MYANMAR: GROWING FEARS OVER ROHINGYA FIGHTERS Gunmen killed nine police officers in a series of raids on border posts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state on October 9, an area where tensions run high between Myanmar’s Buddhists and its Muslim Rohingya population. The raids have prompted violent... MORE

Karachaevo-Cherkessia, a small republic in the Northwestern Caucasus, was among the first areas of the Russian Federation to witness a rise in Islamic jamaats during the 1990s. Yet today, Karachaevo-Cherkessia is a relatively quiet place, unlike neighboring Kabardino-Balkaria and most other North Caucasus republics to... MORE

A significant spike in violence has been registered in the North Caucasus. Within the span of just one week, October 3–9, an estimated 18 people were killed and 4 more suffered injuries in insurgency-related violence across the region. Fifteen suspected rebels, including eight in Chechnya,... MORE

On October 8, both the United Kingdom’s and United States’ embassies in Bishkek issued warnings about an increased threat of a terrorist attack on Kyrgyzstan sometime that month. The suspected attack, if it materialized, was supposed to possibly involving the kidnapping and hostage taking of... MORE

Two high-ranking Russian security officials—General Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia, and General Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary general of the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)—recently paid official visits to Tajikistan within days of one another. Generals Patrushev and Bordyuzha met with... MORE

Hizb-e Islami Afghanistan (HIA), one of Afghanistan’s oldest jihadist factions and largest Islamic parties, concluded a comprehensive peace deal with the Afghan government on September 29. Speaker after speaker in the Afghan capital’s grand Arg presidential palace declared the deal “historic,” a milestone for restoring... MORE

The Nigerian government announced in August that it had resumed amnesty payments to former militants in the Niger Delta, many of them members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) (Naija Headlines, August 4). It had significantly reduced the amount of... MORE

During the nearly two years of the Yemeni civil war, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has gone from an organization that was under pressure and struggling financially, to an organization that is larger, more formidable and better armed than it has ever been. The... MORE

Following a month of lull in August, when the parliament was in recess and the majority of cabinet ministers took a short break from meetings and press briefings, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev opened the fall’s joint session of the Mazhilis and the Senate (lower and... MORE

Though Nigeria’s southern Delta region has abundant oil reserves that should provide amply for the future of both the region and the nation, the Delta has become consumed by environmental degradation, unrestrained oil theft, destruction of infrastructure and a new wave of anti-government militancy complicated... MORE