With Ethiopia sending troops across the border in Somalia to protect the Baidoa-based Transitional Federal Government (TFG), the possibility for a regional conflict looms in the future. To understand why Ethiopia is concerned with the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) takeover in Somalia, it is necessary... MORE

Despite Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddhafi's uncompromising stance toward Islamist activism, a number of Libyan volunteers have traveled from Libya to join the Iraqi jihad. From the information that is beginning to emerge about some of these militants, it would seem that they are not part... MORE

The Islamists who control most of southern Somalia and who are grouped under the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) continue to accuse Kenya of being biased in support of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) as well as backing plans to send African Union peacekeeping troops to... MORE

After years of mutual hostility, the armed forces of two states and the armed militias of one failed state are poised to unleash a potentially devastating war in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia are each moving troops up to their borders in... MORE

Debate is brewing in Kenya over the issue of radical Islam in the wake of the global war on terrorism. In a country where both Christians and Muslims have co-existed harmoniously for years, the talk has turned emotional and has been equally controversial. Experts are... MORE

Al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri's recent September 11 threat to France, coupled with al-Qaeda's official integration with the Algerian Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), is significant for two principal reasons. First, from al-Qaeda's perspective, it is a formal alliance with an "out-of-area" Islamist group... MORE

The brutal decapitation of Khartoum newspaper editor Muhammad Taha earlier this month was part of a much larger inter-Islamic struggle reaching from the mountains of northwest Pakistan through Darfur, Tunisia, Paris and London. The murder took place against a local backdrop of street clashes between... MORE

Months after gaining control of Mogadishu, the main seaports and most of the southern parts of the country, Somalia's Islamic Courts Union (ICU) has begun to rein in sea piracy. Somalia's 3,300 kilometer coastline has been classified by the International Maritime Bureau as one of... MORE

Recent information emerging from Somalia indicates that a hard-line faction within the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) may have evolved into a new organization called Shabbab (Arabic for "youth"), where youthful die-hard elements of the Islamists are being trained for specialized assignments. An official from Kenya's... MORE