At the risk of adding yet one more blog post to the burning question of whether or not Canada – and by extension other countries – has a ‘moral obligation‘ to repatriate its citizens who deliberately, consciously and with full agency left to join terrorist groups such as Islamic State (IS) in Syria and/or Iraq, […]
Remember a terrorist named Anders Breivik? He was the Norwegian self-styled Knight Templar who set off an explosion outside government buildings in Oslo in July 2011 and then proceeded to an island where the Workers’ Youth League was holding a summer camp and opened fire. 77 people in all were killed (8 in the bomb […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on February 18, 2019. One duty that a government or state has to treat seriously is the protection of its citizenry. Police forces, militaries, security intelligence services and other bodies are created, resourced and run by various levels of government (federal, provincial, municipal in Canada) with the goal […]
When you work in counter terrorism you do your utmost to ensure that things do not go boom! or that people who hew to violent ideologies do not succeed in killing others. You play your part – intelligence gatherers, investigators, evidence amassers, prosecutors, etc. – in the hopes that your work will contribute to a […]
A scant 48 hours ago I posted a blog in which I shared my dismay at the tone of some of the exchanges online and reactions to my posts on various aspects of terrorism. I admitted that the ad hominem attacks and nastiness had started to get to me and made me seriously ask myself […]
I’d like you to do me a favour. The next time you read a story like that of Shamima Begum, the UK Islamic State (IS) supporter who desperately wants to come home, although she does not regret her decision to join the terrorist group and thinks the Manchester bombing was justified, or see a report […]
I am fairly certain that a lot of what I have elected to write about today will come as a shock to no one, but here it is anyway. There is a lot of nastiness online. Yes, yes, I realise that this is not an earth-shattering revelation but I feel a need to weigh in […]
In all the years I have been writing about terrorism I have taken great care to stay in my lane (probably not always successfully but I have tried). I provide a perspective based solely on my work as a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst, not as an academic, a policy maker or any other self-styled ‘expert’. I […]
This piece appeared on ICCT International Center for Counter-Terrorism on 21 Feb 2019 Over the past few weeks, there have been multiple news items centring on the problem of what to do with terrorist fighters that have been captured by a variety of actors in Syria and Iraq in the battle to destroy Islamic State […]
In light of the announcement by the UK government that it is considering revoking the citizenship of clearly unrepentant jihadi Shamima Begum, claiming that she is “eligible for that of another country” (Bangladeshi apparently although she has never been there), I thought I would reproduce what I wrote about citizenship revocation in my second book […]