Hiranmay Karlekar

The first requirement is the liquidation of the ISIL as soon and as comprehensively as possible. Defeat will not only remove its ability to direct terror strikes abroad and train potential terrorists on its territory, it will also undermine the glamour the ISIL acquired as a result of its early military successes which enabled it and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to claim invincibility and of being designated by Allah to establish Sharia rule, the world over....

Robert F. Worth

What destroyed Aleppo? It was not the sectarianism that is often held up as a key to the Syrian war. It was not just “terrorism,” the word used by regime apologists to fend off any share of blame. Those things played a role, but the core of the conflict in Aleppo, as in much of Syria, was a divide between urban wealth and rural poverty. It is not new. Travelers in the Ottoman era used to describe the shocking gulf between Aleppo’s opulence and the countryside surrounding it, where peasants lived in almost Stone Age conditions…..

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Not only will the Islamic State remain in Iraq and Syria, it is also likely to persist as an international franchise even with loss of core territory. In several parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, the Islamic State has already moved beyond the insistence on territorial control and statehood, dropping the notion of claiming new "provinces". In short, the Islamic State is indeed Baqiya....

IS has said that it wants to force sympathetic Muslims out of a “greyzone” in which they do not fully embrace the jihadists’ “caliphate” because they still feel loyalty to the country where they live. If so, IS can use extreme violence to provoke an official clampdown and to feed the indiscriminate suspicion of Muslims....

The Muslim Ummah is currently in conflict. A battle is being waged for the heart and soul of Islam. In some cases, the forces of True Islam and Fake Islam are facing off in full-fledged civil wars. In most instances, the overwhelming majority of orthodox Muslims are being assailed by a fringe minority of violent heretics. If anything prevents mainstream Muslims from cleaning up camp, it is the fact that they are powerless and at the mercy of oppressive leaders who have traditionally supported Takfiri terrorists to do their dirty geo-political work covertly while simultaneously condemning them overtly. It is shameful that a billion-strong majority of Muslim tigers are being pestered by one hundred thousand rats....

Jenny McCartney

Terrorism is not random or accidental. It is a conversation with the state conducted by means of extreme violence. Each atrocity has its point to make. With previous terrorist incidents, Isis has emphasised its hatred of Christians, say, or street revellers. This one was meant largely for the girls....

Salwa Samir

According to investigators, these employees let the German group illegally take a piece of a cartouche from a small chamber above King Khufu's burial room and also some fragments from the walls and ceiling of Khufu's tomb in the Great Pyramid. The group used sharp tools while taking the samples, so the pyramid walls were damaged....

Praveen Swami

Abdulla lashed out at mainstream Indian Muslim leaders who, he argued, were misleading their flock by condemning the Islamic State as illegitimate. “Muslim leaders in India claim that it is possible for Muslims to practise their faith 100% in India: we can pray, fast, go for hajj, and so on”, he said. “But the hypocrite Islamic scholars stay silent on the Quranic commandment for Muslims to engage in offensive jihad. They know that the Prophet went with weapons and conquered the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. The Islamic State follows the example of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, yet these so-called scholars criticise it”. “Islam spread by the sword — not by peace”, Abdulla said. “The critics of Islam, ironically, speak the truth, while the so-called Islamic scholars do not. The Prophet Muhammad, the Caliph Abu Bakr Siddiq, and those that followed them, conquered the world by the sword, not by doing Dawah [proselytisation]”.....

Prof D. Suba Chandran

Let us make a cold calculation on the success and failure stories in our region in terms of politically dealing with an active militant group. Let us not rush towards a political dialogue in the name of a ‘peace process’ or worse in the name of ‘pragmatism’. As a rule, unless the militant groups are defeated militarily or openly willing to take part in the political process without any preconditions, dialogues will only strengthen the former....

Charlie English

It was true that a number of documents from the state-owned Ahmed Baba Institute had indeed been destroyed or stolen, but over the following days and weeks, the tale acquired a delicious twist. Almost all of Timbuktu’s precious manuscripts had been smuggled to safety in a daring rescue operation that a Ford Foundation executive described as “an Indiana Jones moment in real life.”....

Contemporary societies and states, whether in the East or the West, have been facing the dual threat of radicalism and terrorism, mainly perpetrated and justified in the name of religion. The rise and proliferation of these are largely the result of lack of economic, social and political openness at the societal and state levels....

Aadil Ikram Zaki

With each terror attack, there is an increasing intellectual churning in much of the Muslim world with a sizeable majority delinking terror with Islam and a faction within the community acknowledging the misinterpretation of Islam by ISIS and other terror outfits such as Taliban and Al-Qaeda. But ISIS has outdone all other outfits with its successful application of savagery....

