Since April this year, rebels – made up of Tuareg separatists and radical Islamists with links to Al-Qaeda – have gained hold of northern Mali. Boosted by the surplus of weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s stashes and the sk...
In 2004, the BBC released filmmaker Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Power of Nightmares. In its three episodes, he carefully and convincingly made the case for the threat of international terrorism being greatly exaggerated; I...
Western media and thinkers, as crude as that categorisation seems, tend to oversimplify matters when dealing with “Jihadist” groups such as Al Qaeda. Like any “human institution”, however totalitarian it may seem, balan...
On Saturday 12th another car bomb exploded in the Iraqi city of Samarra killing at least 14. Civilians, and more recently school children, have been deliberately targeted in attacks. The fact that the car bomb exploded in a sh...
Fawaz Gerges, a prominent Middle Eastern scholar, notes that there exists a ‘terrorism narrative’ in the West. Amongst government officials and the wider public, the notion of imminent terrorist attack seems institutionali...
Since 2001, the common Western understanding of radical Islamic terrorism has revolved almost exclusively around the Middle East. The idea of violent jihadism automatically conjures up mental images of Afghanistan, Lebanon, and...
Barack Obama has recently approved guidelines allowing the Pentagon—the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense—to continue fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda and its allied forces in Afghanistan alongside the A...
The eastern coast of Kenya, home to millions of people and the pearl of the country’s once-booming tourist industry, is now slowly draining itself of foreign visitors. Growing unemployment lands fertile ground for drug tr...