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Today in Terrorism: December 01, 2018 – Jihadi attack in Mozambique

Recent attacks by a jihadi group in Mozambique demonstrate that this brand of terrorism is not going away: quite the opposite.

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Today in Terrorism: November 16, 2008

On this day in 2008, the TPLF was blamed by the Eritrean government for a roadside bomb that killed eight civilians heading to an engagement party.

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How do we determine when a terrorist act has taken place?

We are thankfully not inundated with terrorism in Canada. It would be nice, however, to call it what it is when it occurs.

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Today in Terrorism: 1 November 2016 ISIS affiliate attack in Democratic Republic of Congo

There appears to be an ISIS affiliate in the DRC that is carrying out terrorist acts The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a huge central African country that is both blessed and cursed. It has abundant natural resources, including deposits of cobalt, copper, diamond, tantalum, tin, gold and coltan, the latter of which is […]

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Why sending military forces abroad is a two-edged sword

(NB how’s that for an analogy?) When I was a kid I did not have a good impression of the military (Canadian in my case of course). My friends and I would laugh at those who joined the cadets or reserves, seeing them as ‘losers’. My childhood was first filled with images of US army […]

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State terrorism is making a comeback – of sorts

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on August 26, 2019. These days when we read or think about terrorism we tend to go in two directions. Either we think about terrorist groups: Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, etc. Or we talk about ‘lone wolves’ even if that term is […]

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Can we please not overuse the term ‘terrorism’?

There is no question that there is a lot of terrorism about. Even a cursory glance at the news on a daily basis will uncover stories like an attack on a school by the Taliban in Afghanistan, an Al Shabaab strike on a Mogadishu hotel, yet another Boko Haram use of young girls as suicide […]

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Is it that important to lay terrorism charges for acts of terrorism?

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 17, 2019. It might strike the reader as odd that someone with so much invested in counter terrorism is here making the suggestion that we need to worry less about terrorism. After all, if we stopped spending so much time talking about it, wouldn’t that put […]

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And the terrorism merry-go-round continues…..sigh

As we still try to process the horrific attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an Australian white supremacist we are also immersed into a debate, less fruitful than many think in my opinion, over whether far right extremism presents more of a menace than Islamist extremism. I and many others have taken […]

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US counter terrorism airstrikes may lead to more terrorism

Before I write one word more I need to emphasise that I am far from a military ‘expert’. I did once work for the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) but to be perfectly honest it was a cover for working for CSE – Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s signals intelligence agency. So my military knowledge […]