Terror organization: Hezbollah
Status: Operative
Role: A plane of the company “Alas Chiricanas” had taken off from France Field Airport, in the province of Colón, and was heading to Panama’s international airport. Barely ten minutes after takeoff it exploded in the air and caused death of 21 people. The date was July 19th, 1994, just a day after the attack on the AMIA building in Buenos Aires.
Four indicators show trends of engagement, but the region remains immune to sweeping generalizations.
In the collective memories of people across the Middle East and North Africa, great power rivalries have shaped the region’s fate at multiple critical junctures. In the first part of the twentieth century, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, colonial competition between Britain and France created the modern borders and nation-states of the Middle East. Toward the end of the century and after five Arab-Israeli wars, crucial peace treaties and multilateral negotiations were mediated by great powers, particularly the United States.
On Aug. 26, following a retaliatory strike by Hezbollah against Israel for the killing of senior commander Fuad Shukr at the end of July, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expressed “deep concern over the dangerous increase in tensions in the Lebanese-Israeli border area” and urged all involved parties to exercise “maximum restraint.” Zakharova viewed this escalation as an extension of Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and called for a “speedy cease-fire” in the Gaza Strip that would serve as a gateway to stabilizing the Middle East.
Introduction
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 put an end to European security as a cooperative project. That project was grounded in the so-called Helsinki Decalogue, a declaration within the 1975 Helsinki Final Act that laid out agreed principles of conduct between the West and the Soviet bloc.1 In the years and decades that followed, European security grew in complexity and scope, especially after the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Arms control agreements, institutional arrangements between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia, and the agencies of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) gave an ever denser structure to the security order. That order has collapsed. European security needs now to be reimagined and rebuilt during what promises to be a prolonged period of Russian hostility and obstructionism.
The United States will continue to provide assistance, advice and training to Iraqi forces, Iraqi and US officials say.
United States-led forces have ended their combat mission in Iraq, senior US and Iraqi officials said, as the coalition transitions to an advisory role assisting Iraqi forces.
Amid the ongoing delay in Iran’s response to the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, senior Iranian military officials have stepped up their statements concerning Iran’s commitment to retaliate against Israel at the appropriate time, albeit with different characteristics than the Iranian attack on Israel in April 2024.
Documents obtained by BIRN show that EU Frontex officers deployed to Bulgaria’s border with Turkey are being intimidated into silence in the face of pushbacks and brutality against migrants and refugees, prompting warnings that the agency’s credibility is on the line.
The terrorist threat from jihadi groups was progressively degraded by counterterrorism measures after 9/11. The military defeat of the Islamic State ushered in a period from about 2017 of unusually low threat in non-conflict zones around the world, followed by some disinvestment from CT by Western governments. However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza war have seen a collapse of international unity of purpose on CT. Meanwhile, the underlying factors driving violent jihadi extremism are growing more acute, and the success of the Islamic State and al-Qa`ida in conflict zones is generating safe havens for them to revive their external operations capabilities. The global jihadi threat has already risen and is likely to increase further. Attacks should be expected in the West, and it would be a mistake for governments to disinvest further from CT.
The ever growing threat of jihadist movements to the civilized world has recently been stressed by a wide array of media outlets and politicians in Europe. As noted in a recent UN report, more than 25,000 foreigners from a total of 100 countries have joined militant Islamist terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIL). In Syria and Iraq, there’s more than 22,000 foreign fighters, while some 6,500 are operating in Afghanistan. The total number of foreign radicals in Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia remains unknown.