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 […]
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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 […]
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). […]
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Podcast 3#: W(h)ither Islamic State?
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 […]
Is it just me or is this issue never going to go away? I am referring of course to what to do with those Canadians – and by extension Westerners and others – who made the conscious, deliberate, enthusiastic, but stupid, decision to leave our (their) country to join terrorist groups like Islamic State (IS) […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 28, 2019. If there is one thing in the world of terrorism that touches Canada the most, at least in the minds of average Canadians, it is the issue of those among us who elected to leave to join violent extremist groups abroad. Some of these […]
(with apologies to Erich Segal) Some of you may have heard of a horrific accident last April in rural Saskatchewan when a bus carrying members of the Junior A Humboldt Broncos hockey team collided with a tractor-trailer whose driver had run a stop sign. 16 young men and their coach died and others were injured, […]