Insurgencies Archive

The international tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri unveiled a new indictment last week further implicating Hezbollah in the destabilization of Lebanon in the mid-2000s. On Sept. 15, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a United Nations-backed court based in The Hague, charged Hezbollah member Salim Jamil Ayyash for two assassination attempts on former ministers, Marwan Hamadeh and Elias Murr, in 2004 and 2005, respectively, and the killing of former Lebanese Communist Party leader George Hawi in a car bombing in 2005. Ayyash is one of four Hezbollah members already charged by the tribunal in 2011 for […]

It’s been six months since the Islamic State lost the last slice of its territory in Iraq and Syria, where it once controlled a land mass roughly the size of the United Kingdom. This loss dealt a serious blow to the terrorist group, but not a fatal one. As many different counterterrorism analysts have written, ISIS continues to spread its message and gather adherents who carry out attacks in its name across the globe. One area where a metastasizing ISIS could seek to establish a greater foothold is Southeast Asia. In recent years, a number of countries in this diverse […]

After surrounding the villages at dawn, the militias stormed in, armed with machetes and firearms. As Reuters later reported, the “gunmen left the charred bodies of women and children smoldering in their homes.” The attack on two villages in central Mali in March, in which 170 people were reportedly killed, was shocking enough to generate international headlines. But beyond the grisly details were its seemingly stark ethnic dimensions. The militias were made up of members of the Dogon ethnic group, which is primarily pastoralist. The victims in the two villages were mostly members of the Fulani ethnic group, semi-nomadic herders […]

In the four months since coordinated suicide bombers killed more than 250 people across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, the country’s embattled government has been forced to grapple with a common question in the post-9/11 era. How do you stop enemies willing to kill themselves for a political or religious cause? For Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, one answer has been to accept blame for errors in policing and intelligence gathering while calling on other countries to help curb the scourge of violent extremism. But even as Sri Lanka’s leaders look abroad for support, they must not forget that one of […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Frederick Deknatel and Laura Weiss talk about the tentative deal for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan announced this week. They also discuss the latest setback for Colombia’s peace process with the FARC insurgency and Boris Johnson’s bruising Brexit humiliation in the U.K. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three […]

A week ago, Colombians faced a sudden, unwelcome reminder of the bad old days. In a video message that spread rapidly throughout the country, well-known former guerrilla leaders announced their rejection of the 2016 peace agreement between the state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC. The men, dressed in the olive-green fatigues they had worn for decades waging a self-proclaimed Marxist revolution, blamed the government, which they accused of betraying them and the deal they reached in Havana three years ago. That hard-fought peace accord, the result of four years of negotiations, had won then-Colombian […]

The announcement that a group of senior commanders from the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are taking up arms again is a heavy blow to Colombia’s already fragile peace process. The declaration, made in a video posted on Aug. 29, represents the most significant break to date with the 2016 peace accord that was supposed to end the longest-running conflict in Latin America. In the video posted on social media, the FARC’s former second-in-command, Luciano Marin—better known by his nom de guerre, Ivan Marquez—declared a “new chapter” in the Marxist guerrillas’ armed struggle. One of the key […]