terrorist receives temporary restrictions

Security expert: Kiwi ‘bumbling jihadi’ not the biggest threat to New Zealand

News

This former member of the NZ Army is no idiot, and will say whatever he needs to to get himself off of the hook! He’s a willing fool for freedoms sake. NZ has no intel of it’s own from over there, and has to reply on statements from Islamic State members and supporters for what is happening.

Either Paul is on the Islamic payroll, childishly naive, or just ignorant of previous history of this guy.
See also: Kiwi denies links with al-Qaeda

life2

Global security and intelligence expert Dr Paul Buchanan says while the dubbed ‘bumbling jihadi’ Mark Taylor may have become the face of new terrorism laws, he should not be considered a major public enemy to our national security.

Taylor – also known as Mohammad Daniel and Abu Abdul Rahman – travelled from New Zealand to Syria in 2014 to join Islamic State.

A year later he was tagged the ‘bumbling jihadi’ after mistakenly revealing the location of Islamic State fighters on Twitter after failing to turn off a tracking function on his phone.

He has been in custody in Syria since December 2018 and wants to return home. And earlier this year Taylor told a journalist he would like to set up a medicinal cannabis company in New Zealand.

His face was widely used in coverage of the Bill designed to place restrictions on any New Zealanders returning after fighting alongside terror groups.

Little said in October: “He might be a bumbling idiot, but he has gone there [Syria] to fight and participate in and support extremist activity.

“He hasn’t denounced his views and ideologies … this guy is not safe.”

But Buchanan – from 36th Parallel Assessments, and who has previously done consultancy work for the US Government – said while Taylor was being used as the “face of this law”, he believed he would not be at the top of the list for potential home-based security threats.

“He was never in combat,” Buchanan said. “He was just a gopher, mailman, bodyguard and messenger … quite frankly he lacks the intellectual capability.

“But he is a good face to hang on this bill because we all know him, we all know about him.

“This guy wants to come back here and start a legal cannabis enterprise. I doubt a hardcore jihadist is going to worry about [something like that].”

But Buchanan stressed he wouldn’t classify other New Zealanders who trained and fought alongside Islamic State, or other terror networks in the Middle East, in the same light as Taylor.

In a briefing paper to Parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee during its consideration of the Bill, the New Zealand SIS revealed there were a “small number” of Kiwi men and women who they believed remained in Syria or Iraq with Islamic State or “other extremist groups”.

And he said he expected returning women to be treated differently to men.

“Let’s say there are six people out there and they all come back, and two of them are women,” Buchanan said.

“And those two women now have a flock of kids as they were used as reproduction devices by Isis fighters. Dealing with them and their reassimilation into society is going to be fundamentally different than dealing with the four guys.

“The women I doubt very much that they will have had a lot of weapons training, that they would be as murderously inclined [as the men].”

Deradicalisation programmes should also be onhand to those who return, he said.

The extent of help they would require would depend on the country and “brand of Islam” they had been accustomed to, he said.

–nzh