Bangladesh is increasingly recognized as the locus of a significant and expanding threat emanating from radicalized Islamist extremist mobilization and its systematic transformation into political and terrorist violence. Notwithstanding vociferous official denials, it has, for some time now, been an established staging post for terrorism... MORE

The subject of exposure to acts of terrorism and piracy has once again been occupying minds in the SE Asia region with governments anxious to protect the existing levels of commercial traffic and to secure expansion of tourist and leisure sectors connected with the waterways.... MORE

Some confusion surrounded the announcement on May 23 that the Malaysian government had uncovered the existence of new militant group, distinct, but linked to the regional extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah. According to a report at the time in the Malaysian daily The Star, Deputy Internal... MORE

Southeast Asia has emerged as an important front on the war on terror. The regional al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiya has launched two major terrorist attacks since October 2002, and, despite a significant number of arrests, retains the capability for more devastating strikes in the future.... MORE

Much of the world's economy depends on the security of shipping that passes through a narrow body of water in Southeast Asia known as the Strait of Malacca. Situated between the coastline of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to the East and the Indonesian island of... MORE

Introduction Security in southern Thailand has been brought into sharp focus during the past five months as armed attacks have swept across the four Malay Muslim provinces of Pattani Narithiwat, Yala and Satun. In January, Islamic radicals carried out a series of near simultaneous attacks... MORE

Australia is bracing itself for a possible repeat performance of the March bomb attacks on a Madrid train, which killed over 200. The conditions are closely similar, with an imminent election where the principal opposition party, in a move considered ‘dangerous' by President Bush, has... MORE

The largest Islamist insurgency group in the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), has issued strict instructions to its members not to link up with any members of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) who may be entering the southern island of Mindanao in order to... MORE

The prediction concerning the potential targeting of Australia, made in the last edition of Terrorism Focus, duly came to pass. It came in the form of two incidents within a few days of each other, one an attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the... MORE

Indications of a long-term plan to keep the Southeast Asia region boiling come from Indonesian police reports of two developments: the hunt for Malaysian bomb maker Azahari Husin and Noordin Mohammed Top, and the investigation of video recordings seized from Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militants.... MORE