After announcing that Libyan troops had suspended operations in Misurata, an official of the Libyan government suggested that armed tribesmen loyal to the regime would soon take their place. It would then be up to the tribesmen to negotiate with the besieged rebels or to... MORE

The Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI), a Mangal Bagh-led militant organization based in the Khyber Tribal Agency, is facing a serious threat to its existence after recent clashes with an LeI splinter group comprised of Zakakhel tribesmen. Efforts by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to forge a peace deal... MORE

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAK) announced today (April 22) that among the militants killed yesterday (April 21) in a shootout with security forces near the village of Serzhen-Yurt in Chechnya’s Shali district was a Saudi national known by the nom de guerre Moganned who, according... MORE

The wave of revolutionary unrest spreading across the Middle East poses a host of new challenges and possibilities for Salafist inspired militant groups like al-Qaeda. The calls for democracy, fair elections, and transparent governments in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen run contrary to... MORE

In troubled Pakistan, sacred spaces such as Sufi shrines have increasingly been the target of bloody attacks by Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. The Taliban-Deobandi school of Islam perceives Sufi practices such as devotional whirling dances, the veneration of Sufi saints and other rituals as being... MORE

Russia’s intelligence services reported on the night of April 18 that they had identified the body of Israpil Validzhanov, who was better known as Emir Hassan, the head of Dagestan’s Sharia Jamaat armed resistance movement, among four militants killed near the village of Tashkapur in... MORE

On April 11, at around 6:00 pm local time, a bomb exploded at the Kastrichnitskaya (October) Metro Station in central Minsk, killing some commuters instantly, injuring over 200 others, and causing mayhem. It represents the first genuine terrorist act to be reported by the Belarusian... MORE

As expected, Doku Umarov, the leader of the North Caucasus rebels, was not found among those killed near the village of Upper Alkun in the mountainous part of Ingushetia bordering Chechnya during a March 28 major military-police operation employing military aircraft (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/153198). Nonetheless, the armed... MORE

Insurgency-related violence was reported across the North Caucasus this past week. On April 14, three suspected militants were detained in Kabardino-Balkaria after police stopped a car in which four people were traveling along the Kavkaz federal highway between the villages of Chegem and Shalushka. The... MORE

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