Terrorism Archive

It has been hard to keep up with the sheer torrent of dreadful political proposals that have emanated from the United States in the past 10 days. President Donald Trump’s decision to block refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. is undoubtedly the vilest of the lot. But the new administration has also managed to promulgate a bundle of ideas about international crisis management that will, if put into action, prove pretty disastrous. Last week, I predicted that Trump would adopt “haphazard” approaches to conflicts overseas. That may have underestimated both his sense of purpose and […]

With the self-proclaimed Islamic State besieged in Mosul and on the defensive in parts of Syria, the future of the group’s network beyond its core territory has been thrown into question. At its peak in 2014 and early 2015, the Islamic State established affiliates across the Middle East and North Africa that it labeled “provinces,” or wilayat, rapidly increasing its operational reach and influence. But with its senior leadership now facing considerable pressure in both Iraq and Syria, it is unclear whether the Islamic State will be able to maintain communications and organizational ties with these affiliates abroad. Moreover, as […]

When five diplomats from the United Arab Emirates were killed in a bombing in Kandahar earlier this month, Afghan authorities quickly blamed the Haqqani network, which many suspect of having ties to Pakistani intelligence. That triggered speculation that the attack—the first on diplomats from a Gulf state in Afghanistan—was meant to send a message to the UAE about its growing counterterrorism cooperation with India. The timing of the blast was seen as especially significant since it came just weeks before Abu Dhabi’s powerful crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is also the deputy supreme commander of the […]

“It’s the same fight, the same stakes,” French President Francois Hollande said of the battle against extremism in France and Africa while meeting with Malian troops in the northern city of Gao last week. “The terrorists who attack our land, who commit acts on our soil, are allied with those who are in the Levant, in Iraq and Syria, but here as well, in the Sahel.” Just days later, a suicide attack killed dozens at an army base there. Hollande was in Mali for the final Africa-France Summit of his presidency, which took place in the capital, Bamako, amid tight […]

Most of the policy shops and intelligence agencies in the U.S. government focus on near-term threats or issues, reflecting the time horizon of elected officials who often have little interest in events beyond the next election. But long-term thinking, as senior intelligence officer Gregory Treverton noted, “is critical to framing strategy.” For this reason there are a few government agencies designed specifically to peer deep into the future. The Pentagon, for instance, has its small Office of Net Assessment. The intelligence community has what is called the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Every four years, the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group publishes […]

Last month’s terrorist attack in Jordan, which the self-declared Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for, was a brutal reminder of the kingdom’s fragile security situation. Gunmen attacked a police station in the southern city of Karak and then stormed a Crusader castle popular with tourists. They killed nine Jordanians in the firefight, including seven security officers, and a Canadian tourist. In the days after the attack, three Jordanian gendarmes and a police officer were killed in security raids in Karak, where authorities discovered a huge cache of weapons and explosives that apparently belonged to the gunmen. “Judging by the quantity […]

The so-called Islamic State received some modest good news recently from Somalia, in what has otherwise been a dismal stretch of losses for the jihadi group. In October, a small militant faction aligned with the Islamic State took and held Qandala, a port town in northern Somalia, for more than a month before withdrawing. It was the first time a group linked to the Islamic State has occupied a town in Somalia. Talk of the Islamic State dominated much of the debate on counterterrorism issues during the U.S. presidential campaign. Yet as concerning as the Islamic State’s Qandala operation is, […]

The harrowing image last month of a Turkish police officer standing over the Russian ambassador he just shot, while blaming Moscow for the devastation in Syria, captures a key foreign policy challenge for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump: How can he attempt to stabilize the Middle East by bringing conflicts to a close, rather than letting Russia and Iran lead the region into further cycles of repression and violence under the rubric of fighting terrorism? Trump’s current defense priority—“to crush and destroy” the so-called Islamic State—plays right into Russian and Iranian machinations, with their selective definitions of terrorism and scorched-earth tactics. […]

The battlefield defeat of the self-styled Islamic State in eastern Syria and western Iraq is far from certain but increasingly likely. Iraqi government forces, in conjunction with Shiite and Kurdish militias, are slowly liberating Mosul, the largest city the Islamic State has conquered. While the Syrian government is less concerned with the group than with other rebel forces it faces, a Kurdish-Arab militia alliance called the Syrian Democratic Forces is pushing toward Raqqa, the Islamic State’s most important stronghold after Mosul. In parallel, a global coalition led by the United States is undercutting the group’s economic base. The extremists still […]

The fall of rebel-held eastern Aleppo in Syria last month was a stunning personal blow for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had openly backed Syrian rebel groups after the civil war began in 2011. Losing the rebels’ self-styled “capital of the revolution” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies is an insurmountable setback for years of Turkish regime-change efforts in Syria. But there is a silver lining for Turkey. After Aleppo, Ankara can focus all its diplomatic, military and political efforts on pursuing its more immediate national security interests in northern Syria: fighting the so-called Islamic State […]