As Israel-Hamas war begins, it’s not too late to shape this historic inflection point
Hamas’ murderous raid on Oct. 7, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians, may well turn out to be a consequential inflection point, having unleashed political and popular forces that could lead in a positive or, just as likely, extremely negative direction.
Human rights to counter terrorism: Now is the time for a Global Humanitarian Coalition to Defeat ISIS
There is an urgent need for a Global Humanitarian Coalition to Defeat ISIS to conduct human rights-centered action and build upon hard-fought military gains in the campaign against ISIS. Repatriation of all third-country nationals in the squalid detention camps and prisons in northeast Syria must be the first joint task in order to ease the burden of the local administration and to accomplish long-sought security, justice, and stabilization goals.
Making sense of the Taliban’s counterterrorism assurances
Two years on from the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, Afghanistan’s neighbors are increasingly concerned that their return to power has emboldened terrorist groups and networks, which are using the hospitable environment to regroup, rearm, and recruit substantially. The main question now for Afghanistan’s neighbors in the region, and the international community more broadly, is just how reliable the Taliban’s counterterrorism assurances to other states really are.
As the clock ticks down on the repatriation of IS foreign fighters from Syria, a recent development has added a new sense of urgency to the situation. On June 11, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), announced its intention to prosecute 2,000 IS foreign fighters. How-ever, the lack of international recognition for the AANES and its courts renders these trials illegiti-mate, further complicating future international legal efforts to prosecute these combatants.
The Risk of Violent Inter-Communal Spillover in West Africa: Realities and Prescriptions
The Sahel region of West Africa suffers from escalating cycles of inter-communal violence that have resulted in countless deaths of innocent people. As this worsening situation continues to spread, it has come to be one of the most prominent threats to security and socio-political stability in the region.
The U.S. administration is tacitly contributing to growing acceptance and re-normalization of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the 21st century’s most notorious war criminal, putting in jeopardy the continuation of our counter-terrorism mission in Syria. Assad is toasting his survival on the ashes of his victims — but within the small community of optimistic actors in Syria, ISIS is sitting pretty comfortably too.
It has been an accepted fact that ISIS ceased being a territory-controlling entity in Syria after its March 2019 defeat in the town of Baghouz. Yet it is perhaps time to reevaluate this perspective on the group and its insurgent trajectory in the country. While recent massacres of civilians in central Syria have refocused some international attention on the desert region, known as the Badia, the renewed widespread battles between militants and regime security forces that have occurred in parallel to these attacks have gone unnoticed.
In Disorder, They Thrive: How Rural Distress Fuels Militancy and Banditry in the Central Sahel
The central Sahel — Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger — is buffeted by three main forms of armed conflict that overlap and fuel each other: communal conflict, banditry, and violent extremism. These conflicts are partly rooted in a crisis of governance in rural areas, and are exacerbated by climate change, demographics, and internal and cross-border migration.
As terrorist groups expand in the Sahel, is Algeria the missing link?
Over the past two years, the steady expansion of terrorist and fundamentalist threats in the Sahel has not gotten the attention it deserves. Algeria’s regional diplomatic clout, military might, and experience in fighting terrorism could help Sahelian states ward off an imminent political and security collapse.
On Nov. 30, the Islamic State announced that its leader, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, had been killed in battle and that his successor, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurayshi, was now in place. Hours later, the United States military’s Central Command confirmed the death of Abu al-Hassan, adding that it had occurred in Daraa, in southern Syria, in mid-October at the hands of “the Free Syrian Army.”
أطلقت المجموعات المحلية في مدينة درعا البلد ، وهي مجموعات عسكرية كانت تتبع للجيش السوري الحر، و بقيت في المحافظة بعد توقيع أتفاقية المصالحة مع النظام السوري برعاية روسية في يوليو / تموز عام 2018، عملية عسكرية واسعة على مجموعات هفو _ الحرفوش في أحياء طريق السد والمخيم داخل درعا البلد.
On Oct. 31, local units previously affiliated with the FSA launched a large-scale military operation against the al-Hafo-Harfoush group in the southern Syrian city of Daraa al-Balad. The operation followed a suicide bombing targeting the house of Ghassan al-Akram Abazid, a former FSA leader, that left four dead and several others wounded, on Oct. 28, in Daraa al-Balad. The attack was only the latest in a string of similar operations in southern Syria conducted by the group over the past year targeting military factions affiliated with the opposition.
