WORLD
Thursday, March 16, 2017
East Oregonian
Page 9A
Suicide bombers strike Syrian Russian agents,
capital as war enters 7th year hackers charged
in Yahoo breach
By ALBERT AJI
and ZEINA KARAM
Associated Press
DAMASCUS,
Syria
— Suicide bombers hit the
main judicial building and
a restaurant in Damascus
Wednesday, killing at least
30 people and spreading fear
across Syria’s capital as the
country’s civil war entered
its seventh year with no end
in sight.
The attacks reflect a
renewed effort by militants to
use insurgent tactics against
President Bashar Assad’s
forces in a bid to recover lost
momentum.
The first attacker, report-
edly dressed in a military
uniform, struck inside the
Justice Palace, located near
the famous and crowded
Hamidiyeh market. The
explosion left bodies lying
amid pools of blood and shat-
tered glass in the building’s
main hall, where a picture of
President Bashar Assad hung
on one of the walls.
The official news agency,
SANA, said another suicide
explosion about an hour
later struck a restaurant
in the Rabweh district of
Damascus, an area known
for its restaurants and cafes,
leading to multiple casu-
alties, mostly women and
children. Syrian TV showed
overturned plastic chairs and
tables at the restaurant with
bloodstains on the floor.
The Ikhbariyeh TV
channel said the attacker
was being chased by security
agents when he ran into a
restaurant and detonated his
explosives’ vest there.
The bombings were the
latest in a spate of deadly
explosions and suicide attacks
targeting government-con-
trolled areas in Syria and
its capital. There was no
immediate claim of respon-
sibility for either attack, but
Dutch PM
Rutte claims
victory over
‘wrong kind
of populism’
THE HAGUE, Nether-
lands (AP) — Dutch Prime
Minister Mark Rutte on
Wednesday claimed a domi-
nating parliamentary election
victory over
anti-Islam
lawmaker
G e e r t
Wilders,
who failed
the year’s
first litmus
test
for
populism in Rutte
Europe.
Provi-
sional results with over half
the votes counted suggested
Rutte’s party won 32 seats in
the 150-member legislature,
13 more than Wilders’ party,
which took only third place
with 19 seats. The surging
CDA Christian Democrats
claimed 20.
Following Britain’s vote
to leave the European Union
and Donald Trump’s election
as U.S. president, “the Neth-
erlands said, ‘Whoa!’ to the
wrong kind of populism,”
said Rutte, who is now
poised for a third term as
prime minister.
“We want to stick to the
course we have — safe and
stable and prosperous,” Rutte
added.
Wilders, who campaigned
on radical pledges to close
borders to migrants from
Muslim
nations,
close
mosques, ban the Quran and
take the Netherlands out of
the EU, had insisted that
whatever the result of the
election, the kind of populist
politics he and others in
Europe represent aren’t
going away.
“Rutte has not seen the
back of me,” Wilders said
after the results had sunk in.
His Party for Freedom
clinched 24 seats in 2010
before sinking to 15 in
2012, and Wednesday’s
total left him with about 12
percent of the electorate, far
less than populists in Britain
and the United States have
scored.
By ERIC TUCKER
Associated Press
SANA via AP
In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, journalists gather
next of blood inside the main judicial building which attacked by a suicide bomber,
in Damascus, Syria, Wednesday.
other, similar attacks in recent
weeks were claimed by
al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria,
which has come under pres-
sure lately amid infighting
with other insurgent factions
in Syria and airstrikes by the
U.S.-led coalition.
The al-Qaida branch in
Syria, The Levant Liberation
Committee, denied respon-
sibility for the attacks late
Wednesday. In a statement
released on its Telegram
channel, it said that its targets
are restricted to security and
military installations.
The attacks came as Syrians
mark the sixth anniversary of
the country’s civil war, which
has killed more than 400,000
people and displaced millions
of others. The conflict began
in March 2011 as a popular
uprising against Assad’s rule
but quickly descended into a
full-blown civil war that has
left large parts of the country
in ruins. The chaos allowed
al-Qaida and later the Islamic
State group to gain a foothold
in the war-torn nation.
