Jihadi ‘Counterterrorism:’ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Versus the Islamic State

Abstract: Once allies in the same organization, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Islamic State have an interesting history that turned them into ‘frenemies’ from April 2013 to February 2014 and then outright enemies over the past nine years. This led to a broader global fight between al-Qaida and the Islamic State. Yet, HTS continued to tread its own path by breaking from al-Qaida in 2016. From the spring of 2014 to the summer of 2017, the main avenue by which HTS and its predecessor group, Jabhat al-Nusra, dealt with the Islamic State was insurgent infighting. Yet since the summer of 2017, as HTS consolidated control over areas in northwest Syria and developed a governance apparatus, HTS has favored a lawfare approach to dealing with Islamic State cells in the territory it controls. Surveying the data on its arrest campaign against the Islamic State over the past half decade suggests HTS has been successful in countering the Islamic State. Yet, even if its fight against the Islamic State is deemed a net positive, HTS’ continued support for terrorism abroad and the authoritarian nature of its governance make it difficult for the West to countenance removing the group from the list of designated terrorist groups or engage with it.

US, SDF capture, kill ISIS leaders in Syria helicopter raids

An ISIS leader was killed and another captured during joint helicopter raids in Syria, following deadly attacks on truffle hunters in the desert.

Helicopter-borne US troops working with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Saturday (February 18) captured an “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) provincial official in Syria, the US military said.

Libya has a mercenaries problem. It’s time for the international community to step up.

A couple of weeks after a state institution in Tripoli was stormed by gunmen and a suicide bomber in 2018, I was sitting in a Tunis café with a friend who had been working in the building on the day of the terrorist attack. Aymenn believed that the suicide bomber was wandering the premises in the run-up to the tragedy and had walked by his desk. He described a beatific smile on the man’s face. “He was drugged up in some way,” Aymenn said. “And this is the thing that kept running through my head: He definitely wasn’t Libyan.”

A moment of opportunity: Can the UN’s new special representative for Libya break the country’s cycle of devolution?

While a precarious ceasefire has uneasily prevailed in Libya since the end of its third bout of civil war in 2020, the country is increasingly showing signs of an eventual relapse into conflict today. This may be why many policymakers were quick to hail as a breakthrough the appointment of Senegalese diplomat Abdoulaye Bathily as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for Libya and head of the United Nations (UN) Support Mission to Libya in September. After two months into the job, SRSG Bathily may be quickly realizing that Libya’s war never abated, and that it is now simply fought by other means in the halls of the UN and corridors of foreign capitals.

To counter the Wagner Group’s presence in Africa, the US will need to prioritize stabilizing Libya

The war in Ukraine has brought Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group to the forefront, with the United States now focusing on countering their presence beyond Ukraine, particularly in Africa.

One theatre Washington is now prioritizing as part of this burgeoning effort is Libya, where Russia’s influence is mainly projected through Wagner mercenaries. There, Wagner has acted as the Kremlin’s surreptitious foreign policy tool for over three years, significantly expanding its footprint in the country after supporting General Khalifa Haftar in his failed attack to capture Tripoli and oust Libya’s United Nations-recognized government in 2019. Quelling Wagner’s influence in Libya will be challenging, as the US must address Libyan realities and unite Europe and regional powers to support its foreign policy endeavor.

Macron vows era of French interference in Africa is over

The era of French interference in African affairs is “well over”, President Emmanuel Macron said in Gabon on Thursday during his four-nation tour of central Africa.

Speaking on the fringes of an environment summit in the Gabonese capital Libreville, Macron said France harboured no desire to return to past policies of interfering in Africa.

Morocco to Become a Huge U.S. Military Base to Counter Russia in Africa. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

There may be questions about whether Russia is winning the war in Ukraine, but there is no doubt it is winning the global war against the West. And it’s starting in Africa

Pundits have for months claimed that Ukraine has made great advances on the battlefield and taken back considerable swathes of territory that Russia held. While this claim is losing its validity in recent weeks there, most western analysts indulge themselves with their own blinded dogma and refuse to look at the bigger Ukraine war: commonly known as the ‘global south’ but in reality is actually just the ‘rest of the world’ beyond the boundaries of so-called western countries.