It has been a difficult summer for China’s restive western province Xinjiang. A series of incidents characterized as terrorism have struck two of the province’s cities, causing death, destruction and ethnic tension. This picture was further complicated when the government of the city of Kashgar... MORE

Iran has recently shelled border villages and launched cross-border raids into northern Iraq to step up pressure on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to stop the anti-Iranian operations of the Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistane (PJAK - Party of Free Life of Iranian Kurdistan). Iran... MORE

Last April the Kuwaiti government started building a new port on Boubyan Island near the marine border with Iraq. The port, named Mubarak al-Kabir (Grand Mubarak) after the founder of the Kuwaiti al-Sabah ruling dynasty, triggered the latest crisis between Baghdad and Kuwait, with the... MORE

As if Yemen did not already face enough political, social and economic challenges in the midst of a multi-sided civil war, there are significant and not unreasonable fears in the Yemeni opposition that President Ali Abdullah Saleh has manufactured a new conflict between the state... MORE

After the 2002 Bali bombings, Indonesia recognized that the main threat to national security came from regional terrorist networks whose leaders returned to Indonesia after Suharto fell from power in 1998. An elite counterterrorism unit, Densus 88 (Detasemen Khusus 88, or Special Detachment 88), was... MORE

Somalia’s drought and famine have slowed the progress of al-Shabaab operations in Somalia as people continue to flee from areas of southern Somalia under the movement’s control. These areas also happen to be the regions hit hardest by the growing shortages of food and water.... MORE

As the turmoil affecting Syria persists with no apparent end in sight, fears about the potential impact of the crisis on Syria’s neighbors remain at the fore.  Among all of its neighbors, the complexity that defines Syria’s relationship with Lebanon and the characteristics of Lebanese... MORE

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) seems to be slowly disintegrating as various commanders try to pull it in different directions. A clear indication of this process came when the TTP Commander in the Kurram Agency, Fazal Saeed Haqqani, announced that his group had seceded from the... MORE

The past six weeks have seen an escalation of hostilities between Mauritanian troops and the forces of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The first signs of this escalation occurred on June 24, when Mauritanian forces raided, with Malian help, an al-Qaeda camp in the... MORE

The Jamestown Foundation recently posed a series of questions in an online interview with Abdurahman M. Abdullahi (Baadiyow), an Islamic scholar and prominent leader of the Islah (Reform) Movement in Somalia.  The interview was designed to shed light on the views of Somalia’s Muslim Brotherhood... MORE