Terrorism Watch

BAMAKO, Mali — Days of consultations to map out Mali’s transition to a civilian government will conclude Saturday, though transition leaders won’t be decided upon until next week. The leaders of the military junta that deposed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita last month led talks with some 300 political party and civil society leaders in an effort to map out a way forward for the unstable West African nation. It’s likely the transition will be led by a civilian, with strong military presence in the other positions of power, said Baba Dakono, a researcher with the Institute for Security Studies who is closely following the talks. “We must nevertheless expect a civilian very close to the junta who will lead this transition,” he said, adding that it’s likely other civilian participants will have links to the opposition coalition M5-RFP that held huge anti-government protests for weeks before the coup. The 15-nation West African regional bloc known as ECOWAS has warned the j

Bastar Police claimed that a total of 23 Maoist cadres were killed in Minpa encounter which took place in March this year between Maoists and security forces in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district of Bastar division. Inspector-General of Police, Bastar range, Sunderaj P, issued a press release on Saturday and claimed that the recent letters of communication between Maoist leaders, recovered from an encounter on September 8, suggest that a total 23 Maoists were killed in Minpa encounter. On March 21, in an encounter with police near the jungles of Minpa village of Sukma, total 17 security forces were killed. Two days after the encounter, the Maoists released a press note and claimed that three of their cadres also got killed in the encounter. Also read: Jharkhand CM meets Lalu Yadav, says ‘will contest Bihar polls together’ “On September 8, a joint operation was launched by Sukma police from Bheji and Elarmadgu camp towards Pentapad-Entapad jungle area based on an

  The Kurdish insurgency could lead to the collapse of Turkey by gaining foreign support, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute warned on Wednesday. Turkey’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy may backfire if regional rivals respond by backing the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said Rubin in an article for the National Interest .  The PKK has been waging an armed insurgency in Turkey since 1984, a conflict that has remained largely internal. But the rise of Kurdish groups with U.S. support in Syria has the potential to shift this dynamic, Rubin said, providing a precedent for other countries to begin arming the PKK. This includes Saudi Arabia, which regards Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat, and Egypt, which is at loggerheads with Ankara over Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean.    “Kurdish insurgents in Turkey may soon have at their disposal the type of weaponry and fundin

July 30, 2010 – A soldier with the Armed Forces for the Defense of Mozambique (FADM). Getty Images Mozambique on Thursday denied accusations made by rights group Amnesty International that soldiers had committed atrocities, saying the acts were carried out by Islamist insurgents impersonating troops. Amnesty said on Wednesday it had seen videos showing soldiers in the uniforms of the Mozambique Armed Defence Forces and the Mozambique Rapid Intervention Police committing atrocities against alleged fighters in the northernmost province of Cabo Delgado. “The videos and pictures show the attempted beheading, torture and other ill-treatment of prisoners; the dismemberment of alleged opposition fighters; possible extrajudicial executions; and the transport and discarding of a large number of corpses into apparent mass graves,” according to Amnesty. Mozambique’s defence ministry on Thursday dismissed the report, saying militants regularly impersonated soldiers. “One of the tacti

  The Centre must note that most armed insurgencies find resolution in a grey zone called ‘compromise’ Despite having huge strategic significance, India’s northeastern frontier has largely remained marginal in the country’s popular imagination as well as mainstream politics. The region has witnessed multiple crises including bloody insurgencies, but still lacks the emotional resonance of the Kashmir conflict due to geographical, cultural, and ethnic factors. Rooted in the politics of sub-nationalism, complexities of regional geopolitics and the evolving dynamics of counterinsurgency tactics, the Naga insurgency has defied a lasting solution; it is an extraordinarily complicated conflict whose management has involved a mix of violent response and bargaining. Also read: The Hindu Explains | What has made the Naga peace process wobble? The absence of R.N. Ravi, the Nagaland Governor and the Centre’s interlocutor for Naga peace talks, in the recently-held meeting of the Naga

Landmark intra-Afghan peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents commenced Saturday in the Qatari capital Doha. The historic talks aim to end nearly two decades of armed insurgency in the war-torn country. In his opening speech, the head of Afghanistan's peace council Abdullah Abdullah said that if the warring parties -- the government and Afghan Taliban -- came together, they could finally strike a peace deal to end years of conflict. "I believe that if we give hands to each other and honestly work for peace, the current ongoing misery in the country will end," Abdullah said. "We come here with good intentions to find a peaceful way to end the 40-year-long war in Afghanistan and a political settlement as our people suffered a lot," he added, underlining that "war and use of force" would not solve the conflict. "Today, we have strong regional and international support and we shouldn't lose this historic opport

Even if China decides to increase military and financial support for insurgents in India’s Northeast, it will find it difficult to alter the security situation there. General Secretary of the NSCN (IM) Thuingaleng Muivah leaves at the end of a funeral service for Chairman Isak Chishi Swu at their headquarters in Hebron, Nagaland, India, Friday, July 1, 2016. Credit: AP Photo/Anupam Nath This is the second of a two-part series on insurgencies in India’s northeastern frontier and the varying role China has played in supporting them. Read the first part here . An underappreciated if not overlooked aspect about India’s Northeast insurgency landscape is the agency these groups enjoy vis-à-vis each other, India, and China. With the Naga peace talks in doldrums, a crisis afflicting Sino-Indian relations, and their own future prospects dimming in the face of India’s intense counterinsurgency campaign, it would not take a genius for the United

