By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 July 2023
The Death of Al-Qaeda’s Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: One Year On
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Tag Archives: Bosnia
Islamic State Attacks Israel for the First Time in Five Years
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 March 2022
Israeli security forces reacting to the terrorist attack in Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv, 29 March 2022 || Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has said his country is “facing a new wave of terrorism” after five attacks in the last ten days have killed eleven people. The Islamic State (IS) has effectively admitted to carrying out two of the atrocities, the first time in five years the terrorist group has carried out attacks in the Jewish state. This hiatus, partly a reflection of the fact that, unlike some other Islamist extremists, IS does not make the anti-Israel cause a central plank of its propaganda, also reflects the relatively small inroads IS’s ideology has made to this point among Palestinian and Israeli Arabs. Whether this is now changing is unclear. Continue reading
Qassem Sulaymani: Life and Ambition
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 March 2021
A year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump gave the order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the de facto deputy leader of Iran. Arash Azizi’s The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions is an effort to explain who Soleimani was, how he rose to controlling the lives of millions of people well outside the borders of Iran, and how in the end he was brought down. Continue reading
Bosnian General Convicted for Jihadist Crimes
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 January 2021
Sakib Mahmuljin [image source]
The Jihad Factor in Bosnia
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 January 2021
Last week, as one of his last acts in office, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech about Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. It was unfortunate that Pompeo did this at this time and in this way, with such blatant political intent, because the factual content of Pompeo’s speech was unassailable: the Islamic Republic’s long relationship with Al-Qaeda does stretch back about three decades, the killing of Al-Qaeda’s deputy Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Muhammad al-Masri) in Tehran in August 2020 is demonstrative of a shift in the strategic positioning of the organisation away from Pakistan to Iran, and even the part of Pompeo’s speech that got the most pushback—about Tehran’s contact with the 9/11 killers—is not controversial and is not new.
Unmentioned in Pompeo’s speech was one of the crucibles that forged this relationship, and forged Al-Qaeda into something more than a regional menace, namely the Bosnian war of 1992-5. Continue reading
Tunisia and Jihadism
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 May 2020
Early in his new book, Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad, The Washington Institute’s Aaron Zelin quotes a pair of sociologists who note that ‘where theories are plentiful … ideas are vacuous’. The book is in many ways the antithesis of this approach. It is not without theoretical content; where social movement theory arises as a means of understanding jihadism, say, the author gives an overview of the literature to contextualise it for the reader. But the general approach is historical, empirical, and detail-rich, so that by the time Zelin summarises his findings in the various sections there can be no doubt about the evidentiary basis. Continue reading
Iran Admits Collaborating with Al-Qaeda in Bosnia
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 February 2020
The Mujahideen Battalion (El-Mudžahid) in Bosnia in the early 1990s [image source]
The Memoir of a British Spy in Al-Qaeda
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 July 2019
This article was originally published at the European Eye on Radicalization
The main issue that Nine Lives has to overcome is the one that has attended Aimen Dean (a pseudonym) since he went public in March 2015 with an interview he gave to the BBC, claiming he had been a British spy within Al-Qaeda between 1998 and 2006. That issue is overcoming the doubts about his story. Nine Lives goes a long way to solving this by bringing in Paul Cruickshank, the editor-in-chief of CTC Sentinel, one of the premier academic resources in the terrorism field, and Tim Lister, a terrorism-focused journalist with CNN, as co-authors. As well as helping structure the book from Dean’s memories, the two co-authors note they had been able to “corroborate key details” that convinced them: “In the years immediately leading up to and following 9/11, Aimen Dean was by far the most important spy the West had inside al-Qaeda”.
Continue readingIHH, Al-Qaeda, and Turkey
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 January 2019
Mavi Marmara arrives at Sarayburnu port as people wave Turkish and Palestinian flags, 26 December 2010 [source]
The Russian Relationship with Israel: A History
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 December 2018
© AP Photo / Jim Hollander, Pool
Essay: “Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The Russian Relationship with Israel from the Soviets to Putin Continue reading
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