Geert
Cappelaere,
UNICEF regional director
for the Middle East and
North Africa, told The
Associated Press Wednesday
following a three-day trip to
Syria that what he has seen
is “unprecedented,” even in
comparison to conflict zones
like Yemen, Sudan, Sierra
Leone and Rwanda.
“I have never seen a level
of destruction so big as I
have been seeing over the
last few days,” he said.
Russia and Turkey, who
back opposing sides of the
conflict, have been working
together to launch a political
track focused initially on a
cease-fire in Syria, and the
U.N.’s Syria envoy held
another round of peace talks in
Geneva recently, but the talks
have gone nowhere. Militant
groups such as the Islamic
State group and the Nusra
Front, now known as the
Levant Liberation Committee,
are not part of those talks.
The recent attacks have
struck at highly symbolic
targets, and may mark the
start of a new insurgency
campaign by insurgents to try
and counter recent military
advances by Assad’s forces,
backed by Russia and Iran.
“Deploying sleepers as
suicide bombers deep behind
enemy lines is (al-Qaida’s)
way of telling Syrians that
it remains an invaluable
component of the revolu-
tionary struggle against the
Assad regime and that the
armed struggle is far from
over, despite losses in Aleppo
and elsewhere,” said Charles
Lister, a senior fellow at the
Washington-based Middle
East Institute.
WASHINGTON — Two
Russian intelligence agents and
a pair of hired hackers have
been charged in a devastating
criminal breach at Yahoo that
affected at least a half billion
user accounts, the Justice
Department said Wednesday
in bringing the first case of its
kind against current Russian
government officials.
In a scheme that prosecu-
tors say blended intelligence
gathering with old-fashioned
financial greed, the four men
targeted the email accounts of
Russian and U.S. government
officials, Russian journalists
and employees of financial
services and other private
businesses, U.S. officials said.
Using in some cases a
technique known as “spear-
phishing” to dupe Yahoo
users into thinking they were
receiving legitimate emails,
the hackers broke into at
least 500 million accounts in
search of personal informa-
tion and financial data such
as gift card and credit card
numbers, prosecutors said.
“We will not allow
individuals, groups, nation
states or a combination of
them to compromise the
privacy of our citizens, the
economic interests of our
companies or the security
of our country,” said Acting
Assistant Attorney General
Mary McCord, the head of
the Justice Department’s
national security division.
The case, announced amid
continued U.S. intelligence
agency skepticism of their
Russian counterparts, comes
as U.S. authorities investi-
gative Russian interference
through hacking in the 2016
presidential election. Offi-
cials said those investigations
are separate.
One of the Yahoo-related
defendants, a Canadian and
Kazakh national named
Karim Baratov, has been
taken into custody in Canada.
Another, Alexsey Belan, is
on the list of the FBI’s most
wanted cyber criminals and
has been indicted multiple
times in the U.S. It’s not
clear whether he or the other
two defendants, Dmitry
Dokuchaev and Igor Sush-
chin, will ever step foot in an
American courtroom since
there’s no extradition treaty
with Russia.
“I hope they will respect
our criminal justice system,”
McCord said.
The indictment identifies
Dokuchaev and Sushchin
as officers of the Russian
Federal Security Service,
or FSB. Belan and Baratov
were paid hackers directed
by the FSB to break into the
accounts, prosecutors said.
Dokuchaev has been in
custody in Russia since his
arrest on treason charges in
December, along with his
superior and several others.
Russian media have reported
that Dokuchaev and his
superior were accused of
passing sensitive information
to the CIA. The media reports
also have contended that
Dokuchaev was arrested by
the FSB several years ago and
offered a choice: serve a long
prison sentence on hacking
charges or sign a contract to
work for the agency.
The FSB hasn’t commented,
and the Justice Department did
not confirm that.
Yahoo didn’t disclose the
breach until last September
when it began notifying
hundreds of millions of users
that their email addresses,
birth dates, answers to security
questions and other personal
information may have been
stolen.