A new disagreement between Somali president Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmad and parliamentary speaker Sharif Hassan Shaykh Aden over extending the mandate of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is disrupting a successful offensive by TFG and African Union troops against the radical Islamist al-Shabaab movement.Under an... MORE

Two recent suicide attacks in as many days on Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the amir of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F), show that the Pakistani Taliban are further widening their sectarian war on competing interpretations of political Islam (Dawn [Karachi] April 1). [1] Although the... MORE

Trapped somewhere between revolution and counter-revolution, Egypt’s Ministry of the Interior is facing internal collapse amidst a disastrous leak of intelligence files, mysterious fires in records facilities,  suggestions the ministry was running false-flag terrorist operations, a loss of judicial  immunity and a dramatic deterioration of... MORE

The shooting deaths in early March of two American servicemen at Frankfurt airport as they awaited a plane taking them to Afghanistan was an event that seemed to hearken back to the 1970s, when left-wing groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) targeted American soldiers... MORE

Reputed Jema’ah Islamiya leader Abu Bakr Ba’asyir told the Jamestown Foundation in 2005 that “the highest deed in Islam is jihad” (see Spotlight on Terror, December 16, 2005). After being arrested in August 2010, the Indonesian cleric is now on trial, facing charges under Indonesia’s... MORE

As the surge of revolutionary fervor that has taken the greater Middle East by storm continues to spread, many observers are grappling with the political uncertainties that the tumult has produced from Morocco to the Persian Gulf and beyond.  The popular uprisings that prompted the... MORE

The demonstrations occurring in several countries in the Middle East are now also taking place in Iraq. The violence and public protests that erupted in Kirkuk province and elsewhere in Iraq on February 25 have the dangerous potential to escalate into a civil war between... MORE

Although Pakistani Taliban militants have killed hundreds of people accused of spying for the United States or Pakistan’s intelligence agencies over the past few years in the lawless tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, the incidents of such execution are on rise since the... MORE

Forces loyal to embattled Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi have battled for days to take the coastal city of Misrata. Qaddafi’s efforts to take Misrata shed light on the little known role of Circassians in Libya, descendants of the Muslim tribes of the northwest Caucasus region... MORE

Following the departure of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on February 11 and the collapse of his regime, new faces and conflicts have appeared within the ranks of Egypt’s Islamist movement, including the Muslim Brotherhood.As with the larger Egyptian revolution, internal dissent first appeared on Facebook... MORE