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Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)

northern Mali

Born as an Algerian insurgency in the early 1990s, the group was largely defeated and driven into a swath of ungoverned desert land — about the size of France — in northern Mali. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the group reached out to al-Qaida in an effort to survive. AQIM was officially recognized as an al-Qaida affiliate by Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Both the U.S. and the European Union have designated AQIM a terrorist organization. The group has since absorbed some of al-Qaida's techniques for roadside bombs and suicide attacks. Occasionally it has issued videos and statements on jihadi Internet forums. In December 2007, for example, the group attacked the U.N.'s Algerian headquarters, killing 37 people, including 17 U.N. staff members. At the same time, AQIM has increased its recruiting efforts, drawing insurgents from Mauritania, Nigeria and Chad, officials said. The recruits are trained in small arms and roadside bomb construction, officials said, then return to their home countries to plan and execute attacks. The spike in recruiting and training, along with the increase in kidnappings and other crimes, has made the region more insecure and unstable in just a year, several officials said. The militants often partner with local criminals, who kidnap tourists then sell them to AQIM, which then demands ransoms, officials said. Those alliances cement contacts between the criminal groups and AQIM, broadening its reach and membership.

Egypt will shoulder the costs of restoring the country's Jewish houses of worship said the culture minister Tuesday, two days after a historic synagogue in Cairo's ancient Jewish quarter was rededicated in a private ceremony. Farouk Hosny said in a statement that his ministry views Jewish sites as much a part of Egypt's culture as Muslim mosques or Coptic churches and the restorations would not require any foreign funding.

What the country needs is an interpretation of Islam that embraces freedom and human rights instead of violence and tribal oppression. Everything else is a Band-Aid.

All forms of censorship within "self" and "society" have to be removed because they are obstacles on the path to realization. This means that no individual or group can legitimately dominate another, and that challenging all forms of domination in oneself and others is an ethical responsibility. This Islam is a religion of freedom.

the enormity of the task should not prevent Afghans from undertaking it, as it is impossible to imagine a democratic and developing Afghanistan if the status of women is not confronted. It requires a frontal jihad – a political, intellectual, and spiritual struggle to liberate Muslims and Islamic societies from the addiction to force. This can only be successful when grounded in a freedom-oriented Islam, rather than Western models that seem increasingly alien to many Afghans.

Decaying oil tankers at the coasts of Yemen pose serious risks to the environment and the people depending on it, reminding us starkly how conflicts can bring serious pollution risks. New open source research by PAX reveals multiple oil spills from rusty ships that have been polluting the coastal areas around the Port of Aden. If no action is taken by the authorities to remove these ships, it is only a matter of time before a new disaster will unfold.

Current international attention is mainly focused on finding a solution for the decaying oil tanker FSO SAFER loaded with 1.1 million barrels of oil. The tanker is at risk of sinking or exploding, which would create a regional environmental catastrophe. Yet over the course of the last years, smaller incidents around oil tankers in Yemen’s ports, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have been mounting as well. Ranging from direct attacks on oil tankers to abandoned ships sinking and fires at port refineries, the conflict continues to create serious local pollution problems.

The war itself already poses serious environmental challenges that impact both Yemen’s population and its precious ecosystems. This ranges from structural leaking oil incidents documented by the Yemen environmentalist group Holmakhdar and the Sanaa Center, to broader environmental problems, and conflict-linked cutting and dying of millions of date palms, demonstrated by the open-source investigative group Bellingcat. The current weak state of governance and oversight around the many environmental challenges Yemen is facing continues to result in ongoing incidents that worsen the state of environment and affect the people depending on it.  Not only does this currently already lead to mounting environmental health risks and degraded ecosystems, these impacts will also worsen climate resilience for the conflict-affected country due to more extreme weather events, water shortages and rising temperatures

The global system is built around sovereign states, and it shows. This is an enormous problem for groups that define themselves, or are defined by others, as distinct from the country within whose borders they happen to reside, and it’s also terrible as a framework for navigating the global politics of a rapidly changing world.

Sovereignty is usually traced back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which was pivotal in shifting conceptions of government toward a secular state with entire authority inside inviolable territorial borders. Designed as a diplomatic solution to catastrophic religious wars among feudal, monarchical territories, its tenets have persisted into the modern world largely due to the entrenched power of those states, jealously guarding their unfettered rule over their slice of geography.

as the power of monarchy eroded and European countries needed something else to inspire loyalty among their citizens, the ideal of the nation-state—that the people within those arbitrary borders would feel some sort of collective identity—became popular. This led to more wars as European states expelled or converted anyone who didn’t fit their concept of nation: not French enough, not German enough, not Italian enough. They also spread this idea to their colonies, exporting successive waves of destructive conflicts.

"We accepted the proposal in principle," Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki told reporters at a regional security conference in Bahrain. In what is almost certain to be a deal breaker, however, he spoke of exchanging the material in phases rather than all at once as is called for in the U.N. plan. He said Iran had offered to make a first shipment of 880 pounds (400 kilograms) of enriched uranium. Carrying it out in slow stages would leave Iran in control of enough uranium to make a bomb.

