KABUL — Rustam Haidery, 22, was watching a TikTok video in his bedroom Wednesday morning when a bullet smashed into the window ledge above his head. Leaping up, he saw uniformed Taliban forces setting up barricades in the street below. From a 12-story apartment building on the next block, he thought he heard someone crying for help.
With the death of Al Qaeda kingpin Ayman Al Zawahiri, the global jihadist outfit is on the process of announcing its next leader. The man likely to become Al Qaeda’s next top dog is Saif Al-Adel, a ruthless jihadist who has spent decades using Iran as a base of operations and who maintains deep ties to the hardline mullah regime, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi, signaling that two of the world’s leading terrorist forces could exponentially expand relations in the near future. Iran is going to emerge as the “new headquarters” of Al Qaeda, under the leadership of Saif Al-Adel.
The al-Shabab extremist group has exploited Ethiopia’s internal turmoil to cross the border from neighboring Somalia in unprecedented attacks in recent weeks that a top U.S. military commander has warned could continue.
The Biden administration’s next security assistance package for Ukraine is expected to be $1 billion, one of the largest so far, and include munitions for long-range weapons and armored medical transport vehicles, three sources briefed on the matter told Reuters on Friday.
Ukraine’s state nuclear power agency has said that a worker at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant was wounded and radiation-monitors were damaged in renewed shelling of the plant on Russian-controlled territory, while Russian authorities have accused Kyiv’s forces of carrying out the overnight attack.
Recently the Belgian government proposed and ratified legislation that appears to pave the way to transfer terrorists who have been convicted abroad back to Iran.
Does Belgium not understand that returning convicted terrorists to Iran will further embolden and empower the mullahs to carry out more terrorist acts on the European soil while they maintain complete impunity? The new concession will also encourage Iran’s regime to take even more European citizens as hostages and demand still more concessions from the EU.
Political instability is harming the West’s ability to strategise. For the good of Ukraine and Europe it needs to be actively mitigated.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has dramatically shifted the European security order. European countries, under significant political and societal pressures, have broadly done well to adapt to the pace of change and deal with the secondary and tertiary effects of the war. Countries have delivered extraordinary military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Russia has been extensively sanctioned and significant steps have been taken to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas. NATO has invited two new members to join the alliance and has significantly strengthened its defence and deterrence posture.
After years of failed military efforts, the path forward has to include some kind of accommodation with the militants.
Since at least 2017, when Mali’s government organised a peace forum called the Conference of National Understanding, prominent voices in the country and the wider Sahel region have explored the possibility of dialogue with jihadists.
U.S. Navy ships and planes will transit the Taiwan strait in the next two weeks.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby condemned Chinese military drills in the area and said the Pentagon had ordered the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and her escorts to remain near Taiwan to “monitor the situation.”
His location in Kabul suggests a form of Taliban sanctuary, undermining the regime’s claims to cutting ties with transnational terrorists.
On Monday, President Biden revealed that a U.S. drone strike killed al-Qaida leader, and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al-Zawahiri over the weekend. Al-Zawahiri was reportedly on the balcony of a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan. Last week, the United States participated in a regional conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan focused on counterterrorism, where Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said his regime had followed through on commitments to not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for transnational terrorism. Al-Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul seemingly undercuts Muttaqi’s remarks and the Taliban’s supposed promise to cut ties with groups like al-Qaida. It also complicates discussions held last week between Taliban and U.S. officials on unfreezing Afghan Central Bank assets, which could help ease Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis.