Pour couper les revenus annuels d’al Shabaab, estimés à 100 millions de dollars et générés par les extorsions, il faudra rétablir l’intégrité des agences financières, judiciaires et de renseignement compromises de la Somalie.
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy is a prominent nuclear scientist, well-known author, columnist, and human rights activist. In his latest volume, he presents robust and provocative arguments in what can only be described as a daring, and must-read book. He sets the stage in his introduction by asking striking questions: was the partition of India worth the price in Muslim blood? What is the ideology of Pakistan, and why does it matter? Why couldn’t Pakistan become an Islamic state? Why is Pakistan a praetorian state? Just what are Pakistanis, and how do they self-identify?
“Our allies in the Gulf no longer honor the deal that was made decades ago even though we still have a big physical military presence in the Gulf, bigger than ever before, and we keep giving Gulf nations a pass on human rights violations. Too often our Middle East allies act in conflict with our security interests.”
Since January several flows of emigrants expelled by Algerian authorities have been constantly arriving in the town of Assamaka.
Niger Interior Minister Hamadou Amadou Souley fears the emergence of a humanitarian crisis in Assamaka, a town where 7,172 sub-Saharan migrants expelled by Algeria are stranded.
Did Lebanon’s US-backed army commander exploit the Syrian refugee crisis and incite clashes with them to catapult himself into the highly-contested Lebanese presidency? The US silence on Joseph Aoun’s illegal deportations last week is deafening.
When the Ukraine war interrupted Beijing’s land route to Europe, Azerbaijan and its neighborhood became a vital alternative pathway, but adversaries may seek to disrupt that.
Introduction
This concept note was commissioned by the Global Community Engagement and Resilience
Fund (GCERF) to contribute to a better understanding of current efforts to prevent and counter
violent extremism (P/CVE) in the Western Balkans, and more specifically to provide an
overview of the most immediate needs in rehabilitation and reintegration (R&R) of ex-ISIL
fighters and their family members in the region. Such a mapping exercise was assumed to
produce useful recommendations for policy planning and budgeting of P/CVE and R&R
activities in the Western Balkans. In order to fulfill this goal, the scope of this paper was
widened to include supplemental data and analysis that should provide more factual background
and context-specific insight. Though a slight diversion from the original extent and format of
the paper, this change allows for the presentation of more nuanced complexities and,
consequently, to more fine-tuned policy responses to P/CVE and R&R in the Western Balkans.
Abstract: The primary purpose of this article is to explain the meaning and consequences of foreign fighters’ participation from Western Balkan countries (WB6) in armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq. In the first part, the issue of foreign fighters is discussed in historical terms. The author focuses on the examples o
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ethno-religious conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the second part of the text, the definition framework of foreign fighters’ concept and its evolution towards foreign terrorist-fighters is discussed. Then, a detailed analysis of the main problem is conducted,
and several research questions are answered: 1) What is the scale of the phenomenon of Balkan volunteers (e.g., their number, the structure of origin, and others) in comparison to fighters from other regions? 2) What are their motivations and goals, and what are their recruitment process and ways of
moving into the war zone? 3) What is the threat posed by returning fighters to the security of the Western Balkans, and how do individual states counteract this phenomenon? The author uses mainly the following research methods: critical content analysis (literature, scientific articles, documents, reports, press materials), and historical and comparative analysis. The author’s visits to this country in 2018-2020 constituted an essential contribution to the part concerning the case of Kosovo.
Abstract: Over 1,000 adult male foreign fighters, women, and minors from the Western Balkans spent time in Syria and Iraq and around 500 from the region are still there, including children born in theater. After seven years of fighting and at least 260 combat deaths, the last active jihadi unit from the Western Balkans in Syria and Iraq is a modest ethnic Albanian combat unit fighting with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib. The rest of those remaining in Syria and Iraq, mostly minors, are held in Kurdish-controlled IDP camps. Some 460 others have gradually returned home, making the Western Balkans the region with the highest concentration of returning foreign terrorist fighters in Europe and creating a long-term security challenge compounded by inadequate resources and the threat posed by homegrown jihadi militants.
Introduction and context
In recent years there has been an increasing concern about the potential for violent right-wing extremism
(VRWE) in the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Kosovo*1, Montenegro, North
Macedonia and Serbia. The region has been historically perceived as politically volatile with a history of
violence that stems from right-wing (political) ideologies and actions.2 Experts and officials from the Western Balkans raise concerns about the spread of right-wing extremism (RWE) in the context of political conflict.
Thus, this paper focuses on both not-yet-violent and violent extremist movements and activities in the
Western Balkans.