By Anne Speckhard*, Ardian Shajkovci** The Syrian civil uprising, abuses by Syrian President Bashar Assad, and calls from terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al Qaeda, resulted in an estimated 40,000 or more foreign fighters...
By Anne Speckhard*, Ardian Shajkovci** & Neima Izadi In 2017, ISIS suffered major territorial and military defeat in Iraq. Despite the achieved success, the group remains active and in control of small pockets of territory in Iraq. It also continues to lure...
A recent PBS series highlighted the case of an American mother, Samantha Elhassani, who took her two American children into the so-called Islamic State and had two more babies there with her Moroccan husband, who became a member of ISIS. Her two eldest children, now...
Abu Qatada, who many have called the spiritual father of al Qaeda in Europe, is a scholar of Islam and what many might deem a terrorist instigator, or an ideologue who puts out arguments in support of militant jihad, but never himself fights jihad or spills blood....
Hundreds of thousands of children around the world have been seduced and forced into being child soldiers and cadres in the service of armed and violent groups. Many have been successfully treated using a combination of individual, family and community...
