NEW YORK: He had been brought from the battlefields of Syria to a New York lockup, a US citizen charged with serving as a sniper and weapons trainer for the Daesh group.
And even in jail, Ruslan Maratovich Asainov kept a makeshift version of the militants’ black flag right above the desk in his cell, according to trial testimony this week.
“What’s the big deal? It’s mine. It’s religious,” then-jail lieutenant Judith Woods recalled him saying when she went to confiscate the hand-drawn image in 2020.
Years after the fall of the extremist group’s self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate, the trial is a reminder of the enduring and far-reaching fallout of a war that drew tens of thousands of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq. Their home countries are still contending with what should become of them.
Jurors, who are expected to start deliberating as soon as Monday, have gotten a refresher course Daesh’s gruesome rule and its sophisticated, social-media-savvy recruitment of distant supporters to come and take up arms. Prosecutors say Asainov did so and rose through the group’s ranks, eventually becoming an “emir” who taught other members to use weapons.
In post-arrest videos shown at his trial, he gives his occupation as “a sniper” to FBI agents and readily tells them that he provided instruction in everything from rifle maintenance to ballistics to adjusting for weather effects — and, of course, “how to actually pull the trigger.”
“Oh, it’s a long lesson,” he explains, sitting on a bed in a room where he was being held. “I would give, like, a three-hour lesson, just on that, just to pull the trigger.”
Jurors have seen photos alleged to be of Asainov in camouflage, aiming a rifle, and the handmade flag that Woods said she took from his cell. Witnesses have included his flabbergasted ex-wife, who testified that he morphed from a Brooklyn family man into a zealot. She said he weighed in from Syria to complain about their daughter donning a Halloween costume and sent a photo of the bodies of what he said were comrades killed in a battle, according to the Daily News of New York.
Asainov chose not to testify. One of his lawyers, Susan Kellman, has said he went to Syria because he wanted to live under Islamic law. He has pleaded not guilty — a plea that Kellman entered on his behalf because, she said, he didn’t abide by the American legal system.
Nonetheless, the 46-year-old Asainov listened politely to government witnesses on a day this week, alternately stroking his beard and folding his arms across his chest.
Daesh fighters seized portions of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and declared the establishment of a so-called Islamic caliphate there, at a time when Syria was already convulsed by civil war. Fighting laid waste to multiple cities before Iraq’s prime minister declared the caliphate vanquished in 2017; the extremists lost the last of their territory two years later, though sporadic attacks persist even now.
During the height of the fighting, as many as 40,000 people from 120 countries showed up to join in, according to the United Nations. There is no comprehensive US statistic on Americans among those foreign fighters; a 2018 report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism found at least 64 who had joined jihadist fighting in Iraq and Syria since 2011.
Since Daesh’s defeat, some foreign members and their families have lingered in detention facilities in Syria because their countries refused to take them back. Other accused foreign fighters have returned to their countries, including some who were prosecuted.
Recent US cases include a Kansas mother who led an all-female Daesh battalion, a Minnesota man who served in a battalion that prepared foreign fighters for suicide attacks in Europe, and a Detroit-area convicted this week of training with and then spending more than two years with the group.
Born in Kazakhstan, Asainov is a naturalized US citizen. He lived in Brooklyn starting in 1998, married and had a child.
Then he flew to Istanbul on a one-way ticket in December 2013 and made his way to Syria to join what he later described in a message as “the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed,” authorities say.
“You heard of Daesh,” he said in another text message in January 2015, according to prosecutors’ court filings. “We will get you.”
By that April, Asainov told an acquaintance — in fact, a government informant — that he’d been fighting in Syria for about a year, according to court papers. They say that in various exchanges, he urged the informant to come to Syria and help with Daesh’s media operations, asked for $2,800 to buy a rifle scope, and sent photos of himself with fatigues and rifle, saying he “didn’t mean to show off” but was showing what was “just normal” in his new life.
Authorities announced in July 2019 that US-backed forces in Syria had captured Asainov and turned him over to the FBI.
He faces charges that include providing material support to a US-designated foreign terrorist organization. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.
Job: ‘Sniper’: Accused Daesh fighter on trial in US
https://arab.news/wndp8
Job: ‘Sniper’: Accused Daesh fighter on trial in US
- Ruslan Maratovich Asainov kept a makeshift version of the militants' black flag right above the desk in his cell
- The trial is a reminder of the enduring and far-reaching fallout of a war that drew tens of thousands of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq
World faces new nuclear arms race, researchers warn
- Israel — which does not acknowledge its nuclear weapons — is also believed to be modernizing its arsenal, which SIPRI estimated was about 90 warheads at the start of the year
- SIPRI counted a total of 12,241 warheads in January 2025, of which 9,614 were in stockpiles for potential use
STOCKHOLM: Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, researchers warned Monday.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said nuclear powers including the United States and Russia — which account for around 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions.”
Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads.
