Islamic State leader Abu Hasan al-Hashemi al-Qurashi has been reportedly arrested in Istanbul, but the news has not yet been independently confirmed.
The Islamic State’s most recent leader, Abu Hasan al-Hashemi al-Qurashi, was captured in a raid in Istanbul, according to media reports Thursday.
The State Department is not removing Gamaat Islamiya from the terror list because it is defunct. Just the opposite. It’s being removed from the terror list because the Biden administration expects it to be active again. And wants to be able to provide support for it.
Russia has not only been modernizing its nuclear triad; it has also been developing new types of nuclear systems….
Russia, of course, is not the only nuclear threat to the United States. China has accelerated its nuclear buildup to the extent that Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, “For the first time in our history, the nation is on a trajectory to face two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently. We can no longer assume the risk of strategic deterrence failure in conflict will always remain low.”
As so often in the past, Lithuania has openly declared what many believe but are unwilling for one reason or another to say. The Lithuanian parliament in a unanimous vote declared Russia to be a terrorist state and its war in Ukraine an act of genocide against the population there, actions for which Russian leaders, including Putin, must stand trial.
He said: “Making concessions failed between 2014 and 2022, ultimately bringing us all the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War.” However, he insisted that this war is not a “copy-paste of any previous wars”, highlighting that every war is special.
President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree allowing residents of two Ukrainian regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya, parts of which have been occupied by Russian forces during Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, to obtain Russian citizenship.
Ukraine wasn’t supposed to stand much of a chance in a military conflict with Russia. It was outgunned and outmanned. In the first months of 2022, as the threat of an invasion loomed, the Russian military was expected to quickly and decisively defeat its much weaker neighbor with ease. Many experts were asking not if Russia could win the coming war, but how far its ambitions stretched within and beyond Ukraine.
In May 2021, Mali suffered its second coup in the space of a year, both of which were perpetrated by the same group of colonels. While the first coup, in August 2020, followed a recognizable script of quickly standing up a civilian-led transitional government with the task of guiding the country to democratic elections, the second has upended that “business-as-usual” approach to post-coup transitions.
At least once at every conference about an international security crisis, in the midst of debate, a participant will suddenly lean back and quote Carl von Clausewitz in a booming voice to underscore a tenuous point.
China is gearing up for the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party to be held later this year, where, according to the consensus view, President Xi Jinping’s historic bid for a third term as the party’s general secretary is all but assured.