Hand in Hand operates four bilingual schools across Israel and two kindergartens. Jaffa’s primary school classes are the most recent addition.The idea of children from different cultural backgrounds learning together and speaking each other’s language may seem uncontroversial. But it has prompted a fierce backlash from right-wing Jewish groups in Israel.In late 2014 Hand in Hand’s flagship school in Jerusalem was torched by activists from Lehava, an organisation that opposes integration between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Graffiti daubed on the walls read “Death to the Arabs” and “There can be no coexistence with cancer”.Three of the group’s members were jailed last year. In January Israel’s high court increased the sentences of two brothers involved in the arson attack.Although Lehava is a fringe group, it draws on ideas that have found favour with much larger numbers of Israeli Jews, especially over the past 15 years as the country has lurched to the right.A survey by the Pew polling organisation this month found that half of Israeli Jews wanted Arabs expelled from the state, and 79 percent believed Jews should have more rights than their Palestinian compatriots.

1,350 children are currently in bilingual education, out of a total Israeli school population of some 1.5 million children.

The Jaffa parents argue that their coastal city of 50,000 residents, which is incorporated into the Tel Aviv municipal area, is the natural location for a bilingual school.A third of Jaffa’s residents are Palestinian, reflecting the fact that, before Israel’s creation in 1948, it was Palestine’s commercial centre.Although Israelis mostly live in separate communities, based on their ethnicity, Jaffa is one of half a dozen urban areas where Jewish and Palestinian citizens live close to each other.

Having recently returned from a European Foundation for Democracy sponsored trip to Antakya and Istanbul, during which a European delegation and I met over 100 Syrian opposition figures, a number of important observations come to mind. First, one of my strongest impressions is that things are not what they seem. It is very difficult on the ground to be sure who it is that you are really talking to and what they represent. Second, Turkish officials maintain a striking degree of control over Syrian opposition forces inside Turkey. Third, the Muslim Brotherhood is pervasive not only within the Syrian National Council (SNC), but among many opposition groups – mostly outside Syria. Lastly, there is a striking cynicism and anger among fighters within Syria toward the outside world for not providing enough practical support.

Syrians of all backgrounds seem to be free to move between Syria and Turkey with only Turkish permission. The Syrian government now seems to have lost control of its borders in every direction.

there is a distinct Turkish preference for some parts of the opposition movement; they favor the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the Syrian National Council.

It was August 14, and Shreateh had just reached halfway around the world to pull off a prank that would make him the most famous hacker in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He’d discovered a Facebook bug that would allow him to post to another user’s wall even if he wasn’t on the user’s friends list. Demonstrating the bug on Zuckerberg was a last resort: He first reported the vulnerability to Facebook’s bug bounty program, which usually pays $500 for discoveries like his. But Facebook dismissed his report out of hand, and to this day refuses to pay the bounty for the security hole, which it has now fixed. Where Facebook failed, though, techies from across the world stepped in to fix, crowdfunding a $13,000 reward for Shreateh. Now that money, and Shreateh’s notoriety, is about to launch the former construction worker into a new life. He’s using the funds to buy a new laptop and launch a cybersecurity service where websites will be able to request “ethical hacking” to identify their vulnerabilities. And he’s started a six-month contract with a nearby university to find bugs as part of their information security unit. He hacks and reports flaws on other universities’ sites in his free time.

The West Bank is no easy place to be a hacker, or to do anything in the technology sphere. The occupied region depends on Israel for electricity, water and telecommunications, including the sluggish Internet that crawls into the South Hebron Hills. Shreateh has a well and three water tanks on his roof because Yatta only receives several days of running water every few months. Blackouts are common, and the town often goes without electricity for whole days in the winter. Partly to blame is a complex system established by the Oslo accords that splits the West Bank into three zones under different combinations of Palestinian and Israeli control. “It’s like Swiss cheese,” says George Khadder, a tech entrepreneur who worked in Silicon Valley for 13 years. He sketches how Zones A, B and C weave in, out and around each other, with chunks of Israeli settlement territory in between. “The West Bank is like an archipelago, in terms of contiguity and services. This is absolutely a problem.” This access gap is clear on the drive from Jerusalem to Yatta, which requires passing through a military checkpoint that bars Shreateh from entering Israel. The road to Yatta passes several Israeli settlements, sprawling over hilltops with their separate telecom systems, brightly lit streets and green, well-watered lawns. “The dogs in Israel drink more water than Palestinians,” the taxi driver laughs.

Shreateh has his own website and 44,156 followers on Facebook, many of whom spam him with questions about hacking into their boyfriends’ profiles or raising their exam grades online. Shreateh ignores them. “I am an ethical hacker,” he says. “I don’t damage or destroy.” That makes him different from some other Palestinian hackers. The same month as Shreateh’s Facebook prank, hacktivists hijacked Google’s Palestine domain, redirecting it to a page with a Rihanna background song and written message: “uncle google we say hi from palestine to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine” This month, another group called KDMS hacked the websites of security companies AVG and Avira, among other companies, redirecting to a site displaying the Palestinian flag, a graphic of Palestinian land loss, and a similar message: “we want to tell you that there is a land called Palestine on the earth,” it read in part. “this land has been stolen by Zionist.’