But SIPRI warned that the trend was likely to be reversed in the coming years.
“What we see now, first of all, is that the number of operational nuclear warheads is beginning to increase,” SIPRI Director Dan Smith told AFP.
This was especially the case with China, which SIPRI said had about 600 nuclear warheads and had added 100 new warheads in 2023 and 2024.
“China is increasing its nuclear force steadily,” Smith said, adding that the country could reach 1,000 warheads in seven or eight years.
While that would still be well short of Russian and US arsenals it would make China “a much bigger player,” said Smith.
He said the world faced new threats “at a particularly dangerous and unstable moment” for geopolitics, adding: “We see the warning signs of a new nuclear arms race coming.”
SIPRI counted a total of 12,241 warheads in January 2025, of which 9,614 were in stockpiles for potential use.
The institute noted in its report that both Russia and the United States had “extensive programs under way to modernize and replace their nuclear warheads.”
The United Kingdom was not believed to have increased its number of warheads in 2024, but SIPRI said that given the country’s 2021 decision to raise its limit on the number of warheads from 225 to 260, it was likely to increase in the future.
Similarly, while France’s arsenal was believed to have remained steady at around 290, “its nuclear modernization program progressed during 2024.”
India and Pakistan both “continued to develop new types of nuclear weapon delivery systems in 2024.”
India had a “growing stockpile” of about 180 nuclear weapons at the start of 2025, the institute said, while Pakistan’s arsenal remained steady at about 170 warheads.
SIPRI also noted that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program remained “central to its national security strategy,” estimating that it had around 50 warheads and was believed to possess “enough fissile material to reach a total of up to 90 warheads.”
Israel — which does not acknowledge its nuclear weapons — is also believed to be modernizing its arsenal, which SIPRI estimated was about 90 warheads at the start of the year.
Smith stressed that the looming nuclear arms race would not just be about “the numbers of warheads.”
“It’s an arms race which is going to be highly technological,” Smith said.
He added that it would be both in “outer space and in cyberspace” as the software directing and guiding nuclear weapons would be an area of competition.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence will also likely begin to play a part, at first as a complement to humans.
“The next step would be moving toward full automation. That is a step that must never be taken,” Smith said.
“If our prospects of being free of the danger of nuclear war were to be left in the hands of an artificial intelligence, I think that then we would be close to the doomsday scenarios.”
Political violence is threaded through recent US history. The motives and justifications vary
- Often, those who engage in political violence don’t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country’s partisan divides
The assassination of a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The list, in the past two months alone: the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
And here’s just a sampling of some other attacks before that — the killing of a health care executive on the streets of New York late last year, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in small-town Pennsylvania during his presidential campaign last year, the 2022 attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories, and the 2017 shooting by a liberal gunman at a GOP practice for the congressional softball game.
“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”
Politics behind both individual shootings and massacres
Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews were trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right who support Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Daesh group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police.
“You’re seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,” said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. “It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.”
The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, from presidential assassinations dating back to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynching and violence aimed at Black people in the South, the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the past few years, however, have most likely reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when icons like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has shuttered units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally.
“We’re at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,” Ware said.
Of course, one of Trump’s first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: “They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you’re a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.”
Ideologies aren’t always aligned — or coherent
Often, those who engage in political violence don’t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country’s partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called “nihilistic ideations.”
But, like clockwork, each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as flyers for the day’s anti-Trump parades.
Conservatives online seized on the flyers — and the fact that Boetler had apparently once been appointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. “The far left is murderously violent,” billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X.
It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker’s then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: “Where is Nancy?!”
On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. “All of us must remember that it’s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,” she wrote.
Trump had mocked the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, but on Saturday he joined in the official bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them “horrific violence.” The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls “sick” and “evil,” and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests.
The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration’s immigration operations in Los Angeles during the past week, when he pledged to “HIT” disrespectful protesters and warned of a “migrant invasion” of the city.
Dallek said Trump has been “both a victim and an accelerant” of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country.
“It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,” he said, “and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.”
UK appoints Blaise Metreweli first woman head of MI6 spy service
- The MI6 chief is the only publicly named member of the organization and reports directly to the foreign minister
LONDON: The UK government has appointed Blaise Metreweli as the first-ever woman to head its MI6 spy service as the country faces “threats on an unprecedented scale,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Sunday.
The MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) achieved global fame through Ian Fleming’s fictional agent James Bond.
Metreweli will be the 18th head of the service, Starmer’s Downing Street office said in a statement.
“The historic appointment of Blaise Metreweli comes at a time when the work of our intelligence services has never been more vital,” Starmer said.
“The United Kingdom is facing threats on an unprecedented scale — be it aggressors who send their spy ships to our waters or hackers whose sophisticated cyber plots seek to disrupt our public services,” he added.
The MI6 chief is the only publicly named member of the organization and reports directly to the foreign minister.