  Sen. Panfilo Lacson supports the allocation of funds for development programs in barangays to counter communist insurgency. Senator Panfilo M. Lacson (SENATE OF THE PHILIPPINES / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO) Lacson allayed concerns over the allocation proposed by the Executive department for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict’s (NTF-ELCAC) Barangay Development Program. Of the P19-billion proposed NTF-ELCAC budget for next year, P16.4 billion was earmarked for the program. “These are distributed sa implementing agencies. May (There is a) task force but they only serve as secretariat. Most of it will be implemented by the DILG (Department of Interior and Local Government), and they are being downloaded to LGUs (local government units),” Lacson said in an interview on ABS-CBN News Channel, echoing the explanation of Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado during the Senate hearing on Wednesday. “Once a barangay is cleared, the LGUs through the DILG would ne

One of the world’s leading counterinsurgency experts is alarmed by what he sees. Members of far-right militias and white pride organizations rally near Stone Mountain Park in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on Aug. 15. Logan Cyrus/Getty Images David Kilcullen is one of the world’s leading authorities on insurgencies. For decades he has studied them. As an infantry soldier in the Australian army and an adviser to the U.S. Army, he’s fought against them. His latest scholarly work has focused on their role in urban conflicts . So when Kilcullen says that America is in a state of “incipient insurgency,” it’s worth sitting up, taking notice, and trembling just a little. The official definition of an insurgency is the “organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control” of an area. An “incipient insurgency” might be happening when “inchoate actions by a range of groups”—followed by

Bhubaneswar: Two security personnel lost their lives in the gunfight with Maoists in Odisha's Kalahandi district, police said on Thursday. Five Maoists were also killed in the exchange of fire that took place in the Bhandarangi Sirki forest area on the Kalahandi-Kandhamal border on Wednesday, they said. The two personnel of the Odisha Police's Special Operation Group (SOG) who lost their lives are Sudhir Kumar Tudu (28) of Mayurbhanj district and Debasis Sethy (27) of Angul district, an officer said. While one of them was injured and later succumbed to the injuries at a hospital, the other person's body was found by the forces during combing operations, he said. Among the Maoists killed in the operation were four women, he said. They belonged to the Bansadhara-Ghumsar-Nagabali division of the banned CPI(Maoist), the officer said. Six weapons were recovered from the encounter site, according to Kalahandi's Superintendent of Police B Gangadhar.

  The US announced on Thursday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is flying to Doha to attend the opening ceremony of the Afghanistan peace negotiations, due to begin on Saturday. “The start of these negotiations follows intense diplomatic efforts, including the US-Taliban agreement and the US-Afghanistan joint declaration, which were agreed to in February ,” the State Department said. We will be down to 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan very soon and down to 2,000 in Iraq very soon Donald Trump US President Donald Trump announced the trip for the talks between the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban insurgents, tying it to plans to withdraw 4,000 American troops from the country. “No deaths, no problems since early February,” Mr Trump said. "We are getting along very, very well with the Taliban." February was the date of the US deal with the Taliban. But on Wednesday, a bombing in the Afghan capital hit the convoy of the c

Paul Rusesabagina had been living in exile in the United States until he suddenly appeared under arrest in Rwanda 10 days ago, accused of murder, terrorism and financing rebels Human Rights Watch said Friday that the shadowy arrest of the hero of the "Hotel Rwanda" film amounted to an "enforced disappearance", demanding a full account of how he returned to the country. Paul Rusesabagina became famous after the movie depicted how the moderate Hutu sheltered hundreds of Tutsi at a luxury hotel during Rwanda's 1994 genocide that left some 800,000, mostly Tutsi, dead.  He had been living in exile in the United States until he suddenly appeared under arrest in Rwanda 10 days ago, accused of murder, terrorism and financing rebels. His family believes he was kidnapped while on a trip to Dubai, arguing he would never return of his own accord to Rwanda. "Rwanda has an established track record of using unlawful, cloak-and-dagger methods to target those

The Jivan Wellness in Johns Creek, Georgia, United States, was co-founded by Ravi Zacharias, the most famous Christian apologist in the world. He was diagnosed with a malignant and rare cancer in his spine in March this year, and passed away on 19 May at the age of 74. The spa, whose opening was attended by the biggest names in the Christian missionary world, however, had to be closed down, reportedly , because of the way Ravi treated the women who worked there. Steve Baughman, a lawyer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has carefully documented the case against Zacharias at his website . He has written a book on the subject titled Cover-Up in the Kingdom: Phone Sex, Lies, And God's Great Apologist, Ravi Zacharias. Baughman communicated with masseuses who were formerly in the employment of Zacharias. They told him that Zacharias sexually molested the help at his spa. He also used to “fly women in from India” to give him treatment at Jivan. In 2016, it was revealed

    As the United States marks 19 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a new report finds at least 37 million people in eight countries have been displaced since the start of the so-called global war on terrorism since 2001. The Costs of War Project at Brown University also found more than 800,000 people have been killed since U.S. forces began fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen, at a cost of $6.4 trillion to U.S. taxpayers. “The U.S. has played a disproportionate role in waging war, in launching war and in perpetuating war over the last 19 years,” says report co-author David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University.   Source: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/11/9_11_war_on_terror_report

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) has hit out at Pakistan's Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED), saying it has failed to hold perpetrators responsible for the crime in the last several years. In 2011, the COIED was formed to trace the whereabouts of missing persons and fix the responsibility on individuals or organisations responsible for the enforced disappearances. The probe body is headed by Justice Javed Iqbal, Dawn reported. According to a briefing paper titled 'Entrenching Impunity, Denying Redress: The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan', the ICJ noted that although the COIED had traced the whereabouts of the missing persons in a number of cases, there was no effort to fix the responsibility for the crime. Also read| Pakistan: At least 441 new coronavirus cases reported The paper evaluated the performance of COIED since its constitution and assessed th