May this year. The protests, barricades and clashes with security forces left 43 dead and around 900 wounded, including National Guard officers and civilians from both sides.

The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century after the release of an American contractor held in prison for five years, President Obama announced on Wednesday.In a deal negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, who hosted a final meeting at the Vatican, Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba agreed in a telephone call to put aside decades of hostility to find a new relationship between the United States and the island nation just 90 miles off the American coast.

Officials said they would re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out high-level exchanges and visits between the two governments within months. Mr. Obama will send an assistant secretary of state to Havana next month to lead an American delegation to the next round of talks on Cuban-American migration. The United States will also begin working with Cuba on issues like counternarcotics, environmental protection and human trafficking.The United States will also ease travel restrictions across all 12 categories currently envisioned under limited circumstances in American law, including family visits, official visits, journalistic, professional, educational and religious activities, and public performances, officials said. Ordinary tourism, however, will remain prohibited.Continue reading the main story Mr. Obama will also allow greater banking ties and raise the level of remittances allowed to be sent to Cuban nationals to $2,000 every three months from the current limit of $500. Intermediaries forwarding remittances will no longer require a specific license from the government. American travelers will also be allowed to import up to $400 worth of goods from Cuba, including up to $100 in tobacco and alcohol products.

The contractor, Alan P. Gross, traveled on an American government plane to the United States late Wednesday morning, and the United States sent back three Cuban spies who had been in an American prison since 2001. American officials said the Cuban spies were swapped for a United States intelligence agent who had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years, and said Mr. Gross was not technically part of the swap, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds.”In addition, the United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking relations, and Cuba will release 53 Cuban prisoners identified as political prisoners by the United States government. Although the decades-old American embargo on Cuba will remain in place for now, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about lifting” it.“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time for a new approach.”

On Thursday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a draft authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against ISIL (full text) by a margin of 10-8 along party lines. The text also includes an amendment that would sunset the 2001 AUMF in three-years. Most of today’s news headlines will be focused on the authorization to fight ISIL—and we will have plenty of discussion about it at Just Security. But the sunset of the 2001 AUMF is highly significant in its own right – and it should be welcome news to a wide range of national security law experts across the political spectrum, as Jack Goldsmith, Steve Vladeck, and I discussed in an  Op-Ed in the Washington Post. (Indeed, a sunset of the 2001 AUMF is endorsed by the Principles for drafting an ISIL AUMF published at Just Security and a proposed AUMF published at Lawfare.)

The action on the 2001 sunset was a bit of a surprise because  Sen. Menendez’s draft ISIL AUMF did not originally include a provision to sunset the 2001 AUMF. Nor did Sen. Tim Kaine’s similar draft AUMF. Both Senators Menendez and Kaine, however, spoke strongly in favor of the amendment today (and I applaud them for that). The action on the 2001 AUMF is significant as a potential turning point in the armed conflict with Al Qaeda. In his National Defense University speech in May 2013, President Obama called for refining and eventually repealing the 2001 AUMF when conditions permit. He stated: “I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the [2001] AUMF’s mandate.” Placing a sunset on the 2001 AUMF has been a key plank in Harold Koh’s position, in testimony and in Just Security posts (here and here), outlining how the President can bring an eventual end to the “Forever War.” Another part of that roadmap includes disengaging from Afghanistan. It is notable that today’s decision on the 2001 sunset also comes on the heels of yesterday’s news of the closure of the detention facility at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. At least these aspects of the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban may be winding down or narrowing, albeit while the conflict with ISIL heats up.

