Insurgencies Archive

On the day before Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah died last week, the Arabian Peninsula was in turmoil. The government of Yemen, on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, had just resigned in ignominy; the Saudi-backed president had been besieged, humiliated and ultimately toppled by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. It was precisely the kind of face-off between Iran and Saudi Arabia some of us had been predicting. Events in Yemen offered further proof that the historical rivalry that has marked relations between Riyadh and Tehran has entered a new and far more dangerous stage, gradually moving from rhetorical and diplomatic battles to outright armed […]

The threat of another war between Hezbollah and Israel ticked up Wednesday, after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a missile attack on a convoy in the Shebaa Farms, a disputed area controlled by Israel along its border with Lebanon. In response to the attack, which Hezbollah quickly claimed responsibility for, Israel launched airstrikes and artillery into southern Lebanon, killing a Spanish peacekeeper serving with the United Nations monitoring force there. The violence follows the Jan. 18 Israeli airstrike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights that killed six Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian general. Hezbollah vowed to retaliate. […]

The first weeks of 2015 have already brought repeated, shocking attacks by Boko Haram in and around Nigeria. Within the country’s northeastern state of Borno, the home turf of the proselytizing sect-turned-Islamist-group, militants massacred hundreds of civilians in Baga, site of a multinational military base. Suicide bombers attacked Maiduguri and Potiskum, the latter on three occasions. In a continuation of last year’s trends, Boko Haram’s violence spilled once again into northern Cameroon, where militants kidnapped dozens of children and adults in villages near Mokolo. Some commentators, including Kenan Malik in the New York Times, argue that “jihadists have turned terror […]

Even before the smoke cleared from last week’s horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, people were struggling to make sense of them. Because the initial victims were associated with Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine known to deride Islam, attention fell on questions of free speech and whether it should be limited when religion is involved. But even if the belief that Islam is being insulted influenced the killers at a personal level, the al-Qaida strategists who claim to have directed the Charlie Hebdo attack had other goals. For them, the notion of blasphemy is useful propaganda, but their objectives are much […]

When French officials announced they were searching for a woman as an accomplice in the attacks on a Jewish grocery store in Paris in which four hostages were killed, many in the West shook their heads. How was it possible that a woman, one born and raised in the West, would become a jihadi, a fighter committed to an extremist ideology that is hostile to women? Hayat Boumedienne, it turns out, is only one of a surprisingly large number of Western women who have been joining Islamist groups in recent years. The exact figures are not known, but researchers have […]

In the months before former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was ousted by the military in the summer of 2013, Cairo was full of rumors. That wasn’t particularly new; Egyptian politics have always thrived on rumor. But the latest in a string of anti-Morsi hearsay at that time, which grew louder as the summer neared, went something like this: To appease his Palestinian brethren in Hamas, Morsi planned to give the group—an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—a foothold in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian prosecutors went even further, after Morsi was in military custody later that year, accusing him of plotting both […]

On Dec. 16, militants from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) infiltrated Peshawar Cantonment, a high-security zone under military administration housing key government offices, and attacked the Army Public School, killing 145 people—132 of them children. The massacre was a stark reminder of Pakistan’s crisis of urban violence, weaknesses in its intelligence apparatus and the need to strengthen its counterterrorism capabilities. The attack prompted the government to swiftly adopt new measures to improve counterinsurgency and counterterror efforts. Nevertheless, significant changes in strategic thinking and internal reforms will be needed for this incident to become a watershed moment for Pakistan’s security policies. Pakistan’s major […]

With combat operations in Afghanistan fading in the rearview mirror, the United States is turning its attention to finding ways to stem Russian aggression. U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration supports the creation of a new NATO rapid reaction force and is sending more troops and tanks to Europe. These steps are intended to revive deterrence of Russia. They may do so given the nature of the challenge that Russia poses, but they also underscore the limitations of the old Cold War notion of deterrence in today’s security environment. When the Soviet Union fielded nuclear weapons during the opening years of […]

PARIS—For the seven years I have lived here, the French military has been at war, first in Afghanistan, then in Libya, Mali and the wider Sahel region. Yet if the French armed forces were not only engaged, but at times stretched to the breaking point by their operational pace, the French people seemed oblivious to the country’s role in the fight against Islamic extremism in Africa and now the Middle East. In all but the most dramatic circumstances, casualties were ignored, and while the spotlight of breaking news at times put these wars in the public’s mind, the debate was […]

Last month, after a summit in Doha where the wealthy Arab kingdoms of the Persian Gulf rallied around a joint naval and police force, Qatar’s foreign minister had some kind words for Egypt. Evoking the 1950s and 1960s, the height of pan-Arab rhetoric, Khalid bin Mohammed Al-Attiyah called Egypt “strong and capable…the backbone of all Arabs.” The nostalgia was part of a reconciliation campaign, led by the conservative Gulf countries that back Egyptian strongman President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, to mend ties between Egypt and Qatar. That came on the heels of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain’s own […]

On Dec. 16, 2014, seven gunmen broke into a school in a high-security zone in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar, shooting indiscriminately into crowds of children, before splitting up and going room by room to execute dozens more. Armed with explosives, suicide jackets, automatic rifles and pistols, these men cornered their targets in their classrooms, setting one teacher who attempted to resist on fire as a lesson to the rest. Once in the school’s auditorium, they first shot and killed all those attempting to escape, and then went row by row to execute those who were left. Many were […]

When diplomats want to explore a way out of a crisis, they like to talk about striking a “grand bargain” and try to avoid the word “climb-down,” which tends to imply an acknowledgement of failure or defeat. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States, trapped in costly confrontations over Syria and Ukraine, may need to agree to a sort of “grand climb-down” that allows the two powers to get out of unsustainable positions as painlessly as possible. Moscow and Washington both begin 2015 stuck with the consequences of poor strategic bets. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine now looks like a truly disastrous […]