The Islamic State’s attack on ethnic Assyrian Christian communities in the northeastern Syrian governorate of al-Hasakah in February and the subsequent kidnapping of approximately 220 Assyrian villagers has brought renewed international attention to the region and the complex ethnic and religious conflicts brewing there (Daily... MORE

Amid a series of government denials from Pakistan and Afghanistan regarding the presence of the Islamic State militant group in these countries and its ongoing outreach activities there, its expansion was corroborated by none other than the Islamic State’s spokesperson, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, on January... MORE

North Caucasian militants who recently pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his so-called Islamic State (see EDM, January 8) have experienced their first losses. It happened during a counter-terrorist operation conducted on March 31 in the city of Khasavyurt, near the administrative border with... MORE

Many Chechen supporters of the Islamic State have flocked to the Middle East. And as their numbers and fervency have grown, this has placed at a disadvantage other Chechen commanders in the Middle East who have refused to subordinate themselves to the self-styled new caliphate.... MORE

On January 31, a U.S. drone strike in Shabwah, a province in south Yemen, killed Shaykh Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, a high-ranking jihadist scholar and one of the most prominent members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) (Yemen Times, February 2; al-Sharq al-Awsat, February... MORE

In a video statement on November 24, 2014, burka clad students of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid-affiliated (Red Mosque) female seminary, Jamia-e-Hafsa, pledged allegiance to Islamic State amir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was shocking, as the all-girls madrassa had long been known for supporting al-Qaeda and the... MORE

During the past 16 years of battling militants in the North Caucasus, Russia’s security services and police have generally avoided taking prisoners among the insurgents. This tendency was recently displayed once again in an operation conducted in Makhachkala. According to the official version of events,... MORE

As the militants of the armed Islamic resistance in the North Caucasus began taking oaths of allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (see EDM, January 30), the Russian authorities began looking for ways to confront them. On March 11, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev... MORE

Making sense of the political turmoil and the potential threat of the Islamic State in Libya is becoming increasingly difficult. At the beginning of March 2015, delegations from various Libyan factions met in the Moroccan coastal town of Skhirat, to negotiate under the auspices of... MORE

In recent months, the Islamic State militant group has started using ethnic Kurdish militants in operations against the security forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and in its propaganda materials. Some Kurdish Islamic State militants have taken part in videoed killings. For... MORE