How young Somali immigrants to the U.S. searched for belonging, and found jihad. First of a three-part series. (Part II) (Part III) On Oct. 29 last year, Shirwa Ahmed drove a car full of explosives up to a government compound in Puntland, a region of northern Somalia, and blew himself up. The blast — apparently orchestrated by al-Shabab, an Islamic militant group with ties to al-Qaida — was part of a coordinated attack in two cities that killed more than 20 people. A BBC reporter described body parts flying through the air. The attackers were “not from Puntland,” said Adde [...]
On the eve of his retirement on Aug. 26, Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, declared an end to the war in Sudan’s southern province. “As of today, I would not say there is a war going on in Darfur,” Agwai, a Nigerian, said at a press conference in Khartoum. Agwai’s joint U.N.-African Union force, deployed in 2007, numbers around 15,000 soldiers and police. “Militarily there is not much” going on in Darfur, Agwai said. “What you have is security issues more now. Banditry . . . people trying to resolve issues over water [...]
YALA, Thailand — After more than five years, Thailand’s Muslim insurgency shows no signs of abating. But neither is there any sign of it expanding or joining the ranks of international terrorism. Instead it remains localized, which is where the Thai government hopes it will remain. Some security analysts had been concerned about the possibility of connections to al-Qaida-linked extremist groups, especially the Indonesian-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). JI was responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people on the resort island, and is dedicated to establishing an Islamic state encompassing Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the southern Philippines and [...]
