By: Dr Alex Vines OBE and Jon Wallace
This article explains the history of terrorism in Africa, its causes, and future efforts to bring peace and stability. It focuses on certain nations in West and East Africa – Mali, Nigeria and Somalia.
To discuss terrorism in Africa it is essential to recognize the complexities involved. First, ‘terrorism’ is a problematic term. If terrorism is defined as the use of violence and intimidation against civilians, then some African governments have allegedly
By: Jared Ahmad
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is important to reflect on the legacy that event – and the “war on terror” more broadly – has had for the way news media cover terrorism. Though we should be clear that terrorism as we define it now predates the attacks by well over a century, what is significant about the events of 9/11 is the way they turned terrorism into a near-constant feature of the daily news cycle.
Scholars have long-argued that there is
American journalist Alex Rubinstein has said that mass-casualty terrorist attacks like the Kabul airport bombing are used by the United States for continuing occupations of foreign countries.
Terrorists struck the Kabul airport on August 26, killing at least 180 people, mostly Afghan civilians and 13 US service members. A little-known shadowy terrorist group, Daesh-K, claimed the responsibility for the attack.
Following the bombing, the US military carried out several drone attacks across
By: Amira Jadoon and Andrew Mines
An attack on a crowd gathered outside Kabul’s airport on Aug. 26, 2021, has left at least 100 people dead, including at least 13 U.S. troops. ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the coordinated suicide bomb and gun assault, which came just days after President Joe Biden warned that the group – an affiliate of the Islamic State group operating in Afghanistan – was “seeking to target the airport and attack U.S. and allied forces and innocent civilians.”
This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?
The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the actual reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to U.S. empire.
Successive U.S. administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses
Abstract
Background
The risk factors for radicalization and terrorism represent a key research issue. While numerous data on the sociological, political, and criminological profiles of radicalized people and terrorists are available, knowledge about psychiatric disorders among these populations remains scarce and contradictory.
Method
We conducted a systematic review of the literature regarding psychiatric disorders among both radicalized and terrorist populations.
Results
We screened
By Mehrdad Torabi
To restore its lost hegemonic domination over Latin America, Western Asia, and other parts of the world, especially in the face of newly emerging powers, the United States cannot afford anymore resorting to brute force like that of invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq.
With economic difficulties and consequently the rise of far-right populism amongst constituencies of the so-called liberal international order, it is now more facile to make sense of the phrase “were globalism
A senior advisor to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says during its military presence in Afghanistan, the United States wreaked havoc there instead of helping Afghanistan’s development and finally left the country with humiliation.
Ali Akbar Velayati made the remarks while addressing a one-day webinar themed “Afghanistan, Peace, and Sustainable Security,” which was held in the Iranian capital on Monday, attended by a number of Afghan elites and intellectual
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the spread of violent ideologies with terrorists and extremists capitalising on the increased time spent online, a new Europol report has found.
The latest "EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report" by the bloc's law enforcement agency warns that "a notable increase" in intolerance of political opponents occurred in 2020, spurred in part by the global health crisis.
It noted that extremists and terrorists have found new opportunities in the increased time
When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s caliphate was overthrown in al-Raqqa in March 2019, many wrongly believed that the Islamic State (ISIS) was over. Born out of the chaos of the Syrian War, many assumed that it would disappear as the guns gradually fell silent in Syria. That has not happened, and over the past six months there has been a series of attacks on civilian populations in both Syria and Iraq — all claimed by ISIS. The most recent of those was a twin suicide bombing in Baghdad in January. Two
By Alex Thurston
The “Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership Program” has done more harm than good and wasted taxpayer dollars.
On March 24, the “Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership Program Act” was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The bill, introduced for the third time, would give a firmer legal foundation to the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership. The TSCTP is an executive branch program co-led by the State Department, the United States Agency for
Last week, Pakistan banned the radical Islamist political party, the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) after it staged a series of violent riots. The violent unrest only intensified across the country after that, including threats to international interests, demonstrating both that the Pakistani government was correct about TLP and that the state continues to struggle in dealing with Islamic militancy.
Background
TLP was created in 2015 by a Pakistani Islamic scholar, Khadim Hussain Rizvi. It is
By Francesco Marone
In the United Kingdom, a complex international case has fueled a heated debate, with deep legal, ethical, political, and security implications. The last development depended on a controversial ruling: the UK Supreme Court had to decide whether Shamima Begum, the London schoolgirl who traveled to Syria in 2015 to join the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), could return home to mount her defense. Eventually, on 26 February, the president of the court said the judges had decided
The Second Meeting of "Empowerment of Women Victims of Terrorism; the Necessity for Future of Human" was held at Allameh Tabatabai University in-person and via webinar on Monday, paying tribute to women victims of terrorism.
By the effort of the Association for the Defense of Victims of Terrorism in collaboration with Allameh Tabatabai University and the International Law Student Association, the event was held on Monday with scholars and women activists in human rights affairs in Iran and West
By Azad Essa*
The French say they killed armed fighters, but like US attacks on Yemen, Afghanistan or Somalia, there is no proof that those killed by the recent drone strikes were combatants.
On the afternoon of 3 January, the French military deployed a Reaper drone over the village of Bounti in central Mali. The drone dropped three bombs on a dwelling in an open area outside the village, killing dozens of rebel fighters, the French military said.
Hours after the attack, however, several
By Ariel Koch
In June 2020, an American soldier was charged with sending sensitive information about his own unit’s location, movements and security measures to members of the Nazi-Satanist group, Order of Nine Angles (ONA). He used an ONA-affiliated channel, which promotes Nazism, Satanism, terrorism and sexual violence, on the encrypted messaging service, Telegram.
Three months later, a man was arrested and charged with first-degree murder following the stabbing of a man outside of a mosque
By Brett Wilkins
A new report published Thursday details United States so-called "counterterrorism" operations by the U.S. military in 85 nations since 2018 as part of its "Global War on Terror," the open-ended post-9/11 campaign that has seen over half a dozen countries attacked or invaded, hundreds of overseas military bases built, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and trillions of dollars spent—with no end in sight.
The report—published by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's
By Mohammed Sinan Siyech*
With the approval and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines at the end of 2020, media channels have been ripe with images of different world leaders such as Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong and US President Joe Biden, among others, either taking the jab, or announcing their intention to do so, in a bid to assuage any public distrust towards vaccines.
Millions of people will likely take the vaccine in 2021, in the hopes of stamping out the threat of Covid-19
By Brett Wilkins
Afghans and human rights advocates around the world expressed deep disappointment Tuesday after the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Germany in a case brought by victims of a 2009 NATO airstrike that killed as many as 90 civilians.
The New York Times reports a 17-judge panel of the ECHR ruled unanimously that the German government adequately investigated a September 3, 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan's Kunduz province that targeted two fuel tankers stolen by
By Abdennour Toumi*
Muslims throughout Europe and the U.S. are still unjustly stigmatized. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-U.S. President George W. Bush challenged Muslim world leaders with his rhetorical foreign policy doctrine: “You are either with us or against us.”
Years later, another Republican U.S. president, Donald Trump, followed in Bush's footsteps against Muslims and immigrants.
Such public policies have therefore damaged America's image in the Middle East and North Africa
By: Dr Alex Vines OBE and Jon Wallace
This article explains the history of terrorism in Africa, its causes, and future efforts to bring peace and stability. It focuses on certain nations in West and East Africa – Mali, Nigeria and Somalia.
To discuss terrorism in Africa it is essential to recognize the complexities involved. First, ‘terrorism’ is a problematic term. If terrorism is defined as the use of violence and intimidation against civilians, then some African governments have allegedly