Uzay Bulut

There are more than 1,000 ISIS militants in Turkey and the sympathizers must be in the tens of thousands. ISIS militants have organized all across Turkey – in coffee houses, Internet cafes, mosques and cell hideouts. A lot of ISIS militants were arrested – only to be released later....

Kathy Kelly

In one of the burnt-out shells of the shops where raisins, nuts, fabrics, incense and stone pots were traded for hundreds of years, all that was to be found was a box of coke bottles, a sofa and a child nailing wooden sticks together. This is Sa’ada, ground zero of the 20-month Saudi campaign in Yemen, a largely forgotten conflict that has killed more than 10,000, uprooted 3 million...

Rezaul H Laskar

“Online, in talking with like-minded individuals from all over the world, they get a deep sense of belonging and sense of brotherhood. So, it’s not so much that Islamic State is using these environments to radicalise and recruit, although that happens, it’s that these individuals find a ‘home’ in these environments and it’s hard to break away from that bond with others, even if it’s only online,”...

Hamdi Malik

These differences date back to the era of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's leadership over al-Qaeda in Iraq, who believed that legitimacy comes from the battlefield and not from above. The leaders of the two groups also disagree about the priorities of jihad at this stage. Although both share the ultimate goal of establishing the Islamic caliphate throughout the world, al-Qaeda leaders believe that this stage requires striking the distant enemy, namely the West....

Sanchita Bhattacharya

With the incoherence of Western policy and continuing, albeit diminishing, financial and military support pouring into Islamabad, even as Pakistan is ascribed a lead role in the search for a 'solution' in Afghanistan, there has been no decisive disincentive to ISI's continuing subversive activities across the region. Pakistan's footprints of terror are visible across the world, but Islamabad continues to operate with complete impunity....

Jayson Casper

“Salafists consider Sufis to be infidels, so you cannot open a dialogue with those who reject you,” he said. “Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood plays with both Salafists and Sufis as it judges where its interests lie. And in any case the law considers them a terrorist organization.” Sufism may well be a tool to spread the values of love and tolerance in a polarized society, but Egyptian Sufis also view their politics through the lens of existential crisis....

The Taliban attack at Mazar-e Sharif’s Camp Shaheen appeared aimed at further undermining Afghanistan’s embattled leaders and security forces. And it delivered another psychological blow to Afghans hoping that this year might finally see government gains against a methodical, years-long Taliban advance. It also served as a reminder that the Taliban, and not the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), still represent the most potent Islamist insurgency threatening Afghanistan....

Azim Zahir

These extremist groups - just like corrupt politicians - have also formed alliances with radical gangs. There has indeed been a phenomenon of what Olivier Roy has called "Islamisation of radicals". Several of these "Islamised radicals" have gone to Syria to fight. And as these gangs also have or had interdependent relations with powerful politicians, they seem to enjoy impunity within the Maldives....

Annie Gowen

By the time their relatives realized they were missing, five families – some with small children – had left their comfortable bungalows and jobs as doctors and businessmen to make the perilous journey to Islamic State-controlled territory in Afghanistan. Authorities believe 19 adults and three children settled in Nangarhar province, on the mountainous border with Pakistan. Their departure has raised alarms about the Islamic State's reach in India as well as growing extremism in Kerala, a southern state with deep ties through migrant workers to the Arab Gulf....

By now you all know what happened in Mardan to a student named Mashal Khan. It doesn’t bear repeating, but I’ll do it anyway: a talented and intellectually honest young man was slaughtered by his fellow students for having said things that were allegedly blasphemous. He was 23. Pakistan was born in the Chinese Year of the Pig, which is deeply funny for many reasons...

Praveen Swami

Four members of Islamist-linked street gangs were arrested following the disappearance, but released after police said there was no evidence to link them to the case. The suspects are now thought to have joined the 200-plus Maldivian jihadists fighting in Syria.....

Akbar Ahmed

After 9/11, the US and its allies identified terrorists living in these very communities and allied with central governments in order to target and destroy them. Too often, however, central governments used the pretext of the war on terror and the substantial levels of military and financial assistance they were receiving from the US to settle scores with the tribes, which they often viewed as uncivilized and backward.....

James A. Lyons

The Obama-Clinton disdain for naming the real enemy allowed them to pretend that the Islamic State (ISIS) was the only problem in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, groups with an identical jihad ideology got a pass. Al Qaeda was barely mentioned. Arms continued to flow via Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to a rogues gallery of supposed “moderates” — Jaish al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, the Free Idlib Army and the Islamic Front. These jihadists operate mainly in alliance with al Qaeda, but sometimes with ISIS...