Tensions continue to rise along the Lebanese border, centered around the town of Ghajar, a disputed area that straddles Lebanon and Syrian territory captured and occupied by Israel in 1967.
What seems to be unfolding as a controlled escalation, deterring all sides from a more intense conflagration, could give way to all-out conflict, a situation most of the belligerents would like to avoid.
Iran is equipping its regional allies with sophisticated armed unmanned aerial systems (UAS) – drones – to help them project power on Tehran’s behalf against shared adversaries.
In June and July, Lebanese Hezbollah used Iran-supplied aerial surveillance drones to signal its opposition to Israel’s development of offshore natural gas fields in disputed waters.
Twenty years after the Iraq War began, scholarship on its causes can be usefully divided into the security school and the hegemony school. Security school scholars argue that the main reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq was to safeguard the United States against the conjoined threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argue instead that the purpose of the Iraq War was to preserve and extend U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. Debates between these camps inform broader disputes about the lessons of the Iraq War for the future of U.S. foreign policy and the analysis of other key questions about the war’s origins. Nonetheless, this binary may not be productive for Iraq War scholarship, and more attention to global and cultural factors would be a useful way to advance this field.
ISIS orchestrates ‘prison breaks’ in order to provide manpower for the group’s resurgence. In the last decade, mass escapes have taken place under the watch of Americans, Kurds, and some Iraqis, whose dedication to containing and punishing the thousands of incarcerated terrorists in their custody must seriously be questioned.
Foreign intelligence agencies, including Israeli and US intel and their regional partners, have been instrumental in fueling recent anti-government protests in Suwayda, just as they did in 2011.
On 17 August, anti-government protests erupted in Suwayda, a province in southern Syria with a Druze-majority population. These demonstrations were triggered by the Syrian government’s decision to lift fuel subsidies, which came amidst a severe economic crisis exacerbated by US economic sanctions.
The ambition of Turkish Aircraft Industries today is to build the first indigenous Turkish fighter jet, which could also be the world’s first Muslim fighter aircraft, and it has invited friendly nations Azerbaijan and Pakistan join the effort. Meanwhile Turkey is trying hard to support its assertive regional policy with military might.
There is a problem: With a fleet consisting mostly of ageing F-16s and a per capita income of barely $9,000 Turkey cannot play the role of a major power.
Abstract: Since the emergence of the global jihad movement, global jihadis have expressed their enmity to “Zionists”—jihadi code for Israel and the Jewish community worldwide—through ideological declarations and operations on the ground. Examining the correlation between global jihadi rhetoric and operational activities against Israel and the Jewish community, the present study explores the degree to which the “Zionist cause” is important for global jihadis. In the process, it contributes to understanding why, how, and when extremist language is translated into violence.The study finds that the Palestinian issue and specific “trigger events” related to the Arab-Israeli conflict tend to generate favorable declarations on the part of both al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State, but that jihadi rhetoric is rarely translated into violent attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets. Of the two main jihadi organizations, the Islamic State has the better track recordof striking Jewish and Israeli targets, although the Islamic State’s “anti-Zionist” campaign can hardly be deemed a success. The relative dearth of successful operations, however, has not deterred global jihadi organizations from regularly leveraging the Palestinian issue for political gain, and in order to reinforce their stature as powerful actors in the Middle Eastern and global arenas. Despite jihadi lip service to the Palestinian cause, support for global jihad among Arab Israelis and Palestinians has remained relatively low. Physical and ideological barriers erected by Israel and the Jewish community have so far limited the capacity of global jihadi actors to operate against Israel and the Jewish community.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which controls Idlib, is taking advantage of the difficult living conditions of the people to attract more people into its ranks by offering high salaries.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is still the largest and most dominant faction in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, amid its continuous attempts to control other areas to expand its influence, despite the existence of other factions supported by Turkey.
The Afrin Liberation Forces, which has escalated attacks against the Turkish-backed opposition in the Aleppo countryside, is being secretive about the sources of its support, weapons and training.
The Afrin Liberation Forces, a group of Kurdish fighters from Afrin also known as Hezen Rizgariya Efrine (HRE), recently stepped up their attacks against the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Turkish army in the countryside of Aleppo. The attacks suggest HRE is a well-trained and organized group.