Tag Archives: Palestine Liberation Organization

The Islamic State is Taking Advantage of the Mess in Northern Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 July 2022

The United States announced on 12 July that it had killed the Islamic State’s (ISIS) governor of Syria in a drone strike in the village of Galtan in the Jinderes district of the north-western Syrian province of Efrin on the border with Turkey. The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) statement identified the slain man as “Maher al-Agal”, though a more precise transliteration is Maher al-Aqal (ماهر العقال). Riding on the motorcycle alongside Al-Aqal when he was killed was a “senior ISIS official” with whom he was “closely associated”. This ISIS official was “seriously injured during the strike”, CENTCOM notes, adding that the Jinderes strike caused no civilian casualties. Continue reading →

Britain Won the Spy War with the Irish Republican Army

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 July 2022

An IRA parade in Belfast || Image source

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Islamic State Attacks Israel for the First Time in Five Years

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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 →

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

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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 →

Women and Terrorism: The Case of the May 19th Communist Organization

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 January 2021

This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization

The world has been captivated this week by the scenes of an insurrectionary mob overrunning the United States Capitol at the behest of President Donald Trump. It is unlikely that many people remember or even know that nearly forty years ago, this building—the meeting place of the U.S. Congress, the place where laws are made—was bombed by a Communist terrorist group, a group remarkable for its all-female membership. A new book, Tonight We Bombed the Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group, by William Rosenau, a senior policy historian at CNA and a fellow in the International Security program at New America, examines this forgotten episode. Continue reading →

The Russian Relationship with Israel: A History

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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 →

Is Britain Cracking Down on PKK Terrorist Activity?

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Originally published at The Henry Jackson Society

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 December 2017

Pro-PKK demonstrators in Frankfurt, Germany, 18 March 2017, REUTERS / Ralph Orlowski

The BBC reported yesterday that on 7 December the Metropolitan Police Service arrested four people—two 17-year-old boys, a 38-year-old woman, and a 50-year-old woman—were arrested in the Haringey area of north London as part of a probe into terrorist fundraising, through money laundering and fraud. The terrorist group at issue is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and those arrested are believed to have contributed to the PKK’s finances through sale and distribution of one of the PKK’s most important propaganda instruments, the Yeni Ozgur Politika (New Free Politics) newspaper. Time will tell if this is a one-off or the beginning of a serious and long-overdue attempt to curtail the PKK’s propaganda-recruitment activity and fundraising in the West. Continue reading →

Black September: the PLO’s Deniable Terrorism Wing

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 19, 2015

A Black September terrorist appears on the balcony in the Olympic Village in Munich, September 1972 (photo via AP)

The Black September group was formed in September 1971, ostensibly as a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but in reality the PLO retained control of Black September and used it to carry out terrorist operations that raised the Palestinian organisations’ profile, without staining the PLO with these atrocities. Continue reading →