Violence and Security

Britain's New Policy to Counter Radical Islamism May Improve by Learning from US

August 07, 2015

Britain's new policy for countering radical Islamism by focusing on the prevention of "non-violent extremists" is generating a debate among security experts about possible blowback, with suggestions that the US practice of outreach to domestic Muslim communities may be more efficacious.
Islamic State Cultural Cleansing in Iraq Includes Libraries

August 06, 2015

The Islamic State's ("IS") violent campaign to impose a caliphate in Iraq and Syria has involved cultural cleansing through destruction of sites and libraries, so officials at the Baghdad National Library are accelerating the digitization of the massive collection to protect a millennium of historical materials.
Radical Islamists Raise Profile in China

August 03, 2015

The activism of radical Islamists committed to sharia and jihad in Central China continues to intensify, evidenced in the public congratulations by the Turkistan Islamic Party, a jihadi group claiming to protect the rights of China's Uighur Muslims, to al-Shabaab for its recent Islamist terror attack that damaged China's Embassy in Somalia.
Islamic State Institutionalizes Sex Slavery for Non-Muslim Women and Girls

July 31, 2015

Widespread, eyewitness accounts are emerging from the Mideast territories under the control of the Islamic State's ("IS") strict caliphate that IS has been institutionalizing the practice of abduction, detention, and sale of Christian and Yezidi girls and women for sexual enslavement to Muslim men.
Taliban Chief's Death Reveals Bad-Worse Spectrum of Islamists in Afghanistan

July 31, 2015

Security experts on Southwest Asia have expressed surprising concerns that the reported death of Taliban chief Mullah Omar could provoke a fragmentation of the militant Islamist group at a time when Great Power governments have been carefully negotiating with the Taliban to normalize relations with the Afghan government and to serve as a bulwark against the regional spread of more extremist Islamist factions affiliated with the Islamic State ("IS").
Saudis Hit Reset Button with Hamas for Sunni Coalition Against IS and Iran

July 31, 2015

The conservative Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia is moving aggressively toward detente with the militant Palestinian group Hamas, as part of a broader consolidation of Sunni actors that view Shiite Iran and the Sunni-fanatic Islamic State ("IS") as the major threats to order in the Mideast.
Prominent London Mosque on Terrorism Watch List

July 30, 2015

One of London's most prominent mosques, Finsbury Park Mosque, is blacklisted on Thomson Reuters' well-known risk-analysis database for terrorism, which aggregates financial crime data linked to terrorist activities.
Sunni-Shiite Realpolitik Causes a Realignment of Militant Islamist Groups

July 29, 2015

Saudi Arabia and Iran are leading a Sunni-Shiite balance of power struggle for hegemony in the Mideast, also lining up support from militant Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood on the Sunni side and Hezbollah on the Shiite side.
Radical Islamist Threat Is Redefining the Geopolitics of Central Asia

July 29, 2015

The expansion of radical-militant Islamist groups across Central Asia is creating a transnational security threat that has begun to reshape the geopolitics of shared interests among the key actors in both NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization ("SCO").
Egypt Faces Challenge of Using Human Rights for Countering Islamist Terrorism

July 28, 2015

Egypt's government is struggling to find a balance between a human rights-based security strategy and a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy as a means to finding a durable solution to the huge uptick in transnational Islamist terror attacks that have devastated the country over the year.