Although Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau publicly declared a jihad only as late as 2010, 2002 is widely recognized as the year the Nigerian jihadist group was founded. The group’s leader then was Shekau’s predecessor, the Salafist cleric Muhammed Yusuf, who himself was aligned with... MORE

A little-known five-year civil war in South Sudan has left up to 400,000 dead and millions more displaced. After the young nation gained its hard-won independence in 2011, only two years of peace followed before latent rivalries between the Dinka and the Nuer (the two... MORE

Introduction While Algeria is going through a period of instability, another country in the Maghreb-Sahel region is also experiencing a power transition—Mauritania (see Hot Issue, March 16). This transitional process should, despite the risks posed by jihadist groups, be smoother than Algeria’s. On January 15, ... MORE

Shamima Begum has been the talking point of the international media and has dominated the headlines after her British citizenship was stripped, the most public example of an Islamic-State (IS)-bride-turned-stateless-jihadist.  With IS losing its last enclave in Baghouz, Syria, the group’s members, like Begum, are... MORE

Among jihadist circles in Pakistan, few ideologues managed to attract such widespread respect and charisma as Maulana Sami ul Haq. His credentials include Islamist jihadist writings, fatwas against Western forces, teaching and running his own grand madrasah, active participation in politics, running his own Islamist... MORE

On January 17, the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen announced that an intelligence operation conducted in Sanaa resulted in the killing of a former Yemen Air Force commander who had defected to the Houthi militia—Ibrahim Ali al-Shami (al-Tagheer, January 19). The operation was carried out as... MORE

Uyghur Islamist extremists propagating a separatist jihad against the Chinese state have concerned the Chinese government since long before recent reports of mass internment of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the far west of China (South China Morning Post, February 26; Permanent... MORE

Maulana Masood Azhar, the founding leader of Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad—JeM), a Pakistan-based terrorist group blamed for violence against India over the past two decades—including the latest vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) attack in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) targeting a security convoy. On February 14,... MORE

In October 2018, the Taliban announced that Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Khairullah Khairkhwa, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Norullah Noori, and Mohammad Nabi would be among its representatives at upcoming talks with the United States. The five, who were imprisoned at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo,... MORE

Long-time al-Qaeda operative Jamal al-Badawi was killed in what U.S. military officials called a “precision airstrike” on January 1 in the Yemeni governorate of Marib (al-Jazeera, January 6). Al-Badawi was a key accomplice in the October 2000 al-Qaeda led attack on the USS Cole in... MORE