The U.S. military denied on Thursday taking part in a raid on an al-Qaida site in the Libyan city of Ubari, contradicting a statement by a Libyan official.

The spokesperson for Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the Presidency Council of the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord of Libya, said in a statement late Wednesday that a site with a number of al-Qaida members in Ubari was “raided” by joint U.S.-Libyan forces.

“This joint work between the Presidency Council of the Government of National Accord and the U.S. Government coincided with the meeting of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Foreign Minister Mohamed Sayala at the Global Coalition To Defeat Islamic State meeting last week,” spokesperson Mohamed El Sallak said in the statement.

But U.S. Africa Command, which is responsible for American troops in the area, said that although the United States supports what is described as counterterrorism efforts of the U.N.-recognized Libyan government, U.S. forces were not involved in the raid.

“U.S. Africa Command was not involved in the reported raid of an al-Qaeda site in Ubari, Libya, Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019,” it said in a statement. “U.S. Africa Command has not conducted any air strikes in Libya in 2019.”
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The former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst, her brown hair now hidden underneath a mandatory hijab, stood before an Iranian ayatollah as a television camera filmed behind her.

It was 2012 and Monica Elfriede Witt offered Ayatollah Hadi Barikbin the pledge of faith all Islam converts must recite: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.”

Yet amid congratulations for her conversion, Witt — who once held a top secret security clearance — allegedly had a dark secret: She was being recruited by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to betray her country, according to federal prosecutors.

The 39-year-old El Paso native has since defected, disappearing into the Islamic Republic, allegedly to support the Guard with her counterintelligence knowledge to target American military officials. The unveiling of federal charges this week now links her to hackers with alleged ties to the Guard, a powerful paramilitary force within Iran answerable only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Years before the charges became public, however, Witt’s own journey into Iran became the subject of television segments and news articles.

The image Iran offered of Witt changed over time, a function of the funhouse-mirror coverage prevalent among Iran’s state-run broadcasters and news agencies linked to its intelligence services. They initially described her as an Occupy Wall Street activist, a left-wing protest movement linked to an encampment at New York’s Zuccotti Park. Iranian state media, always eager for anything highlighting social problems in the U.S., trumpeted the demonstrations.  

Witt, who had left the Air Force in 2008 and later worked for a defense contractor, arrived in Iran in February 2012 to attend the New Horizon Organization’s “Hollywoodism” conference. The group at the time described the conference as calling into question Hollywood’s representation of Iran and Muslims. However, the Anti-Defamation League has referred to the conference as “promoting classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel while giving legitimacy to a rogue’s gallery of conspiratorial anti-Semites and anti-Zionists.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned New Horizon, accusing it of being a front for the Guard’s expeditionary Quds, or “Jerusalem,” Force. Nader Talebzadeh, a cultural activist and one of the conference’s organizers, told the semi-official Fars news agency the sanctions came only because America was angered by the summit’s guests, which included whistleblowers.

State television also that year appears to have quoted Witt as a “former consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense” on sexual harassment in the American military.

“The boy’s club atmosphere is reinforced with a false belief that men are allowed to act inappropriately and that the command is condoning their behavior,” state TV’s English-language Press TV quoted her as saying.  

State TV’s Young Journalist Club in 2012 also referred to her as an “American soldier in the Iraq war.” Witt served in the Air Force between 1997 and 2008, where she was trained in the Farsi language and was deployed overseas on classified counterintelligence missions, including to countries in the Middle East.

“I understand how the Western media are trying to show an unrealistic image of Iran and Islam after seeing the clear realities of Iran and Islam by myself,” she was quoted as saying.

She also told the semi-official International Quran News Agency that a friend encouraged her to come to Iran and embrace Shiite Islam.

“I was a Christian, though I was not a religious person and never went to church. During my mission in Iraq, I decided to learn more about the people’s beliefs and religion,” she reportedly said. “I believed it would help me to better confront the enemy. I got a copy of the Quran and started reading it.”

It remains unclear who encouraged Witt to travel to Iran. Federal prosecutors in her indictment refer only to that person as “Individual A,” who they describe as a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen who served as a “spotter and assessor on behalf of the Iranian intelligence services.” The person also hired Witt to work as an assistant on a film later aired in Iran.

The description could fit Marzieh Hashemi, a dual national who works as a PressTV anchorwoman and was recently detained for days on a material witness warrant in the U.S. That warrant involved the same judge assigned to Witt’s case. Hashemi also reportedly had a role in organizing elements of the “Hollywoodism” conferences.

Hashemi, who since her testimony was released and allowed to return to Iran, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday from The Associated Press.

Since disappearing after defecting to Iran, Witt allegedly has received free housing and computer equipment from Iran. Prosecutors allege she supplied Iran with information about a classified Defense Department program and has assembled “target packages” research she conducted into the lives, locations and missions of former colleagues.

She has not appeared on television recently, as she did during his conversion some seven years ago. She took the name Narges, or “daffodil,” in Farsi.

“I congratulate you because you have chosen the religion of Islam, and I must say when you chose the name of Narges for yourself, now you should follow the Islamic rules,” Barikbin, the ayatollah, told her then.

 
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As Islamic State faces pressure in its final stronghold in Syria’s Deir el-Zour province, the group could be hiding a mountain of gold it smuggled out of other Syrian provinces and neighboring Iraq, a rights group told VOA on Wednesday. 

Rami Abdulrahman, head of the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), told VOA that it had confirmation from the ground that IS was holding 40 tons of gold bars in Syria.

“These quantities of gold were held by the IS group since late 2017, specifically in its eastern Syrian pocket” of control, he added. 

