After a month of fighting in Iraq, the ISIS insurgency has made considerable progress, even if there is now something of a stalemate as Shi’a militias organise themselves and the weak Iraqi Army gets a…
British support for opposition groups fighting against the Assad regime in Syria has waned considerably since the summer of 2013, with the increasing prominence of more radicalised Islamic organisations…
Prince Faisal and his party (including T E Lawrence) at Versailles, 1919.
Wikimedia Commons
The sweeping advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has given rise to a lively debate about who should bear ultimate responsibility for the disintegration of Iraq and Syria. On one hand…
The jihadi fighters in Iraq and Syria include hundreds of Australians.
EPA/Mohammed Jalil
The conflicts in Syria and Iraq are attracting many westerners, including young Australians, as jihadi fighters. Last December, Australian intelligence agencies reported that they were aware of at least…
Concern is again mounting about the radicalisation of young British Muslims, with the news that up to 500 may be fighting in Syria. But despite the gravity of the issue, the public discussion of it is…
Since its nadir in the 2000s, British Islamophobia has become more tempered.
John Giles/PA
For some time now, speculation has raged over the number of young British Muslims travelling to Syria and Iraq with the intention of fighting in the ongoing conflicts there. At the high end, Birmingham-area…
A photograph made available by a jihadist affiliated group.
Albaraka News/EPA
This week Twitter began suspending accounts related to ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham). This follows an ISIS fighter reportedly posting the photo of the head of a decapitated Iraqi police major…
Kurdish peshmerga brigades, which have emerged as the only viable military counterweight to ISIL in Iraq, prepare defences at Kirkuk.
EPA/Khalil al-A'nei
The Kurds have no friends but the mountains, runs the adage. Marginalised, dispossessed and oppressed in their historic homelands, Kurds have long lamented a lack of powerful allies willing and able to…
On the march: IS fighters in Fallujah.
EPA/Mohammed Jalil
The capture of most of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, by Islamist paramilitaries has caused shock across the Middle East and in western capitals, especially Washington, but follows a pattern developing over…
Aid convoy with armoured vehicles from the UN World Food Program.
MSGT Robert Hargreaves Jr., USAF
The hostilities in Syria have killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Every day, people die because they lack goods and services essential for their survival. Much of the suffering is a consequence…
Syrians have the option to vote in their own blood to show commitment.
EPA/Youssef Badawi
There are three candidates running in Syria’s presidential election: the incumbent, Bashar al-Assad and two challengers, Maher Hajjar and Hassan al-Nouri. In reality there is only one, Assad. The other…
Bad influence: Abu Hamza in court.
EPA/Jane Rosenberg
This week saw the convictions of two men at opposite ends of the process of radicalisation – one convicted for radicalising others, the other for being radicalised himself. In the United States, a court…
Who will deliver justice to the civilian victims of the Syrian conflict if not a properly constituted international court?
EPA
The Obama administration has decided to back a push to have the International Criminal Court (ICC) open a formal, United Nations-sanctioned investigation into potential Syrian war crimes, according to…
Human rights monitoring can now be done by anyone.
Allyson Neville-Morgan
In November 2013, the New Yorker published a profile of Eliot Higgins – or Brown Moses as he is known to almost 17,000 Twitter followers. An unemployed finance and admin worker at the time, Higgins was…
Britain’s combat operations in Afghanistan are due to end completely this year, and along with them a century of continuous UK involvement in foreign conflicts. But ever since the HMS Ark Royal sailed…
Tony Blair says Egypt was ‘rescued’ from extremism by military intervention.
EPA/Khaled Elfiqi
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the strongest external support for a forceful response from the United States came from Tony Blair, the man who now again describes the struggle against…
Keep calm and Cameron: PMs in the Knesset.
EPA/Jim Hollander
David Cameron’s long-planned visit to Israel was overshadowed in the UK by Ed Miliband’s Europe speech but Cameron did have an opportunity to address the Knesset. Cameron made a strong plea for Israel…
The rise of homegrown terrorism and foreign fighters in conflicts such as the Syrian civil war has prompted governments to consider various policy responses to combat such threats.
EPA/Stringer
Dealing with the rise of homegrown terrorism has prompted governments to take novel approaches in combating such threats. The UK government, for example, has recently pushed for schools to teach children…
The crisis in Ukraine, as Russian troops apparently occupy Crimea and threaten its borders with the rest of the country, has sent strong tremors through the international diplomatic community. Both Barack…
US president Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have to find a way to conduct meaningful negotiations to help end the Syrian civil war.
EPA
The Geneva II Syria peace talks concluded earlier this month in a sadly predictable failure, marked by the frustration of the UN-Arab League negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi, who apologised to the Syrian people…
Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University