ISIS and the missing Gitmo guy targeting Rio Olympics for terror?

(My new American Thinker post)

Brazil has enough problems these days, from a lousy economy to a political crisis to zika and a “futbol” team that can’t win anymore.

Let’s add another one and this one (via Fausta’s Blog) may be the most unpleasant of all:

A new Telegram channel, Ansar al-Khilafah Brazil, appeared today, declaring itself an ISIS cell in Brazil that had pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “If French police couldn’t stop France attacks, then their training Brazil’s police will serve no use,” said a message on the new channel. But the administrator later posted that it was just a messaging channel with one person reposting ISIS news in several languages.
ISIS has been offering its regular propaganda channel in Portuguese along with English, French, German, Russian and other languages in target areas.


We add the crazy story of the GITMO alumnus living in Uruguay who is suddenly missing.  It is believed that he crossed illegally into Brazil.  We don’t believe that he went to Rio to learn how to “samba” or to tell Sergio Mendes that he loved his “Fool on the Hill” arrangement.

Let’s safely assume that he is up to no good with thousands coming to Rio for the Olympics.  After all, he is a terrorist!

In the past, we may have overlooked these threats, but you can’t anymore, after Nice, Orlando, San Bernardino and Paris.

Brazilian authorities assure us that there is no specific threat.   Frankly, I can understand that they may be trying to downplay it.    At the same time, the aforementioned article reminds us that French ISIS fighter Maxime Hauchard tweeted, “Brazil, you are our next target.”

We know that ISIS loves soft targets.   What could be “softer” than thousands of people moving around a major city during an Olympic event?  It’s scary!

So let’s hope that the entire world has their eyes open because these threats have to be taken very seriously.

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