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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
Recent weeks have borne witness to many stories and analyses about the problem of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ and what to do about them. Those who are holding these terrorists are asking host nations to repatriate them and prosecute them at home. The responses to these requests vary from ‘hell no, we don’t want them back’ to […]
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War as a catalyst for terrorism
Historical revisionism is inevitable I suppose. There are those who look back at events, both recent and less so, re-interpret them through a new paradigm, lens or self-interested agenda, re-package them, and present them to us in a way that goes against the previous collected wisdom. Sometimes this re-interpretation is necessary in the light of […]
A couple of years ago I went out to my car, which I had left on the street in front of my house and found a ticket on the windshield. For the record, overnight parking is allowed on my street, which is located in a subdivision of Ottawa. I could not understand why I had […]
A Canadian judge’s job cannot be easy. You are expected to listen to a whole bunch of information, often contradictory in nature, from diametrically opposed sides (Crown and defence), and determine which side has made the better argument, all while keeping your knowledge and understanding of Canadian law in mind. Then you have to make […]
Of all the cases of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ that has cropped up of late, and there have been many, many such instances, the story of a British ‘schoolgirl’ is one of the most interesting. Shamima Begum left the UK in 2015 as part of the ‘Bethnal Green’ trio of females who joined Islamic State (IS). […]
In case you didn’t notice – or don’t care – today marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. It was this day in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini-led revolt against the Shah of Iran consolidated victory in what became known as the Dah-e-fajr (the ‘ten days of dawn’ in Farsi, the period between Khomeini’s […]