Islamic Extremists

WASHINGTON - The CIA has stepped up secret contingency planning to protect the United States and its allies as the turmoil expands in Syria, including collecting intelligence on Islamic extremists for the first time for possible lethal drone strikes, according to current and former U.S. officials. President Obama has not authorized drone missile strikes in Syria, however, and none are under consideration. The Counterterrorism Center, which runs the CIA's covert drone killing program in Pakistan and Yemen, recently shifted several targeting officers to improve intelligence collection on militants in Syria who could pose a terrorist threat, the officials said.

BEIRUT - Syrian President Bashar Assad warned in a television interview Wednesday that the war against his government risked spreading to neighboring Jordan and predicted that rebel fighters, whom he described as Islamic extremists, would later take their violence to the West. Speaking on the pro-government Syrian channel Al Ikhbariya, Assad presented himself as a staunch patriot who was fending off meddling by the West. He appeared to be wooing Syrians wearied by the country's bloodshed, disillusioned by all sides and desperate for Syria's conflict to end. Assad charged that the United States and Europe were supporting his Islamist opponents.

Earlier this year, after Comedy Central altered an episode of "South Park" that had prompted threats because of the way it depicted Islam's prophet Muhammad, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris proposed an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. " The idea was, as she put it, to stand up for the 1st Amendment and "water down the pool of targets" for extremists. The proposal got Norris targeted for assassination by radical Yemeni American cleric Anwar Awlaki, who has been linked to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight and also to several of the 9/11 hijackers.

CAIRO - The Mass was celebrated as if from centuries past: A bearded priest veiled in incense chanted for grace in a church along the Nile, near the spot where Christians believe Jesus and his mother sought refuge in an earlier age of bloodshed and uncertainty. Marianne Samir knelt and prayed for the Coptic Christians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence that has further shaken a nation engulfed in economic and political anxieties. "I feel unsafe," said Samir, a high school philosophy teacher with a cross tattooed on her wrist.

A huge police dragnet through Cairo's sprawling slum of Imbaba, a district so dominated by Islamic fundamentalists that police had feared to enter parts of it after dark, has netted more than 600 arrests and an end to the extremists' reign, authorities said Sunday.

Armed Islamic extremists warned all foreigners to leave Algeria within a month or risk "sudden death," according to a communique given to a released French hostage and made public Thursday. France, reacting to the threat, said it is reducing its diplomatic staff and urged French families who left Algeria last week for the All Saints' Day holiday not to return.

Islamic extremists claimed responsibility Wednesday for the killing of a Saudi Arabian Embassy employee, and the Saudi ambassador said his embassy had received more than 100 threatening letters before the attack. Police speculated that a sole gunman shot Abdulgani Bedawi, the embassy's telex operator, as he returned to his Ankara apartment Tuesday night, Ankara Gov. Saffet Arikan Beduk said.

Islamic militants kidnapped 16 Western tourists, including two Americans, in southern Yemen on Monday and demanded the release of two jailed leaders, security officials said. In exchange for the tourists' freedom, kidnappers from the Islamic Jihad extremist group wanted leader Saleh Haidara Atwi and another top militant released, officials said. The two were arrested by Yemeni authorities two weeks ago.

The Rev. Eleya Komoss was seated in the confession room when the low murmurs inside the Mar Girgis Church where a weekly meeting of young Coptic Christians was in progress were replaced by the jarring staccato of machine-gun fire. "I opened the door and found everyone running about," the Coptic priest recounted Friday. "There were two girls who had been shot in the back. I pulled them inside. Another man shot in the back was calling out to me, 'Help me, Father,' so I pulled him inside too.

Mozart has survived grandiose conductors and abstract interpretations, but the librettos for his operas never cast Islamic radicals threatening a skittish theater company. On a day of messy drama and furious debate over free speech, German Opera in Berlin reaffirmed Tuesday its decision not to revive a production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" out of fear of inciting Islamic extremists over a scene showing the severed head of the prophet Muhammad.

