It took the Russians a few days to properly formulate a response to Turkey shooting down its Sukhoi Su-24 aircraft, but over the weekend they finally took vengeance on the real villains: Syrians who eat bread and drink water. I really do wish I was joking: A reported Russian airstrike on Saturday in central Idlib … Continue reading Punishing the truly guilty

It's no secret that ISIS thrives on power vacuums. Its rise from the ashes of al-Qaeda in Iraq was fueled by the chaos created by the actual Syrian civil war and the undeclared civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and the Maliki government. Its expansion abroad has similarly targeted places that are unstable or potentially unstable: … Continue reading A great argument for ending the Libyan civil war

The University of Chicago is closed today, apart from its hospitals. I can tell you from personal experience that this is almost unprecedented. It took real-deal blizzards (and I mean "blizzard" by Chicago standards, which means "so much snow that it would shut DC down for a month") to get that place to even consider … Continue reading Al-Shabaab: the terror group that has Kenyan authorities terrorizing their own people

Earlier this week (November 22-25) was the 100th anniversary of World War I's Battle of Ctesiphon, the point at which Britain's 1915 campaign to take Baghdad went from a bad decision in theory to a bad decision in fact. That campaign, in short, consisted of the 6th (Poona) Division of the British Indian Army, under … Continue reading Good history reading: the Battle of Ctesiphon (1915)

There have been a lot of developments in the case of that Russian Sukhoi Su-24 interdictor that was shot down in Syria yesterday by Turkish F-16s, and although I'm on semi-vacation I figured I should at least mention some of them. First, in a bit of good news, one of the pilots apparently survived being … Continue reading Retired USAF general says Turkey really shouldn’t have shot that plane down

It seems like only yesterday we were just speculating that maybe Russian planes buzzing Turkish airspace wasn't exactly good news for, you know, the human race. Welp, you'll never guess what happened today: Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border on Tuesday, saying it had repeatedly violated its air space, one of … Continue reading Well, as worst-case scenarios go…

On Sunday, saboteurs in Ukraine's southern Kherson region blew up one of the electrical towers that carries the main power lines from the mainland into Crimea, cutting those lines and leaving the Russian-claimed peninsula without electricity. Some power has been restored to Crimean cities using generators, but most of the peninsula is still in the … Continue reading Cutting off Crimea

Alongside the much more prominent and destructive national civil war that's been raging in Libya between its two competing governments (and between those governments and ISIS), there's also been a regional war going on in the southern part of the country (the Fezzan region) between two Berber peoples, the Tubu and Tuareg. They've had a … Continue reading Libya gets A ceasefire, but not THE ceasefire

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