This week Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine became overt for all the world to see. Since February, Moscow waged a semi-covert campaign that I term Special War, with the initial aim of taking Crimea. This succeeded almost bloodlessly thanks to...
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The Russo-Ukrainian War
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New Intelligence on Italian Jihadists
Compared to France, Germany, or Britain, Italy’s problem with domestic jihadism is relatively modest, yet it is growing fast, thanks to the wars in Syria and Iraq. A new report in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s paper of record, based on...
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War and the (Islamic) State
The barbaric murder this week of the American journalist James Foley by a British jihadist has served as a tragic reminder of the gravity of the global threat posed by the Salafi jihad movement. For the first time in years,...
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Bosnia and the Global Jihad Revisited
Back in 2007, my book Unholy Terror ruffled quite a few feathers by pointing out the unpleasant truth that, in the 1990s, Bosnia-Hercegovina became a jihadist playground and a major venue for Al-Qa’ida, thanks to malign Saudi and Iranian influences....
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Vienna Calling: How Austria Became a Hub of Global Jihad
The brutal murder this week of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic State (IS) has focused Western minds, at long last, on the serious nature of the jihadist threat emanating from the Middle East, particularly Iraq and Syria. No...
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100 Years Ago: The First Allied Victory of World War I
[This is the beginning of a new blog series, 100 Years Ago, I’ll be posting to commemorate the centenary of the First World War.] Exactly a century ago today, on 19 August 1914, Austria-Hungary suffered a shocking battlefield defeat at...
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Russian-Backed Separatists Discuss Killing Civilians
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has released a new signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercept on its YouTube page (link here; see a follow-up report in the Kyiv daily Ukrayinska Pravda here) that it says demonstrates that Russian-backed separatists in the Donetsk...
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Interview with a Madman
The Moscow weekly Novaya Gazeta, which is the last independent newsmagazine left in Russia that has a critical stance towards the Kremlin, has published an extended interview with Aleksandr Boroday, the Russian national who until recently was the “prime minister”...
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Is the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Underway?
Amidst sketchy reports of Russian military moves across the Ukrainian border, the website of the Moscow magazine New Times has posted a picture of Russian BTR armored personnel carriers (APCs) with the following text: “Photo by Sergey Khazov, The New...
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How Russia Wages Special War Against NATO and the EU
Long before Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and began his slow-rolling aggression against Ukraine, I was explaining the concept of Special War, specifically as an alternative to the very expensive and not always effective high-intensity warfare at which the U.S. military...