Tag Archives: Huthis

The West Needs a Strategy to Counter Iran’s “Ring of Fire”

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 April 2024

Continue reading

The Strikes in Yemen Avoid the Real Issue: Iran

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 January 2024

Continue reading

Islamic State Khorasan Province is Looking More Dangerous

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 January 2024

Continue reading

Iran Was Behind the Massacre in Israel

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 October 2023

Continue reading

Iran Admits Responsibility for the 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 October 2023

Continue reading

The Death of Al-Qaeda’s Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri: One Year On

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 July 2023

Continue reading

United Nations Report Finds Al-Qaeda and Islamic State Reduced, But Reviving

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 July 2022

Islamic State in Palmyra, December 2016

Continue reading

Spywar and Strategy: The Israel-Iran Contest in the Middle East

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 June 2021

Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, at a memorial in Gaza, 31 January 2017. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib, Flash90.

The May 2021 round of fighting in Gaza brought with it the upending of the unspoken understanding between Israel and Hamas and a level of intercommunal violence within Israel that has not been seen in quite some time. The scale of the rocket attacks on the Jewish state must also be counted among the unusual elements of this latest flare-up, with Iran clearly identifiable as the enabling state behind Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the two primary factions behind these attacks. Continue reading

Gaza is Just One Front in Iran’s Regional War

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 May 2021

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system [left] activates over southern Israel against incoming HAMAS rockets [right], 14 May 2021

Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general of Hizballah, the Lebanese division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), gave an interesting interview to Hizballah’s Al-Nour radio station on 22 May, explaining IRGC/Hizballah’s vision for what it had achieved with the recent war in Gaza. Qassem added to a large body of evidence about Iran’s extensive role in the war, a lot of it supplied directly by the combatant parties themselves. Not only did the clerical regime in Iran supply the material basis for the Islamists’ war against Israel this month; they provided much of the ideological framework, too. Continue reading

Losing in Yemen, Winning in Afghanistan, Islamic State Weighs in on Arab-Israeli Peace

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 August 2020

Al-Naba 248

The Islamic State (IS) produced the 248th edition of Al-Naba, its newsletter, on 20 August. The front page was devoted to recent events in Yemen, which had not gone well for IS—although one could easily miss that fact when reading a story that a focuses almost entirely on enemy casualties and the failures of others. IS is, of course, not pleased about the Israeli normalisation of relations with the United Arab Emirates, but Al-Naba makes clear that it is more perturbed that Muslims should believe Turkey or Qatar are any better than the U.A.E., despite their different approach to Islamists. Al-Naba 248 documents IS’s continuing advances in Afghanistan—and, indeed, Iraq, Syria, Africa (the Sahel), and Egypt. There is also a report of insurgent activity in the Philippines. Continue reading