A UN investigative panel looking into the summer 2014 Israel-Hamas war has found “serious violations of international humanitarian law” which “may amount to war crimes” by both sides. The report was released early on Monday in Geneva by a commission of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). It says that “impunity prevails across the board” regarding the actions of the Israeli military in Gaza, and urged Israel to “break with its recent lamentable track record in holding wrongdoers accountable.” The commission found that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad employed methods of “inherently indiscriminate nature” by using rockets and mortars to fire at Israeli civilians.

The Tuareg-led rebel coalition in northern Mali on Saturday signed a historic agreement with the government of Mali to end decades of conflict and war between the independence-seeking Tuareg and the central government in Bamako. Since 1960, when Mali gained its independence from France, the Tuareg launched four bloody wars in an effort to gain their independence, but were defeated each time. The pact signed Saturday between the Tuareg and the Mali government was brokered by Algeria – it is called the Algiers Accord – and it aims to bring stability to the country’s northern region.

Forty armed conflicts were active in 2014, the highest number of conflicts since 1999 — and an increase of 18 percent when compared to the thirty-four conflicts active in 2013. New data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) shows an increase in both the number of active conflicts but also in the number of battle-related deaths in these conflicts.

In the last few weeks, Syrian military units have begun to build what military analysts describe as “Maginot Line” east of Damascus in a last-ditch effort to defend the capital from the forces of the Southern Front, which threaten the capital from the south, and from Islamic State, which threatens the city from the east. The line consists of small military outposts, earthen berms, and approach roads. It is being built about fifty miles east of the Damascus International Airport, located east of the capital. The mini-Maginot Line being built east of Damascus is an admission by the Assad regime that battle for Syria is over. It is not yet clear who will control Syria, but it is clear it will not be Assad and the Alawites. Their forty-five years in power are over. The question for Assad, rather, is who will control Damascus and the Alawite region. The building of the line east of the capital is an indication that Assad is getting ready to fight for the control of the capital, but the battle for Damascus may be a delaying tactics, aimed to gain time for the preparations for the ultimate battle – the battle over the Alawite region. It will be a battle over more – much more — than the fate of the Assad regime. It may well be a battle over the very fate of the Alawites.

A U.S. drone strike in Yemen on 9 June killed Nasir al-Wuhayshi, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command and the leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Qaeda’s most powerful regional organization. Analysts say the killing of Wuhayshi, nicknamed Abu Basir, is a blow to the organization. He was a charismatic and capable organizer who was focused on continuing al-Qaeda’s tradition of hitting Western targets, preferably in a headline-grabbing spectacular fashion. Wuhayshi, who fought in Afghanistan, accompanied Osama bin Laden as they fled the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to the caves of Tora Bora in Pakistan. He served as OBL’s secretary and close aide. He was imprisoned in Yemen for a couple of years but escaped and helped found AQAP in 2009, rising to the leadership of the group.

The broad retreat of the pro-government forces in Syria in the face of increasingly more effective attacks by both Islamic State and moderate anti-regime rebels, have placed the Druze in Syria in a difficult position. The disintegration of the Syria military has forced the regime to abandon areas it regards as less essential to the future of the Alawite community, to which the Assad family belongs. The realization that Syrian government forces are no longer capable of, or interested in, defending them, has triggered urgent debates among Druze leaders about how best to protect the interests – and lives — of the half million Druze who live in Syria. Some Druze leaders still advocate staying close to the Assad regime, which traditionally has been hospitable to the Druze, but the majority of the Druze in Syria – and, importantly, the Druze leadership in Lebanon – are calling on the Druze in Syria to reach out to Sunni insurgents in an effort to reach an accommodation with them in anticipation of a post-Assad Syria. There are also Druze leaders who call for members of the community to mobilize and create a Druze militia in order to repel the approaching Sunni rebels. The Israeli government and military, however, have this week quietly decided not to use, or threaten to use, military force to defend the Druze. If ISIS fighters take the lead in pushing into areas heavily populated by Druze, and if the militants exhibit the same murderous tendencies toward the Druze that they showed in Iraq toward the Yezidis and others, then a humanitarian catastrophe will be unfolding on Israel’s doorstep, forcing Israel to make decisions it has so far resisted.

Intelligence and counterterrorism officials have spent tremendous effort to understand why people become Islamist terrorists and commit acts of violence. Up till the 1980s, a significant number of terrorism scholars argued that terrorists are “driven” or “pushed” to commit violence because of an internal imbalance or a psychological abnormality rooted inside the individual. In recent years, scholars have suggested that the roots of terrorism are not in the individual, but in the social environment in which terrorists live and act. The debate goes, leading scholars to argue that the concerns of law enforcement officials should be less about why terrorists exist or commit violence, and more about the how, when, and where does the transition to terrorism take place.

Citing several incidents involving Boston-based terrorists, some ask whether homegrown terrorism might be a trend specific to Boston. “Clearly, there have been a number of incidents here, and some of that is because Boston is really an international city,” said former Boston Police Department commissioner Ed Davis. “It seems to be more than a coincidence,” says one scholar. “But there’s no good answer.”

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was not on the ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, but his ambitious agenda for Turkey was – and he lost big. The losses of his Islamist Justice and Development party, or AKP, were the most significant and painful losses in the party’s 20-year history – and the first losses for Erdogan since he emerged in 2002 to dominate the Turkish political scene. Erdogan openly proclaimed that the goal of AKP in Sunday’s election was to win at least 66 percent of the seats in parliament — the number required to make changes to the Turkish constitution. The AKP now has nearly 50 percent of the seats in parliament, short of the constitution-changing threshold. The Turkish voters, however, soundly rejected Erdogan’s ambitious agenda: Not only did the AKP not win the required majority – the party actually lost power. With 99 percent of the votes counted, the AKP had won 41 percent of the vote, down from the 49 percent it won in the last national election in 2011. It will now have only 258 seats in Turkey’s Parliament, compared with the 327 seats it has in the outgoing parliament. There are regional implications for the Erdogan and AKP loses: On Syria, Libya, and other regional issues, a subdued Erdogan and a tamer AKP may be less of an obstacle to more harmony and greater coordination among the key Sunni states in the Middle East, which is good news for the twin efforts to contain Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions and weaken Iran’s allies, on the one hand, and defeat the nihilistic forces of jihadist Islamist extremism, on the other hand.