Fierce urban fighting alongside Machiavellian political maneuvering is nothing new to the Syrian conflict. But the past few days have brought a new twist in the upheaval with lasting, if opaque, repercussions for Syria’s civil war and the many actors involved in it directly or by proxy. The key center of the new convoluted and deadly developments is Aleppo, Syria’s prewar commercial capital, now a rubble-strewn ruin at the heart of the five-year-old conflict. After several days of intensified battles and curious political moves, a new crop of winners and losers is emerging. But identifying who they are, or who [...]
In the early hours of June 27, four suicide bombers detonated their explosive belts in the sleepy Lebanese town of al-Qaa, which lies just a few kilometers from the Syrian frontier. Another four attackers would strike later in the evening, with the two attacks killing five and wounding scores more. In the context of spillover from the Syrian civil war, the violence itself was not an anomaly. Lebanon has been on high alert for retaliatory terrorist activity ever since 2013, when Hezbollah leader Sayed Hasan Nasrallah publicly announced the party’s fighters were active in Syria alongside longtime ally President Bashar [...]
A bloody summer, with attacks from Orlando to Nice to Bangladesh, has left many wondering what compels an individual, whether a low-level criminal with a history of domestic violence or a student at an elite private school, to massacre civilians in the name of the so-called Islamic State or another extremist group. Even more confounding is how to stop them. That question isn’t new, or unique to the rise of the Islamic State. For years, governments, analysts and observers have worked to understand the drivers of radicalization and how best to block the road to extremism, particularly among youth. In [...]
