A US missile strike on a Pakistani madrasa near the Afghan border killed six people on Monday, possibly including an al-Qaeda weapons expert.
Three female suicide bombers killed at least 28 people in Baghdad on Monday while in the city of Kirkuk another bomber killed at least 22 people.
An interrogation video of Osama bin Laden’s driver showed Salim Hamdan denying under questioning in a dark cell that he worked for al-Qaeda.
Five Britons who were jailed for life for plotting al-Qaeda-inspired bomb attacks across Britain lost appeals against their convictions on Wednesday.
A hard-line Somali Islamist accused of ties to al-Qaeda claimed leadership of the country’s fractured opposition on Tuesday.
Canada says it will not press for the return of a young Canadian inmate held at Guantánamo Bay despite video footage that showed him weeping.
Two suicide bombers killed 16 police recruits and wounded 30 others at a security post north of Baghdad on Tuesday, the US military said.
Moroccan security forces have foiled a terrorist plot to attack tourists this summer in a ”near-daily” struggle to root out extremist cells.
Saudi Arabia has arrested 701 Islamists in the past six months on suspicion of plotting attacks on oil-industry installations.
Tunisia routinely uses torture, illegal detention and unfair trials in the name of fighting terrorism and should be held to accepted standards.
Egyptian expert on radical Islamists, Dia Rashwan, says recent al-Qaeda propaganda footage from Iraq is old and cannot mask the crisis it is facing.
The accused al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks stood in a United States military court on Thursday.
Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri, in an internet audio message, urged Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip to escalate attacks on Israel over its crippling siege of the territory.
The United States is operating ”floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. The US government was on Sunday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.
Al-Qaeda has been essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and is on the defensive throughout most of the rest of the world, the CIA claimed on Friday. The upbeat assessment comes less than a year after United States intelligence reported that al-Qaeda had rebuilt its strength around the world and was well-placed to launch fresh attacks.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
Sam Sole, the M&G‘s award-winning investigative reporter, and Matthew Burbidge, news editor of the M&G Online, interviewed Seymour Hersch, the original newsman, who says ”The wonderful thing about our profession is if we do it right, stories are not Democrat or Republican, left or right, hawk or dove, pro or anti-government. Stories are stories, and they’re just the truth.”
There is ”no solution but war” to solve Somalia’s problems, and Somali Islamists must re-arm and fight, a long-time hard-line Islamist leader linked to al-Qaeda said on Monday. In a rare interview, Sheikh Hassan Abdullah Hersi al-Turki urged the United Nations not to send soldiers to shore up an African Union peacekeeping force.
It is a subject that has engaged some of the biggest names in international letters: Don DeLillo in Falling Man, Ian McEwan in Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Each attempted to explain in imaginary terms that great reordering of western life, which happened on 9/11 when New York’s Twin Towers were destroyed by al-Qaeda terrorists.
The senior leader of Somalia’s Islamist opposition vowed on Wednesday to expel United States-backed Ethiopian troops by force and create an Islamic republic in the war-torn country. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who led Somalia’s Islamic Courts movement, said Mogadishu’s Western-backed Transitional Federal Government was run by ”traitors”.
Top Indian and Pakistani Foreign Ministry officials met on Tuesday to review their four-year-old peace process that has stalled since domestic political turmoil erupted in Pakistan last year. It is the first contact India has had with leaders of a new Pakistani civilian government.
A fading photo tossed on an empty bed is all that remains of the interrupted lives in Spinkai, a desolate Pakistani village that has endured the wrath of the army’s ”collective punishment”. In the image, a laughing young man in a jet-black turban brandishes his rifle like a trophy. Beside him stand two little girls in bright frocks, giggling with glee.
Five years after Morocco’s deadliest suicide bombings killed 45 people in Casablanca, the North African kingdom remains engaged in a relentless chase for Islamist terrorists. Thousands of people have been detained, including dozens who have been abducted illegally by the secret service and taken to detention centres.
Suspected Taliban militants have released Pakistan’s envoy to Afghanistan more than three months after he was kidnapped in Pakistan’s Khyber tribal region, a senior government official said on Saturday. Pakistani television channels said the envoy, Tariq Azizuddin, had been freed in Afghanistan.
The United States agreed on Friday to help Saudi Arabia protect its oil industry from terrorist attack, while offering to back conservative Arab countries resisting Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East — but King Abdullah was not persuaded to boost Saudi oil production to ease the effect of the -a-barrel price on the US.
Osama bin Laden vowed in an audio tape marking Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations to continue the fight against the Jewish state and its allies and not give up an inch of Palestinian land. ”We will continue, God permitting, the fight against the Israelis and their allies,” the al-Qaeda leader said in the tape posted on an Islamist website on Friday.
United States President George Bush offered a peace prophecy for the Middle East on Thursday in which the enemies of the United States faced a future of defeat. ”This is a bold vision, and some will say it can never be achieved,” Bush told Israel’s Parliament.
Taliban insurgents have ordered residents of a province near the capital Kabul to stop watching television, saying the networks were showing un-Islamic programmes, officials and local media said on Tuesday. The order is the last in a wave of curbs that the resurgent militants have announced in areas they are active.
Somali government officials and exiled Islamist opposition leaders are to hold face-to-face peace talks in Djibouti, the United Nations special envoy to the country said on Friday. Somalia has been wracked by conflict since 1991, with the capital, Mogadishu, plagued by political and civil unrest, food riots and attacks on Western aid agencies.
Iraqi security forces have detained a man suspected of being the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq after a captured associate led them to him sleeping in a house in the northern city of Mosul, Iraqi officials said on Friday. More than eight hours after the Iraqi announcement, the United States military said it still had no confirmation that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian, had been seized.
A man seized by Iraqi forces is not the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a senior United States military official said on Friday, following an announcement by several Iraqi officials that Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been captured. Security sources had already begun to cast doubt on the earlier announcement that Masri, an Egyptian also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, had been captured.
All parties in Somalia’s conflict have carried out rights abuses including executions, rape and torture, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, adding there were reports Ethiopian soldiers had slit civilians’ throats. Mogadishu’s whole population is scarred from witnessing or suffering such abuses, it said in its 32-page report.