Search: “tourist”

There have been a lot of very good analytic pieces on Islamic State of late, especially in the wake of US President Trump’s Tweet “we have won against ISIS; we’ve beaten them, and we’ve beaten them badly”.  Here are links to  a few: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/17/its-not-just-isis-many-terrorist-groups-have-been-declared-dead-only-rise-again/?utm_term=.dab4f12cf0b8 https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/tracking-jihadist-movements-2019-islamic-state https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/islamic-state-terrorism-extremism-eyes-southeast-asia-11199586 https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/1577356/pentagon-isis-syria-could-regroup-6-months https://www.thedailybeast.com/isis-smuggler-sleeper-cells-and-undead-suicide-bombers-have-infiltrated-europe?ref=home The US office of the Director of […]

I have spent the last week at a conference in a Central Asian country discussing terrorism and what to do about it. I have listened to a lot of presentations by those who know the region well and who have tried to put terrorism into local context. Some of the contributions were descriptive while others […]

All the jokes about civil servants aside, governments around the world do have some useful functions. Governments have the bodies and funds to look into important matters and provide advice to their citizenry on a whole host of things. Whether we are talking about food safety (the recent romaine lettuce scare in North America is […]

Every end of year we are inundated with two phenomena in our newspapers, TV broadcasts and Web sites. These two are: the year that was and the year that will be. The former recaps the important events of the 12 months drawing to an end and always includes, and I am not sure why, a […]

Spain has been the target of two significant jihadi attacks in the post 9/11 period. In what has become known as 4-11, four bombs went off on the Madrid transit system in 2004, killing 191 and injuring more than 1,800. Al Qaeda (AQ) was responsible for that act, despite initial the Spanish government’s initial awkward […]

Tunisia presents an interesting case study when it comes to terrorism.  The North African country was, of course, where the ‘Arab Spring’ began on December 18, 2010 (coincidentally my birthday!) when a crowd protested the self immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi who killed himself the day before when police had confiscated his wares and a female […]

As I -and many others – have mentioned before, Indonesia is by far the largest Muslim nation on Earth.  This often comes to a surprise to many as the southeast Asian country is not located within the ‘normal’ region we associate with Islam (i.e. the Middle East) and is surrounded by nations that are most […]

If there is one country that is garnering the headlines for all the good reasons these days (as opposed to Trump’s US for all the – well you know what I mean) it is Saudi Arabia.  The cradle of Islam has best been known for confirming the maxim “there is no FUN in FUNdamentalism” as […]