PARIS - Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, sits calmly behind a desk in a large, messy office with no sign outside indicating the name of his publication. True, there is a riot police car stationed in the street, but basically, he says, he doesn't see what all the fuss is about. "It just so happens I'm more likely to get run over by a bicycle in Paris than get assassinated," says Charb, the soft-spoken editor of Charlie Hebdo, a left-leaning French satirical weekly, which since 2006 has been sued, threatened and firebombed for its sporadic publication of cartoons mocking the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

WASHINGTON - The CIA has stepped up secret contingency planning to protect the United States and its allies as the turmoil expands in Syria, including collecting intelligence on Islamic extremists for the first time for possible lethal drone strikes, according to current and former U.S. officials. President Obama has not authorized drone missile strikes in Syria, however, and none are under consideration. The Counterterrorism Center, which runs the CIA's covert drone killing program in Pakistan and Yemen, recently shifted several targeting officers to improve intelligence collection on militants in Syria who could pose a terrorist threat, the officials said.

This time will be different. That is the word from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to Syrian rebels who have become so frustrated by empty promises of help to overthrow President Bashar Assad that they had threatened to boycott a Thursday meeting in Rome of the Friends of Syria alliance. Hints of meaningful assistance remain vague, though, giving rise to fear of more dashed expectations. “We are not coming to Rome simply to talk, we are coming to Rome to talk about next steps,” Kerry told reporters in London after meeting with his British counterpart, Foreign Secretary William Hague.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - A suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint outside the northern Mali city of Gao on Friday, in the first sign that Al Qaeda-linked militias may be adopting new tactics since being driven back by a French-led invasion. A man on a motorcycle approached a group of soldiers at a military checkpoint and detonated explosives, according to a military officer contacted by The Times. The attack was confirmed by Gao Mayor Sadou Diallo in a telephone interview.

Mali was thrown into turmoil again Tuesday following the arrest of Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra by soldiers who forced him to resign, an unsettling ouster that could derail plans to eject Islamic extremists from the northern stretches of the troubled country. The prime minister appeared on state television before dawn to abruptly announce he and his entire government were resigning because the country was embroiled in crisis and “hoping for peace.” Soldiers had reportedly smashed in his door and seized him hours earlier.

Rebels who took over northern Mali this year clashed Friday with Islamists who had ejected them from major cities, spokesmen for both sides told reporters. A Tuareg rebel spokesman said the clashes near Ansango were part of an offensive to recapture the Gao region, Agence France-Presse reported . Oumar Ould Hamaha, spokesman for the Islamist group MUJAO, told the Associated Press the Tuareg started the fray by kidnapping a dozen of its members. “The fighting began this morning,” Hamaha said.

The assassination attempt against President Hosni Mubarak marks a major escalation in the three-year Egyptian insurgency, which has defied ruthless, often bloody attempts to quash it, Middle East experts and counterterrorism officials here said Monday. Although no group has claimed responsibility for the attack in Ethiopia--the most daring and sophisticated of several recent plots against Mubarak--Islamic extremists are widely believed to be responsible.

Millions of voters in the North African nation of Algeria defied death threats and boycott calls from Islamic extremists to cast ballots Thursday in the country's first multi-party presidential elections. Few doubted that President Liamine Zeroual, the retired general appointed by the army two years ago to lead Algeria, would win the election, if not on the first ballot then on a second one next month.

Last week, simultaneous with a mob attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the slaying of an American diplomat in Benghazi, Libya, Mitt Romney tried to lay blame for the incidents on what he said was President Obama's weak foreign policy. He was aiming to hurt Obama, but did himself greater harm. The inaccuracy and poor timing of his attack made it look exactly like what it was: shallow politicking at a moment of national crisis. Romney should get additional demerits for simplistic thinking.

On Thursday night, Jon Stewart added his voice to the growing chorus of criticism directed at Rep. Michele Bachmann and her campaign against Huma Abedin, longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton (as well as the wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat). Late last week, the former presidential candidate and four other Republican representatives sent a letter to top intellgence officials urging them to investigate Abedin's alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.