'Fed Up With West, I'm Off to Jihad'

On the day he departed for a Terrorist training camp in Pakistan, a 21-year-old Sydney student sent a letter to his parents.

"I'm fed up with Westerners," wrote Izhar ul-Haque, who had just failed his second year of medicine at the University of NSW.

"Western patients look at me as if I'm a frog. They don't wish to speak English to me. How can I spend five to six years with them?"

A disillusioned ul-Haque told them he was going to take part in a Jihad with the Militant Islamic Terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), fighting the Indian Army for the freedom of Kashmir. And he would fight to his death to become a martyr.   more > >

Thai Militants Fighting for Islam: Cleric

An Islamic cleric arrested after this week's mass killings of Militants in Thailand insisted they were fighting to create a Muslim nation independent from the mainly Buddhist kingdom.

Mama Matheeyoh denied Government allegations they were drug addicts or criminals and said, "We are fighting for a separate Muslim state."   more > >

Bali: Bashir Faces New Charges

Bali bombers have told Police radical Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir sanctioned and funded the Terrorist blasts that killed 202 people, 88 of them Australian.

Their confessions form a crucial part of the new case against the cleric, who was re-arrested.   more > >

Aussie Terrorist Calls Us All 'Animals'

When Izhar Ul-Haque enrolled in a Terrorist training camp in Pakistan last year, he was fed up with Westerners and their "animal type of lifestyle", a Court heard.

In a letter to his parents, Ul-Haque says he wanted to undergo weapons and combat training and eventually expected to die a martyr for a Pakistani Terrorist group.

When he returned to Sydney after the camp, Customs officials found 30 books in his luggage including handwritten notes about rocket launchers, landmines, tanks and multi-purpose machineguns.

Ul-Haque, 21, was charged last month by the Federal-NSW Police Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force with training with the group Lashkar-e-Toiba.   more > >

Power Supply 'Open to Attack'

The national electricity network is more susceptible to Terrorist attack than grids in the US and Britain, but experts say cars knocking over power poles are a greater risk to supplies.

Anti-Terrorist surveillance has increased since the September 11 attacks, but the network was "skinny" compared with the highly populated regions of North America and Europe, and in danger because it was not fully integrated.   more > >

Cost Blowout for New US Jet Fighter 'Disappointing', says RAAF

Australia's Air Force has expressed disappointment over cost blowouts and production delays plaguing a controversial new generation of US jet fighters that Canberra plans to buy.

But Prime Minister John Howard was unfazed by the problems surrounding development of the 240 billion US dollar Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), saying the new generation warplanes were "a fantastic aircraft concept".

Howard, one of US President George W. Bush's closest foreign allies, chose the yet-to-be-built JSF over a rival European fighter to replace Australia's ageing Air Force fleet in the biggest Military procurement project in Australian history, believed worth 16 billion dollars (11.5 billion US).   more > >

Army 'Seconds' for Iraq

Iraq is likely to get secondhand Australian Army trucks, Land Rovers and other surplus Military equipment as part of efforts to rebuild the country's forces.

Defence Minister Robert Hill, after talks with senior Coalition and Iraqi officials in Baghdad, confirmed that Canberra had been requested to supply Military equipment and vehicles.   more > >

For Good or Bad, We're In For the Long Haul

John Howard received a clear message when he was in Baghdad last month - it's going to take a long time to transform Iraq into a self-governing and independent nation.

Iraqi Governing Council president Massoud Barzani put it most graphically when he told the Australian Prime Minister and his officials that "Iraq has been through hell for 35 years" and it was not going to be restored quickly or easily.   more > >

War Within Islam

Why has Islam, unlike its close cousins Christianity and Judaism, not undergone a reformation? The question may sound reasonable. Yet often as not those who pose it forget that in the Christian case, at least, reformation was a painfully long procedure.

They tend to neglect the gory episodes, and the intricate debates about doctrine, and think instead of the end result that Westerners live with today, something that the Moroccan philosopher Abdou Filali-Ansary aptly calls a state of "disenchantment" with pure religious dogma in favour of the ethical principles that underlie it, such that "faith becomes a matter of individual choice and commitment, not an obligation imposed on the community".¹ And that, of course, is as much a product of the Enlightenment as of the Reformation.   more > >

Report: 3,213 Terrorist Incidents Worldwide In 2003

The Terrorists have been busier than ever. From AP:

A total of 3,213 Terrorist incidents and guerrilla attacks last year claimed 7,476 lives worldwide, according to a Japanese Government study published in local newspapers.   more > >