Latest Articles about Terrorism
Attack in Dagestan Undermines Claims That Republic Is Stable
On December 29, unidentified individuals carried out an attack at the Naryn-Kala fortress, a well-known tourist site in Derbent, Dagestan, killing a Russian border guard officer and injuring 11 other people (Lifenews.ru, December 30, 2015). The slain border guard officer was identified as Semyon Sporyshev.... MORE
Italy’s Lady Jihad: Maria Gulia Sergio of the Islamic State
The Islamic State has drawn an overwhelming number of female followers, who play a key role in recruiting other female volunteers, promoting the organization’s propaganda online and even engaging in combat operations. This contradicts perceptions that women are less prone to partake in violent Islamist... MORE
Aman Abdurrahman: Indonesia’s Most Influential Extremist
Aman Abdurrahman has become arguably the most influential extremist ideologue in Indonesia today. A former Salafist preacher, Abdurrahman has become the foremost promoter of the Islamic State in Indonesia from his cell in the country’s so-called “super-maximum security” prison. His reputation among local Islamic State... MORE
Burhan Muzafar Wani: The Viral Poster Boy of Kashmir Jihad
Hizbul Mujahideen’s (HM) newly recruited commander, Burhan-ud-Din Muzaffar Wani, has taken Kashmir’s militant landscape by storm by using his social media skills and guns. One of his recent photographs featured the 21-year-old commander surrounded by at least ten other militants of roughly the same age... MORE
A Post-Mortem Analysis of Wisam al-Zubaidi: The Leader of the Islamic State in Libya
In November 2015, sources in the Pentagon suggested that the United States killed the leader of the Islamic State in Libya, Wisam al-Zubaidi (a.k.a. Abu Nabil al-Anbari). According to American sources cited by Jeune Afrique, al-Anbari was killed in an airstrike carried out by F-15... MORE
Islamic State and West Africa
2015 marked the year when “Boko Haram” evolved from an ostensibly domestic-rooted and globally unaffiliated militant group into a “Province” in the Islamic State’s global structure. This transition was formalized on March 7, 2015, when “Boko Haram” leader Abubakr Shekau pledged baya’a, or allegiance, to... MORE
Europe’s Jihadist Pipeline to Syria
As previous papers have outlined, the Islamic State poses a range of different threats to different people. One is a more or less conventional threat to the state structure in the Middle East. The other is an unconventional threat to countries further afield, including in... MORE
ISIS and al-Qaeda: Tactical Twins, Strategic Enemies
How can “Daesh” and al-Qaeda be both tactical twins and strategic enemies? [1] Their tactics are very similar. Even their strategies have the same roots in classical guerrilla doctrine. In a short article, one cannot review all the points of convergence and difference between the... MORE
Caliphate at War: Islamic State Ideology, War Fighting and State Formation
A series of books that I remember from my teenage days when I was in school in France sought to provide a succinct explanation for a variety of phenomena. The series title was De Quoi S’Agit-Il? This roughly translates as “what does it mean or... MORE
The Kurdish Periphery
The Kurds play a key role in the war against the Islamic State as they are located on the periphery of the jihadist organization’s two de-facto capitals, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. As a result, both Western states and Russia are courting the... MORE