Rami said his organization’s “confirmed reports” indicated the gold, along with millions of dollars, was stockpiled in Deir el-Zour province. 

But it was unclear to SOHR whether the gold bars were buried in Baghouz village, hidden in tunnels on the Syria-Iraq border or hidden in areas recently captured by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). 

“This gold was stolen from the Central Bank of Mosul, from the economy in Syria that was under the control of IS, and from the selling of Syrian and Iraqi antiquities, like smuggled antiquities from Palmyra that were sold to smugglers and traders through Turkey,” Abdulrahman of SOHR said. 

The U.S.-led coalition, which is supporting the SDF fighters in their last push against IS in eastern Syria, said it was not aware of such reports. 

The coalition’s spokesperson, Col. Sean Ryan, told VOA via email Wednesday that they were investigating the claims. 

The Islamic State terror group has been holding firmly to Baghouz since Saturday, when the SDF forces launched their final push to end the jihadists self-proclaimed caliphate. SDF officials estimated there were about 3,000 IS jihadists, mostly foreigners, who were determined to fight to the death.

The SDF says its progress has been slowed by land mines, suicide attacks and the extremists’ use of civilians as human shields. 

WATCH: A new strategy for Islamic State

Nabil Hassan, the administrator of al-Hol camp in al-Hasakah governorate in Syria’s northeast, told VOA that over 23,000 people left their homes last week amid clashes and that more were expected to flee as fighting continued in the region.

The jihadist group’s self-styled caliphate once sprawled across large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq. According to the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the group made millions of dollars through the control of banks, oil and gas fields, taxation, extortion and theft of relics. 

In 2014, IS stole nearly $450 million and vast quantities of gold bullion from Mosul’s central bank, according the International Business Times. 

IS currency

The Syrian group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently reported in June 2015 that IS went as far as minting its own gold “Islamic dinar” coins. The group then posted photos showing what appeared to be gold sovereigns bearing IS inscriptions.

The U.S.-led coalition over the years has aggressively campaigned to target the group’s finances, particularly through shrinking IS territory, conducting airstrikes on IS money reserves and disabling the group’s oil fields. U.S. military officials in early 2016 said a U.S. airstrike on an IS cash distribution site in Mosul destroyed millions of dollars. 

Iraqi and Kurdish officials say the group has turned to other sources of income that are more difficult to trace. 

Iraqi and Kurdish officials told The Washington Post last December that IS leaders had laundered tens of millions of dollars by investing in legitimate businesses throughout the Middle East over the past year. They reported large caches of gold and currency were also buried in the Iraqi desert.

Insurgency 

According to Colin Clarke, an expert on terror financing with the Soufan Group, IS could be hiding gold and money reserves to help finance its insurgency actions across the region once its physical caliphate is gone. 

“After the territorial caliphate falls, it is possible that small cells of militants will rely on the group’s remaining war chest to rebuild core capabilities and recruit new members. Additionally, IS will rely on its money while also pursuing new revenue streams or rejuvenating prior links to trafficking and smuggling,” Clarke told VOA. 

He said the group’s determined fighters had already hoarded weapons to use later.

“What the group has left will be able to last, especially as IS is no longer paying to maintain a state. Its revenues are less, but so are its operating costs,” he added. 
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Iran says a female member of a group of eight conservationists on trial for spying has been absent from the courtroom this week as a prosecutor continued reading charges that rights activists say are bogus.  

Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that the female defendant was absent from the third and fourth sessions of the closed-door trial, held in Tehran on Tuesday and Wednesday. The report did not name the defendant or cite a reason for her absence. But it said a prosecutor continued reading a more than 300-page-long indictment to the other seven defendants and would complete the process later.

An Iran researcher for U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), Tara Sepehri Far, told VOA Persian that her sources named the absent defendant as Niloufar Bayani.

Another U.S.-based group, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), has said much of the indictment is based on forced confessions from Bayani. CHRI has quoted its own source as saying Bayani interrupted the trial’s opening Jan. 30 session several times, accusing investigators of extracting confessions from her under mental and physical duress, and saying she has since retracted those statements.

Iran’s state-controlled Fars News Agency has referred to the six male and two female defendants as “individuals accused of spying on the country’s military installations.” Besides Bayani, the other conservationists on trial are Taher Ghadirian, Houman Jowkar, Sepideh Kashani, Amir Hossein Khaleghi, Abdolreza Kouhpayeh, Sam Rajabi and Morad Tahbaz.

Ninth defendant died

Iran detained the eight defendants in January 2018 along with a ninth member of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, Iranian-Canadian dual national Kavous Seyed Emami, who died in custody the following month in what officials termed a suicide. Family members disputed that assertion and called for further investigation into how Iranian authorities treated him.

International human rights organizations have called on Iran to release the environmentalists and investigate allegations that authorities have mistreated them.

Iran’s former deputy environment chief, Kaveh Madani, in a Jan. 30 interview with VOA Persian, praised the detained members of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation as experts in their field with good reputations nationally and internationally.

Madani, an American-educated water management expert now based at Yale University in the U.S., served as deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment from September 2017 until April 2018, when he fled the country under verbal attack from conservatives who also accused him of spying under cover of environmental activism.

A group of 369 international conservation practitioners and scholars have added their names to a November 2018 open letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader, saying they believe the detained Iranian environmentalists are innocent. 

“All of the conservationists in question have dedicated their lives to the conservation of wildlife in Iran, including the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah,” the letter said. “We are convinced that their work and research had no second means or objectives.”

This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service.
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