In-Depth Archive

Editor’s Note: This article is one of three WPR features on the theme “The Al-Qaida We Don’t Know.” WASHINGTON — At 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2007, a suicide bomber blew the Moorish-style facade off the building that housed Algeria’s Constitutional Council, which oversees the country’s elections. Ten minutes later, elsewhere in Algiers, a truck containing 1,800 pounds of explosives and another suicide attacker leveled part of a United Nations building. The blasts killed 42 people — including 17 U.N. employees — and injured 158 others. They were also the surest sign to date that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb […]

Editor’s Note: This article is one of three WPR features on the theme “The Al-Qaida We Don’t Know.” Two months ago, on the seventh anniversary of the attacks of 9/11, dozens of American scholars published articles trying to determine whether al-Qaida is stronger or weaker today than it was seven years ago. Nearly all of the analysis, though, viewed al-Qaida exclusively through the theoretical lens of counterterrorism, an approach that essentially defines the organization by its choice of tactics. But ignoring the many social, cultural and historical factors that effect al-Qaida’s relation to its principal constituency, the “Arab street,” skews […]

Editor’s Note: This article is one of three WPR features on the theme “The Al-Qaida We Don’t Know.” Salim Hamdan was not a typical al-Qaida prisoner. For seven years prior to his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001, Hamdan had been Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and bodyguard. He had been caught red handed on an al-Qaida film carrying an AK 47 while protecting the al-Qaida chief, and as if that weren’t enough, pictures of Hamdan’s car at the time of his arrest showed two SAM 7 heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles there on the backseat. Hardly the normal accoutrement for an […]

This month’s release of Field Manual 3-07, “Stability Operations,” marks a milestone for the United States Army. With it, the Army acknowledges and codifies a dramatic change in thinking: No longer does the mission of the military stop at winning wars; now it must also help “win the peace.” As Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, IV, states in the foreword to the new manual: As the Nation continues into this era of uncertainty and persistent conflict, the lines separating war and peace, enemy and friend, have blurred and no longer conform to the clear delineations we once knew. At the […]

The three short articles by an anthropology professor from California seemed out of place beside a large area map and various military memoranda on a plywood wall at combat outpost Tarmiyah, about 20 miles north of Baghdad. Not long ago, the accompanying note demanding that all platoon and squad leaders not only read the articles, but pass the information along to their men, would have made most commanders in Iraq laugh at the thought of burdening their already overworked junior officers and NCOs with articles by college professors. But the conduct of the Iraq War has taken a decidedly cultural […]

On Sept. 25, Somali pirates armed with rockets and assault rifles and traveling in small boats called “skiffs,” scaled the side of the Ukrainian cargo ship Fainaoff the Somali coast and overpowered the 22 crew members on board. Inside the 530-foot roll-on, roll-off vessel, the pirates made a surprise discovery: 33 Soviet-designed T-72 tanks, plus small arms, rockets and ammunition. The arms shipment was reportedly on its way to an unspecified customer in Sudan, but now seems likely to wind up on the African black market instead, unless the vessel’s shady owners cough up the unprecedented $20-million ransom demanded by […]