There are three key reasons why success for the West hasn’t followed. Together, these reasons point towards an urgent need to shift strategy to avoid a stalemate.
Foreign fighters have always posed a dual challenge: how to stop them going and what to do if they return. History offers lessons on managing these problems, including that it’s hard to stop them leaving.
On the face of it, Iraq and the US Federal Reserve share little. One is a country plagued by division, war and mayhem since the US invasion of 2003. It is a brutal world where there are no friends, few…
If governments are to maintain public support for their military ventures, war narratives must be kept simple and consistent. The underlying message must not change: the West is always the innocent victim of terrorism, never its perpetrator.
The Camp Speicher massacre was one of Islamic State’s earliest and worst mass killings – but it was nearly buried under a tide of misinterpretation and denial.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has flagged that Australia would like to see its substantial military contribution to the war against Islamic State more effectively used.
Simplistic views of terrorist recruitment focus on online messages to Western youth. Foreign fighters are coming from many other countries, lured by many means, and we need more sophisticated responses.
Memories of the killing of Osama bin Laden are fading, but the legacies of al-Qaeda and the war on terror’s many ‘own goals’ haunt us in the form of multiplying threats and lost civil liberties.
There are religious and non-religious extremists and we should not confuse violent believers with religion itself, which has a long history of peacemaking.
Dire government warnings and counter-terrorism raids in our suburbs paint a picture of the worst threat Western nations have ever faced. A little historical perspective is in order.
The terrorist group now calls itself Islamic State, but the many names by which it is known reflect both its own evolution and the deliberate choices others make in how they refer to it.