Short term, the pledge of allegiance by Boko Haram to the Islamic State may be no more than a propaganda gesture, experts say, but that could change.
A French force of 1 000 soldiers in a major offensive has swept a valley thought to be a logistics base for al-Qaeda near the Malian city of Gao.
Syrian troops have pounded Aleppo to thwart a rebel advance in Syria’s second city as actress Angelina Jolie visited a Jordanian camp for refugees.
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/ 30 January 2012
A French project featuring a range of anti-piracy features, including sound blasts, has been unveiled at a shipping security forum in Nantes.
Gadaffi’s forces shelled Ajdabiya in Libya on Friday, as Nato expressed regret at the deaths caused by an alliance air strike on rebel tank
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/ 13 September 2007
Dotted throughout the world are ”ungoverned territories” outside the control of the states in which they lie and which provide havens for extremists, according to a United States military-financed study by the Rand Corporation think tank. ”The world is full of safe havens for potential terrorists,” Angel Rabasa, director of the study, said this week.
In the barren, rocky landscape of the West Bank in the northern Jordan Valley, Yossi Hazut and his family, expelled from Israeli settlements in Gaza, dream of reconstructing their Zionist dream. Last week, the Israeli government approved this site at Maskiot to become the first new Israeli settlement to be authorised in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1992.
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/ 25 December 2006
The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, a Palestinian, called on Monday on Middle East leaders to become ”peacemakers” and condemned inter-Palestinian fighting, as the pope used his Christmas message to appeal for respect of the ”dignity of children”. In Asia, there were no immediate reports of violence that had been feared for the religious holiday.
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/ 23 November 2006
They neither carry weapons nor lay ambushes for soldiers in Iraq or in Afghanistan. But thousands of radical Islamists are waging a different kind of war from behind their computers, called ”electronic jihad”. These radical Islamic sites have sprung up over the past few years, specialising in the organisation and the coordination of concerted cyber-attacks against Israeli, American, Catholic and Danish websites.
Washington has been playing with fire in Somalia, where its support for a warlord alliance has ended up boosting Islamic militias, which now hold the capital Mogadishu, analysts say. Somalia has been torn by four months of fighting between the Islamists and an alliance of warlords, who largely controlled the lawless state for 15 years.