Vox's Jennifer Williams wrote an excellent and very brave piece for Lawfare yesterday called "We Were Wrong About ISIS." As the title suggests, she does something very rare in the field of People Who Write About Stuff for a Living: she admits to getting something, specifically ISIS's shift from state-building to foreign terrorism, wrong: Many … Continue reading Missing the signs

A deadly attack on a hotel in Mali kills several people, many of them foreigners, and leaves the country unsettled. Very quickly, the al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group al-Mourabitoun claims responsibility for the attack in a statement delivered to the media. But in the aftermath of the attack, a second group comes forward to claim responsibility for … Continue reading Another group claims responsibility for the Bamako hotel attack

The Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali, was struck by gunmen earlier today in an attack that so far has killed at least 27 people. The situation is still unfolding (though it may be nearing a resolution), with gunmen still believed to be inside the hotel, though a "special forces raid," possibly … Continue reading Some early thoughts on the Mali hotel attack

I've got a new piece at LobeLog looking at the arrest and detention of Egyptian journalist Hossam Bahgat last weekend. Bahgat evidently angered the Egyptian military in October with an investigative piece about a couple dozen officers who appear to have been railroaded, complete with coerced confessions, into guilty verdicts in a case about an … Continue reading In Sisi’s Egypt, you’re lucky if you only get arrested

I was all set to write something about the snowballing right-wing mass freak out over the possibility of Syrian refugees coming to America and committing terror attacks here, but The Week's Ryan Cooper has already written it for me (and I'm not just saying that because he cites me in his piece): Furthermore, sheltering refugees … Continue reading Shunning refugees is what ISIS wants us to do, so why would we do it?

The Institute for Economics and Peace released its Global Terrorism Index 2015 report today, and if you're looking for 2014's gold medal winner in terror, it's not ISIS. Not exactly. It's complicated: Also notable over the past year is the major intensification of the terrorist threat in Nigeria. The country witnessed the largest increase in … Continue reading “The most deadly terrorist group in the world” isn’t ISIS — well, not exactly

Paris, and by extension Syria, is obviously the big story at the moment, but we shouldn't forget the other brutal, destructive civil war wracking an Arab country at the moment: the one in Yemen. Forces loyal to President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, along with his coalition of Gulf supporters, entered Taiz, Yemen's third largest city … Continue reading Let’s not forget about Yemen

I put a new piece up at Medium, just to be different, on Aung San Suu Kyi and the Rohingya in the aftermath of Myanmar's recent elections. Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won an overwhelming victory, giving it control of parliament despite the fact that a quarter of the seats in the legislature have … Continue reading Suu Kyi and the Rohingya: no more excuses

A new piece from yours truly went online at LobeLog yesterday, and while I think the main point still holds, I'll admit that it got a little overtaken by events (I sent it in late Friday afternoon, before...well, you know). Please go read it anyway! See, on Saturday, in the aftershock of the Paris attack, … Continue reading The Syrian peace talks and governance, my latest at LobeLog