Increase transparency. Neither Congress nor the American public has a clear idea whom the United States is fighting or where, especially when it comes to forces associated with al-Qaeda. Any new AUMF should require the president to identify the groups against which force is used, along with related details, regularly in a report to Congress and, unless strictly required by national security, the American people. The president should also share with Congress, and the public to the extent possible, the administration’s legal rationales for using force. Such transparency rules should also be imposed on the 2001 AUMF … Congress should also consider imposing these transparency requirements on uses of force against terrorists under the president’s Article II powers. 3) Geographic limits on ISIL AUMF Sen. Rand Paul proposed an amendment to limit the ISIL AUMF so that the authorization to use force does not apply “outside of the geographic boundaries of Iraq and Syria.” He explained that if ISIL moves some of its forces outside of Iraq and Syria, the administration could return to Congress for additional authorities. That amendment was defeated in a separate vote. With a group of seven other national security law experts, I have supported geographic limits on an ISIL AUMF, but not as restrictive as the limits that Sen. Paul proposes. Our set of Principles recommend Congress to authorize force in Iraq and Syria as well as “any other locations from which ISIL forces actively plan and/or launch attacks against the United States or Iraq.” As Sen. Paul noted, a recent study found that 60 percent of congressional force authorizations have contained geographic limitations.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is being touted as the newest "threat" to the American homeland: hysterics have pointed to Chicago as the locus of their interest, and we are told by everyone from the President on down that if we don’t attack them – i.e. go back into Iraq (and even venture into Syria) to root them out – they’ll soon show up on American shores.

If we step back from the hysteria generated by the beheading of US journalist James Foley, what’s clear is that this new bogeyman is the creation of the United States and its allies in the region. ISIS didn’t just arise out of the earth like some Islamist variation on the fabled Myrmidons: they needed money, weapons, logistics, propaganda facilities, and international connections to reach the relatively high level of organization and lethality they seem to have achieved in such a short period of time. Where did they get these assets? None of this is any secret: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the rest of the oil-rich Gulf states have been backing them all the way. Prince Bandar al-Sultan, until recently the head of the Kingdom’s intelligence agency – and still the chief of its National Security Council – has been among their biggest backers. Qatar and the Gulf states have also been generous in their support for the Syrian jihadists who were too radical for the US to openly back. Although pressure from Washington – only recently exerted – has reportedly forced them to cut off the aid, ISIS is now an accomplished fact – and how can anyone say that support has entirely evaporated instead of merely going underground?

Washington’s responsibility for the success of ISIS is less direct, but no less damning. The US was in a de facto alliance with the groups that merged to form ISIS ever since President Barack Obama declared Syria’s Bashar al-Assad "must go" – and Washington started funding Syrian rebel groups whose composition and leadership kept changing. By funding the Free Syrian Army (FSA), our "vetted" Syrian Islamists, this administration has actively worked to defeat the only forces capable of rooting out ISIS from its Syrian nest – Assad’s Ba’athist government. Millions of dollars in overt aid – and who knows how much covertly? – were pumped into the FSA. How much of that seeped into the coffers of ISIS when constantly forming and re-forming chameleon-like rebel groups defected from the FSA? These defectors didn’t just go away: they joined up with more radical – and militarily effective – Islamist militias, some of which undoubtedly found their way to ISIS. How many ISIS cadres who started out in the FSA were trained and equipped by American "advisors" in neighboring Jordan? We’ll never know the exact answer to that question, but the number is very likely not zero – and this Mother Jones piece shows that, at least under the Clinton-Petraeus duo, the "vetting" process was a joke. Furthermore, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) may have been on to something when he confronted Hillary with the contention that some of the arms looted from Gaddafi’s arsenals may well have reached the Syrian rebels. There was, after all, the question of where that mysterious "charity ship," the Al Entisar, carrying "humanitarian aid" to the Syrian rebels headquartered in Turkey, sailed from.

Germany, France and Britain have begun working on a UN Security Council resolution that would end the fighting in the Gaza Strip, a document obtained by Haaretz revealed.The U.S. has also joined the European initiative, diplomats said.

Same stuff... different country. Once again someone (former opposition leader Musallam al-Barrak) exposed the corruption among the elites (revealed documents that allegedly prove billions of illicit financial transfers were made to senior officials, including judges) and the leaders (Kuwait officials) decided he should be arrested and charged with slander. This has caused uproar among the people as hundreds of protesters rallied overnight in support of al-Barrack, marching from his house to the jail chanting: "The people want to cleanse the judiciary!" The police in the oil-rich nation of Kuwait used tear gas and stun grenades early Thursday to disperse the protesters. 

