• Rising world military spending in 2015

    World military expenditure totaled almost $1.7 trillion in 2015, an increase of 1 percent in real terms from 2014. The increase reflects continuing growth in Asia and Oceania, Central and Eastern Europe, and some Middle Eastern states. The decline in spending in the West is also levelling off. At the same time, spending decreased in Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, the global military expenditure picture is mixed. The United States remained by far the world’s biggest spender in 2015, despite its expenditure falling by 2.4 per cent to $596 billion.

  • Islamist radicals from Muslim countries tend to have engineering qualifications

    Islamist radicals born and educated in Muslim countries are seventeen times more likely to have an engineering qualification than the general population in these countries. A new book, which relies on a study of over 800 members of violent Islamist groups, challenges a widely held view that many terrorists are “poor, ignorant and have nothing to lose,” according to its authors. “There is little doubt that violent Islamist radicals are vastly more educated than the general population born and educated in the Muslim world, and engineers are dramatically over-represented,” the authors say.

  • Leader of Nigeria’s Islamist Ansaru group arrested in Nigeria

    Khalid al-Barnawi, the leader of Nigeria’s Ansaru jihadist group, a Boko Haram splinter group ideologically aligned with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has been arrested, a Nigerian army spokesman said on Sunday. Al-Barnawi, 47, was born as Usman Umar Abubakar in Biu town in northeast Borno state. He is one of three Nigerians listed by Washington in 2012 as “specially designated global terrorists.

  • ISIS planning to use drones for radioactive attacks on Western cities

    Prime Minister David Cameron warned that ISIS terrorists are planning to use drones to spray nuclear material over Western cities in a lethal “dirty bomb” attack. Security experts are worried about jihadists buying simple drones, which are widely available, and use them to carry radioactive material into the centers of large cities in attacks which would kill thousands and contaminate large sections of cities, making entire areas uninhabitable for years.

  • Al-Shabaab leader in Somalia killed in U.S. strike

    Hassan Ali Dhoore, a senior leader of the Somali al-Shabaab Islamist group, was killed by a U.S. drone strike on Thursday. On 5 March a U.S. air strike killed more than a 100 al-Shabaab fighters in one of the group’s training facilities.

  • ISIS rocket expert killed in U.S. strike

    Jasim Khadijah, a former Iraqi officer in Saddam Hussein’s army who joined ISIS and led the organization’s rocket development effort, was killed by a drone strike in northern Iraq Sunday. Khadijah was responsible for a rocket attack last month on a U.S. military base near the town of Makhmour, located between Mosul and Kirkuk. That attack killed marine staff sergeant Louis Cardin and wounded eight others.

  • ISIS has changed international law

    By Michael Scharf

    Two years ago, virtually no one had heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In a January 2014 New Yorker interview, President Obama dismissed the group as “Junior Varsity.” Since then, ISIS has emerged as one of the most wealthy, powerful, and dangerous terrorist organizations that ever existed. UN Security Council Resolution 2249, adopted in November 2015, will likely be viewed as confirming that use of force in self-defense is now permissible against “nonstate actors” such as terrorists when the territorial state is unable to suppress the threat that they pose. The implication of this newly accepted change in the international law of self-defense is that any nation can now lawfully use force against deadly nonstate actors in another country if the government of that country is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat within its borders. With so many potential targets in so many countries – the U.S. terrorist organizations list, for example, includes fifty-eight terrorist groups headquartered in thirty-five different countries (in addition to ISIS in Syria/Iraq) — one must ask whether the possibility of abuse will ultimately outweigh the benefits of weakening ISIS.

  • Dozens of Gitmo prisoners to be transferred to other countries in the next two weeks

    The United States plans to move out a dozen inmates from Guantanamo Bay in the next few weeks, part of the final push by President Barack Obama to shut down the facility. Obama, since his election to the presidency, has said he wants to transfer the men to their home countries, or to maximum security prisons in the United States.

  • EU cities have 900 “no-go zones”: Hungary’s government

    Hungary’s right-wing government, ahead of a national referendum on the question of EU-mandated refugee quotas for EU member states, has claimed in a Web site post which supports the government’s anti-migration stance, that there are 900 “no-go zones” in London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin. The government Web page, entitled “We say no to mandatory migrant quotas,” defines the 900 “no-go zones” as “neighborhoods not under control, or hardly kept under control,” where “the norms of the host society … barely prevail.”

  • Is Belgium’s nuclear security up to scratch?

    By Robert J. Downes and Daniel Salisbury

    Belgium’s counter-terrorism efforts are once again being called into question following the recent tragedies in Brussels. The attacks were carried out against soft targets – the public check-in area of Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station – but a series of unusual and suspicious occurrences were also reported at nuclear facilities in the country. These events highlight the very real threat to nuclear facilities. For Belgium, this recent episode is one item on a long list of security concerns. Based on this history, the Belgian authorities should be primed to take nuclear security especially seriously. But there are serious questions about whether they are.

  • Montenegro expels 58 members of Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo

    Montenegro has expelled fifty-eight foreigners, all members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo which, in March 1995, launched a deadly nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s underground. Twelve people were killed and thousands injured in Aum Shinrikyo’s nerve gas attack on a Tokyo commuters.

  • Sen. Wyden said he would filibuster efforts to mandate back doors

    Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), a critic of the NSA domestic spying programs, said he would filibuster any attempt by fellow lawmakers to require U.S. technology companies to weaken the encryption systems with which they equip their devices. Referring to Apple fight against a court order requiring the company to relax the encryption of iPhone used by the two San Bernardino terrorists, Wyden said that consumers were asking: “Are these for the privacy rights of the dead terrorist?”

  • French government abandons plan to strip terrorists of French citizenship

    The French government has decided to abandon plans to strip convicted terrorists with dual nationality of their French citizenship and deport them.French president Francois Hollande also wanted to make the state of emergency, which gives the police special powers and which was imposed for three months after the November attacks, a permanent feature of the constitution, but the government was forced to abandon this proposal, too, in the face of stiff opposition.

  • Populist German party calling for banning construction, operation of mosques

    A 45-page draft policy proposal, to be debated at the end of April at the annual conference of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland),a populist, anti-immigration party which has been gaining in the polls, would prohibit the “construction and operation of mosques.” The policy draft, titled “Courage to take responsibility,” states that “Islam does not belong to Germany.” Mosques are conducive “not only to common prayer, but also to the spread of Islamic teachings directed towards the removal of our legal order,” the draft says.

  • American Airlines cancels all Brussels flights until 7 April

    American Airlines announced it has canceled all flights to and from Brussels until 7 April. The carrier’s decision is in response to the 22 March suicide bombing attack at the Brussels airport. The explosion occurred near the American Airlines counter, and some of the thirty-two people killed in the blast were about to board an AA flight.