Police nab 16 Daesh/ISIS, al Qaeda terror suspects in Istanbul

Turkish anti-terror police raid 8 districts across the city to arrest suspects identified as ‘foreign terrorist fighters,’ say security sources

Turkish security forces arrested 16 foreign nationals for their alleged links to the Daesh/ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorist organizations, security sources said on Thursday.

The Death of Secret Intelligence? Think Again

While the Ukraine war has seen an explosion in the collection and distribution of open source intelligence, the work of secret intelligence agencies remains as important as ever.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the world of secret intelligence is no more. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been a stream of opinion pieces arguing that traditional state-based agencies are struggling to keep up in the face of open source intelligence (OSINT). The volume and speed at which we can access publicly available information is a revolution that large secret intelligence agencies are struggling to cope with, or so we’re told. Whether it’s commercially sourced satellite imagery or social media posts, the US and UK intelligence communities are operating in an increasingly complex environment – that much is true.

Indian Preeminence In South Asia – OpEd

It is generally recognized that any discussion on South Asia without reference to India would be putting the cart before the horse.

In the article Why France and India Are Natural Partners, Antonia Collabasanu (July 20 2034-Geopolitical Futures) has emphasized the importance of Franco-Indian collaboration as a preeminent feature of Indian politico-economic interest, despite India’s isolationist policy that it has been following since the adoption of non-alignment as the country’s foreign policy anchor ever since independence from British domination in 1948. Antonio Collabasanu writes in her article that France is a natural strategic ally to India. India’s relative isolation from the rest of the world – with no imposed borders, a large and dense population, and a central government having no choice but to deal with a broad subcontinent – has resulted in a country formed of shifting systems that continuously challenge central authority. This divided landscape has historically made it easier for foreign powers, most notably the British, to conquer it. India’s birth as a modern state in the early 1950s was New Delhi’s first lesson in how shifting economics may alter political realities. Traditionally, Indian security threats have come either from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or from the sea.

Can The Palestinian Authority Survive? – OpEd

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is in a parlous state. Its standing with the Palestinian population has sunk to new low levels, while it has lost authority to more extremist groups in large parts of the West Bank. Voices from within Israel’s defense and security establishment have been warning for months that if the PA were to collapse, the resulting power vacuum in the West Bank would almost certainly be filled by extremist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) that would present Israel with much greater problems than it faces at the moment.

Ukraine And The World Order – OpEd

As the Cold War began to wane, multipolarism became a rallying cry for everyone sick and tired of superpower politics, nuclear standoffs, and the banal bipolarism of Soviet misinformation and American propaganda.

This “rise of the rest” was prefigured in the Non-Aligned Movement that began in 1961, the New International Economic Order that the United Nations launched in the 1970s, the consolidation of an economically powerful East Asia and a single European market in the 1980s, and the south-south cooperation that emerged in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, after a couple of papers by Morgan Stanley, of all places, the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was christened and then institutionalized.