As we have noted previously, uprising against government corruption is a global trend and in the case of Kuwait (which is oil-rich, the last friendly place to US in the Middle East, and has the highest per capita Twitter usage on the planet), we suspect this 'spring' is far from over. Things do not look good...

Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced today at Black Hat 2014 that starting in the fall of this year, the purple-hued company will begin giving users the option of seamlessly wrapping their e-mails in PGP encryption. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes, the encryption capability will be offered through a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail. The announcement was tweeted by Yan Zhu, who has reportedly been hired by Yahoo to adapt End-to-End for use with Yahoo Mail. Zhu formerly worked as an engineer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has consistently been outspoken in its call for the widespread use of encryption throughout the Web and the Internet in general.

Israel has said rocket fire from Gaza has "made continuation of talks impossible," trading blame with Palestinian negotiators over the collapse of the ceasefire. Spokesman Mark Regev responded to Palestinian negotiator Azzam al-Ahmed's charge that Israel had thwarted the talks that broke down on Tuesday after Israel recalled its negotiators from Egypt, accusing Hamas of violating a truce. "The Cairo process was built on a total and complete cessation of all hostilities and so when rockets were fired from Gaza, not only was it a clear violation of the ceasefire but it also destroyed the premise upon which the talks were based," Regev said, according to the Reuters news agency. A week-long truce in Gaza collapsed with both sides blaming each other after Palestinian fighters launched rockets into Israel and Israel attacked "terror sites" inside the enclave.

Al Jazeera's Jane Ferguson said at least six children had been killed in the airstrikes since the truce disintegrated. "There is now this fallout row, essentially over who started it," our correspondent said. "Whoever broke the truce, it seems the exchange of rocket fire into Israel and airstrikes on Gaza is unlikely to end today."

The Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing, said on Twitter that it had fired rockets towards Tel Aviv. No one was injured in the attack on the city, the Israeli army said.

The Soufan Group, a New York-based intelligence firm, estimated in June that there were at least 12,000 foreign fighters from 81 countries in the Syrian conflict, including some 3,000 European nationals. Given the Islamic State's ascendance — and its slick online recruitment operation — it's probable that the bulk of the Western militants are in its ranks. The Economist published a handy graphic of the breakdown this week:

In a statement released on its official Twitter feed on Aug. 30, the Al Nusrah Front announced its responsibility for the detention of 45 members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). The peacekeepers were captured during recent fighting at the Quneitra border crossing, which connects Syria to the Israeli-controlled portion of the Golan Heights. The key crossing was captured by a coalition of rebel forces, including the Al Nusrah Front, earlier this week. The announcement by Al Nusrah, which is al Qaeda's official branch in Syria, was first obtained and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group. Al Nusrah attempts to justify the capture of the men by arguing that the UN has failed to support the Syrian people during the rebellion against Bashar al Assad's regime. The al Qaeda branch also accuses the UN of looking the other way when it comes to Assad's crimes.

A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough. The advice, in a newly uncovered five-year forecast written in 2009, contrasts with the pledge made by David Cameron this week to crack down on encryption use by technology companies.

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the prime minister said there should be no “safe spaces for terrorists to communicate” or that British authorites could not access. Cameron, who landed in the US on Thursday night, is expected to urge Barack Obama to apply more pressure to tech giants, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, which have been expanding encrypted messaging for their millions of users since the revelations of mass NSA surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Cameron said the companies “need to work with us. They need also to demonstrate, which they do, that they have a social responsibility to fight the battle against terrorism. We shouldn’t allow safe spaces for terrorists to communicate. That’s a huge challenge but that’s certainly the right principle”. But the document from the US National Intelligence Council, which reports directly to the US director of national intelligence, made clear that encryption was the “best defence” for computer users to protect private data. Part of the cache given to the Guardian by Snowden was published in 2009 and gives a five-year forecast on the “global cyber threat to the US information infrastructure”. It covers communications, commercial and financial networks, and government and critical infrastructure systems. It was shared with GCHQ and made available to the agency’s staff through its intranet.