The Battle of Mosul was an attempt by the Iraqi Army and its allies to wrest control of the city from ISIS terrorists: ISIS massacred hundreds in response. Iraq has been a suffering nation for many, many years. When I began by career in intelligence in the early 1980s it was under the iron fist […]
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Today in terrorism: 11 October 1993
On this day in 1993, a publisher linked to “The Satanic Verses”, a novel by Salman Rushdie, was shot in Oslo, Norway.
Iran gets a lot of bad press (somewhat deservedly!) for its international meddling and ‘theocracy’. But is it really as dangerous as another ‘theocratic’ state when it comes to terrorism?
What do you remember of the dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile? Even if you are not well versed in Latin American history you are bound to know that his reign, from 1973 to 1990, was not good. Thousands of opponents, dismissed as ‘Communists’ or ‘leftists’, were killed, tens of thousands were probably tortured and close […]
(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 […]
If you go far enough back in recent-ish history one of the terrorist groups that used to get a fair bit of attention was an outfit named Black September. Named after the month in 1970 during which the Jordanian armed forces clashed with fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO – remember them?), which led […]
When I used to work in counter terrorism at CSIS many analysts used to say that of all the terrorists and terrorist groups in the world, and there were far too many to monitor at any given time, the real ‘A-team’ was Hizballah. The Lebanon-based group which was created in the aftermath of the Israeli […]
On this day in 2006, four gunmen attacked the US Embassy in Damascus, storming the compound with grenades and automatic weapons before being repelled by Syrian security forces.
This piece is a bit of a cheat. Rather than an entirely new thought it is a cut and paste from the introduction to my fourth book An End to the War on Terrorism, published in 2018. Given that today marks the 18th anniversary of the single greatest terrorist attack in our planet’s history I […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on August 12, 2019. I never worked in foreign affairs or for Foreign Affairs (or Global Affairs Canada as it is now known, having once been designated External Affairs and many other names) but I know a little about about the subject. After all, you cannot work in […]