On Monday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that a new Afghan interim government will be announced in the next few days, after confirming that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has taken over Panjshir, the only province that had remained out of Taliban’s control.
Bulgaria has announced that it is sending hundreds of soldiers to its southern frontiers to stop migrants from crossing from Turkey and Greece. Bulgaria’s defence ministry says pressure on its borders is increasing.
Bulgaria announced on Thursday (August 26) that it would send between 400 to 700 soldiers to its borders with Greece and Turkey, to support around 1,000 border police officers already stationed there.
The US and the EU should not buy Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fake pro-Western posture (such as when he offered to run the Kabul airport, then fled) or his fake anti-radicalism (such as when he is courting the Afghan terrorists). Erdogan’s strategy, as a member of NATO, is clearly to bolster Russia’s and China’s plans for the future of Afghanistan.
Iran, for its part, seems to be hoping to hit two birds with one stone: by systematically facilitating the journey of illegal Afghans to Turkey and toward Greece, it might destabilize both Turkey and Europe.
The Islamic State (IS) will remain a threat in 2018, experts say. Thousands of foreign fighters are now coming back to their home countries following the collapse of the so-called “caliphate”. From the around 900 people from the Western Balkans who have travelled to Syria and Iraq between 2011 and 2016, 250 have already returned.
Despite the different reasons for doing so, returnees raise security concerns, to which local governments should respond. The key challenge for security actors is how to assess the threat posed by former IS combatants and their families. Although returnees have not contributed to the threat of terrorism locally, they create some degree of risk, not only to the Western Balkans but also to Europe as many returnees have dual citizenship or links to their diaspora
communities across the continent.
Introduction
In June 2021, southern Syria once again dominated the headlines when the regime laid siege to the Daraa al-Balad area of Daraa city. A few days after the monthlong siege, an agreement to end the escalation collapsed and the Syrian army’s Fourth Division spearheaded a major military push in the area. Intense clashes broke out as groups of unreconciled rebels violently repelled the advancement of Syrian military forces. Armed confrontations spread into eastern and western Daraa amid heavy bombardment via missiles, artillery, and mortar shells, marking the deadliest and most intense fighting in Syria’s south-west since the conclusion of the 2018 “reconciliation” agreements.
Local and external actors expected Russia to intervene and mitigate hostilities. Such expectations were based on a record of rapid interventions, whereby Moscow had managed to resolve localized conflicts and prevented the eruption of large-scale armed clashes in Daraa over the past three years. In the case of Daraa al-Balad, however, Russia was slow to intervene and showed an extraordinary reluctance to end armed violence, broker serious negotiations, and enforce a final agreement. Despite the catastrophic humanitarian implications it has on the exhausted local population, this delay seems to be warranted.
The central media apparatus of the Islamic State group is mis-reporting on the activities of its cells in central Syria. Rather than exaggerating their capabilities, something that it is conventionally assumed to be doing all the time,1 its Central Media Diwan appears either to be deliberately under-playing them, or, less likely, to be unaware of their full extent, possibly due to communication issues. Indeed, there is a significant disconnect between what the Islamic State is saying its cells in central Syria are doing versus what its adversaries are saying they are doing. This is starkly evident in the fact that the vast majority of attacks that pro-regime sources attributed to the Islamic State in the Badia, Syria’s expansive central desert region, in 2020 went entirely unclaimed by the group, according to data collected and cross-analyzed by the authors. Based on the dynamics that characterize this data, which is supported by fieldwork inside Syria, it appears that this under-reporting on the part of the Islamic State, which has continued unabated into 2021, is at least partially intentional. This suggests that its covert network in Syria may be attempting to surreptitiously establish a strategic hub in this remote central region, something that could act as a rear base for a resurgence in the rest of the country and Iraq in years to come.
Before disclosing his real identity and announcing he was breaking ties with al-Qaeda in July 2016, “the conqueror” amir of Jabhat al-Nusra (JN), Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, always made sure to speak with confidence when asked about his relationship with al-Qaeda. He also wore a traditional, modest Shami outfit, projecting a sense of local affiliation and asceticism. Things have changed since then, however. The al-Qaeda affiliation became a burden, “the conqueror” changed his title to simply “leader,” and he began wearing a formal Western-style suit. On June 1, PBS Frontline released a documentary entitled “The Jihadist,” which includes an interview by American journalist Martin Smith with al-Jolani, now the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who “opened his heart” about the past, present, and future of his group.1
By ceding control of its borders and airspace to various foreign actors, the regime has essentially resigned itself to a limited but potentially durable existence for the long term.
In an official sense, at least, the situation on Syria’s borders has hardly changed at all over the past couple years. The Western agenda still excluded any international solution comparable to what the Dayton Accords established in the former Yugoslavia. Russia and its partners in the “Astana process,” Iran and Turkey, oppose any formal efforts to partition the country or cement the existence of a separate Kurdish entity in the north. Moreover, the problems that followed the partition of Sudan have given Western policymakers serious doubts about the viability of such a solution for Syria. Yet none of these abortive international possibilities has prevented external powers from informally dividing the country into multiple zones of influence and unilaterally controlling most of its borders, thus depriving the Assad regime of a major instrument of sovereignty.
The first and best-known of the facade groups that Iran-backed militias use to conceal their involvement in operations, Ashab al-Kahf has a particularly strong connection to Asaib Ahl al-Haq.
Name: Ashab al-Kahf (AK) (Companions of the Cave).
Type of movement: Facade group. Kinetic military operations. Domestic counter-U.S. operations.
Ironically, the Syrian jihadist group now acts much like a typical Middle Eastern regime, from the way it mobilizes local support to the abuses it commits against those who oppose its rule.
This week, the Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) passed a notable milestone: it has now been active for longer than its predecessor, the al-Qaeda branch Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). Although HTS remains an extremist organization, it attempts to derive legitimacy from different constituencies these days. As JN, the group based its legitimacy on where it stood within the global jihadist movement, but as HTS, it seeks to build its reputation within the local milieu of Syria’s Idlib province. The latter form of legitimacy is more difficult to burnish, however, since it depends on how the group attempts to govern millions of residents with differing aspirations and worldviews. Ironically, HTS now acts much like the Arab regimes it claims to oppose throughout the Middle East—from the way it mobilizes local support, to the abuses it commits against activists opposed to its rule.