As Arab and Western diplomats work to fashion tools to pressure the Syrian regime to end its military response to a year-old rebellion, an unrelenting artillery exacts a terrible daily toll on the residents of rebel-held Sunni …
Qaeda
Baghdad Bloodbath Threatens Sectarian Chaos in Iraq: Will Iran Stoke or Douse the Fires?
A series of deadly bombings across Baghdad that killed at least 63 people and wounded hundreds on Thursday underscored the political and security peril facing Iraq amid rising sectarian tension. Officials said four car bombs and …
Ten Grim Lessons Learned From the Iraq War
Despite the upbeat talk of the Obama Administration, the eight-year war that ended this week has done plenty of long-term damage to both Iraq and the United States. And it has bequeathed lessons worth considering ahead of future conflicts
Al-Qaeda After Bin-Laden: Can the ‘Brand’ Survive?
While most of the U.S. media this week rolled out “box set”-type compilations of the best of ten years of reporting on Osama bin-Laden, the magazine most al-Qaeda watches are waiting for is the next edition of Inspire. Dubbed by the LA Times as the “Vanity Fair of jihadi publications,” the next edition of the glossy produced by al-Qaeda …
Pakistan May Have Been Cheating on the U.S., but Don’t Expect the Marriage to End
That Pakistan has been an unreliable ally to the U.S. is hardly news: just as Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad, so has Pakistan’s security establishment scarcely bothered to conceal the fact that it pursues an agenda quite different from that of the U.S. While that establishment has helped the U.S. roll up hundreds …
Why Bin Laden’s Death No Longer Really Matters
Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editor asked me to prepare an obituary for Osama bin Laden for TIME.com on the assumption that he might well be killed in Afghanistan while I was on the beach in Cape Town. Almost ten years later there was finally a reason to call up the old file: President Barack …
Al Qaeda Goes Glossy
And you thought print was dead. The latest contender in the current-affairs magazine market carries the innocuous title Inspire, and the cover art of its fifth edition, Spring 1431 (or 2011 if you follow the infidel calendar) would not look out of place on the New Age self-help shelves of your news agent. But its publisher, al-Malahim …
Is the Obama Administration Losing its Fear of Islamists?
Has President Barack Obama, as the old saying goes, stopped worrying and learned to love the Muslim Brotherhood? Not exactly. But the Washington Post reports Friday on the first green shoots of what may turn out to be a maturing of the United States’ response to Islamist movements in the Middle East. In light of the possibility that …