The typical opinion in the Moscow political bazaar is that every foreign policy setback for the United States represents a net gain for Russia. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan, with each of its faults eagerly amplified by Russian propaganda, is nevertheless, a hard challenge to... MORE

Uyghur Jihadists Prominent in Syria Now Face an Unclear Future in Afghanistan  Jacob Zenn The Uyghur-led Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) had its roots in 1990s-era Afghanistan and was comprised of exiled Uyghurs from Xinjiang, China. The group was close to the Taliban and Islamic Movement... MORE

In June, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, or HTS) demanded that the Chechen warlord Muslim Shishani join their organization or leave Idlib, Syria. Reports of the demand emerged on June 27. A local news agency in its reporting referred to... MORE

The latest issue of al-Qaeda’s Inspire Magazine prominently featured a call for ‘lone wolf’ style attacks on Americans. This is the first time that al-Qaeda made a call for lone wolf-style jihadists to conduct attacks in the United States since 2017. The article praised attackers... MORE

In two battlegrounds 1,500 kilometers apart, veteran Chechen freelance fighters are being rebuked by those with whom they aligned against a common foe. In June, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main rebel group in the Idlib Governorate of Syria, issued a demand that the hundreds... MORE

It took a telephone call from United States President Joseph Biden last Friday (July 9) afternoon to convince President Vladimir Putin to abandon his “principled” stance on upholding Syria’s sovereignty and to grant consent to keeping the corridor for delivering humanitarian aid to the rebel-controlled... MORE

Contemporary Turkish counterterrorism campaigns rest on sophisticated, close cooperation between the Turkish military and national intelligence with a pronounced use of drones. This was reflected in a recent operation, which targeted one of the top Syrian-Kurdish figures of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), Halef al-Muhammad,... MORE

One of the most critical issues in Iraq currently is the relationship between its Shia-led government and Iranian-backed Shia militias. This issue has been important for U.S. military strategy in the Middle East. The only two military actions ordered by President Joe Biden thus far... MORE

Although Russia’s Caspian Flotilla remains the dominant naval force on the Caspian, it is not the only one that matters anymore. All four other littoral states—Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan—have been building up their own naval presences, particularly since various intra-regional disputes over access to... MORE

As the self-styled Islamic State (IS) “caliphate” collapsed in March 2019, the international community was faced with the problem of more than 70,000 IS family members stranded in Syria. The Kurdish Peshmerga gathered these family members into camps in northeastern Syria. Currently, these camps still... MORE