The person in the post is referred to as “C” — not “M” as in the James Bond franchise, which already had a woman, played by Judi Dench, in the role.
Metreweli will take over from outgoing MI6 head Richard Moore in the autumn.
Currently, she is MI6’s director general — known as “Q” — with responsiblity for technology and innovation at the service, the statement said.
She is described as a career intelligence officer who joined the service in 1999 having studied anthropology at Cambridge University.
Metreweli held senior roles at both MI6 and the MI5 domestic intelligence service and spent most of her career in “operational roles in the Middle East and Europe,” the statement added, without giving further biographical details.
The appointment comes over three decades after MI5 appointed its first female chief.
Stella Rimington held the position from 1992-1996, followed by Eliza Manningham-Buller from 2002-2007.
The UK intelligence and security organization GCHQ appointed its first woman chief, Anne Keast-Butler, in 2023.
Macron rejects Trump’s idea for Putin to mediate Israel-Iran crisis
- “Greenland is not to be sold, not to be taken,” he said, adding that he has spoken with Trump ahead of his trip, and would speak with him about Greenland at the G7
PARIS/COPENHAGEN: French President Emmanuel Macron, during a visit to Greenland to offer his support to the Arctic island, said on Sunday that Russia lacked the credibility to mediate the crisis between Israel and Iran as US President Donald Trump has suggested.
In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Trump said he was open to Putin, whose forces invaded Ukraine and who has resisted Trump’s attempts to broker a ceasefire with Kyiv, mediating between Israel and Iran. Macron said he rejected such an idea.
“I do not believe that Russia, which is now engaged in a high-intensity conflict and has decided not to respect the UN Charter for several years now, can be a mediator,” Macron said.
HIGHLIGHTS
• Macron is first foreign leader to visit since Trump threats
• Macron says his visit is show of European solidarity
• French president invited by leaders of Greenland and Denmark
He also said France did not take part in any of Israel’s attacks against Iran.
Macron was visiting Greenland, a self-governing part of Denmark with the right to declare independence that Trump has threatened to take over, ahead of a trip to Canada for the Group of Seven Leaders’ summit.
In a press conference alongside Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Macron said the island was threatened by “predatory ambition,” and that its situation was a wakeup call for all Europeans.
“Greenland is not to be sold, not to be taken,” he said, adding that he has spoken with Trump ahead of his trip, and would speak with him about Greenland at the G7. “I think there is a way forward in order to clearly build a better future in cooperation and not in provocation or confrontation.”
However, Macron said he ultimately doubted the United States would invade Greenland.
“I don’t believe that in the end, the US, which is an ally and a friend, will ever do something aggressive against another ally,” he said, adding he believed “the United States of America remains engaged in NATO and our key and historical alliances.”
Trump has said he wants the United States to take over the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island, and has not ruled out force. His vice president, JD Vance, visited a US military base there in March. Macron is the first foreign leader to visit Greenland since Trump’s explicit threats to “get” the island.
According to an IFOP poll for NYC.eu published on Saturday, 77 percent of French people and 56 percent of Americans disapprove of an annexation of Greenland by the US and 43 percent of the French would back using French military power to prevent a US invasion.
Denmark’s Frederiksen made several visits to Paris after Trump’s threats to seek French and European backing, and has placed orders for French-made surface-to-air missiles, in a shift of focus for Copenhagen.
Russia says it struck oil refinery that supplies Ukrainian army with fuel
- President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the attack on the central Poltava region as a vile strike against Ukrainian energy infrastructure
MOSCOW: Russian forces carried out an overnight strike on the Kremenchuk oil refinery that supplies fuel to Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region, Russia’s defense ministry said on Sunday.
President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the attack on the central Poltava region as a vile strike against Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
“Unfortunately, there was damage to the energy infrastructure,” Zelensky said in his evening address to the nation.
“This is Russia’s (effort to) spit on everything that the international community is trying to do to stop this war.” He said it occurred “after the Americans asked us not to strike at Russian energy facilities.”
The Russian defense ministry’s statement said that missiles had been fired at the refinery in Ukraine’s Poltava region from both sea and air and that strike drones were also used in what it said had been a successful attack.
Russia has claimed Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as its own and controls most of its two regions, Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine is fighting to stop Russia from taking control of the rest of Donbas and has said it plans to retake territory it has lost, through a combination of force and diplomacy.
The Russian Defense Ministry said separately that its forces had taken control of the village of Malynivka in the Donetsk region, known in Russia as Ulyanovka.
It also said its forces had advanced deep into enemy defenses in Ukraine’s Sumy region and inflicted heavy losses on Ukrainian units there. Sumy is not one of the regions Russia has formally claimed as its own, but it has spoken of creating a buffer zone there. Zelensky said on Saturday that Ukrainian forces had recaptured Andriivka village in northeastern Sumy as part of a drive to expel Russian forces from the area.
He said Russia has amassed 53,000 troops in the vicinity.
