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Britain is not formally taking part in military action in Syria — its Parliament having rejected such an intervention two years ago — but Britain and France are involved in the American-led air campaign against Islamic State targets.

di construction magnate and attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. It's hard to imagine someone with more opportunities

But, in fact, Osama bin Laden is more the rule than the exception. Take not only Emwazi/Jihadi John, but also the notorious British terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who attended the London School of Economics and who kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

Similarly, in his important 2004 book "Understanding Terror Networks," psychiatrist Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer, examined the backgrounds of 172 militants who were part of al Qaeda or a similar group. Just under half were professionals; two-thirds were either middle or upper class and had gone to college; indeed, several had doctorates.

Significantly, we found that, of those who did attend college and/or graduate school, 58% attained scientific or technical degrees. Emwazi/Jihadi John reportedly studied computer programming, which makes him typical of the anti-Western jihadist terrorists we examine

The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society.

Post-9/11 research demonstrating that Islamist terrorism is mostly a pursuit of the middle class echoed an important study about Egyptian militants that was undertaken by the French academic Gilles Kepel during the mid-1980s.

The conclusion, based on a survey of all the published literature, was that there were only a few "major exceptions to the middle- and upper-class origins of terrorist groups."

ISIS may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is, just as Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the unborn child explain why some Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics and doctors. But, of course, murderous Christian fundamentalists are not killing many thousands of civilians a year. More than 80% of the world's terrorist attacks take place in five Muslim-majority countries

will kill in the name of their god, an all-too-common phenomenon across human history.

ISIS and like-minded groups and their fellow travelers are not representative of the vast majority of the world's Muslims, their ideology is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, and indeed they can point to verses in the Quran that can be interpreted to support their worldview.

In other words, coming out of Khorasan, an area that now encompasses Afghanistan, will come an army that includes the Mahdi, the Islamic savior of the world. The parent organization of ISIS was al Qaeda, which, of course, was headquartered in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

religious group and nationality that they perceive as standing in their way. ISIS recruits also believe that we are in the end times, and they are best understood as members of an Islamist apocalyptic death cult.

Emwazi challenges the social and moral order. To put it mildly. Far more than, say, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reportedly Iraqi-born ISIS leader challenges the social and moral order.

This is because Emwazi spent most of his life in Britain, in the secular West. Despite his Kuwaiti background and heritage, he was socialized or “acculturated” here, not over there. He went to school here, played football here, went to university here, talked London-street tough here, and wore baseball caps here.

Killers, too, can act in decent and humane ways. It is just that we rarely like to admit it—unless of course they kill in defense of the good, as we subjectively define it.

Problem number one: an overreliance on military force and other “kinetic options.”

That effort has sometimes achieved narrow tactical aims — ousting the Taliban in 2002, overthrowing Saddam in 2003, toppling Qaddafi and killing bin Laden in 2011 — but it has failed to solve the larger strategic problem and created conditions where extremism was likely to flourish rather than wither.

when historians a few decades from now look back on U.S. policy, they will no doubt regard this record as a massive, collective failure of the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment

the ability to blow things up and kill people does not translate into a workable set of governing institutions.

Like a cardiac surgeon who prescribes open-heart surgery for every malady from influenza to athlete’s foot, the United States now reaches for drones, Special Operations, or training missions not because they will cure the disease, but that is all we know how to do.

Second, U.S. officials have never seriously questioned the underlying set of policy commitments that have turned much of the Middle East against us, made the jihadi narrative seem appealing to some listeners, and made our friends in the region look like lackeys. U.S. officials from both parties have sometimes recognized that Israel’s occupation was a problem for the United States (as well as threat to Israel’s long-term future), and they have sometimes understood that many of our Middle East “partners” were less than fully reliable. Unfortunately, such moments of clarity never led any serious reconsideration of U.S. support for its various questionable clients.

The final reason for recurring failure is the tendency to rely on the same people, no matter what their past track records have been. We’ve seen a revolving door of (unsuccessful) Middle East peace negotiators who then spend their retirements giving advice on how future peace negotiations should be conducted

We’ve got a CIA director whose been centrally involved in U.S. counterterror policy since the early 1990s, and who continues to enjoy the president’s confidence despite a dodgy relationship with the truth and a conspicuous lack of policy success. We’ve got famous generals who were better at self-promotion than at winning wars, yet whose advice on what to do today is still eagerly sought. And of course we’ve got a large community of hawkish pundits offering up the same bellicose advice, with no acknowledgement of how disastrously their past recommendations have fared. The result is that U.S. policy continues to run on the same familiar tracks, and with more-or-less the same unhappy results.

Lebanese intelligence believes the bombers could be part of a cell dispatched to Beirut by ISIS leadership, the source said, but investigators are still working to verify the surviving suspect's claim

Last month at least 95 people were killed in twin bombings in Turkey's capital, Ankara, ripping through a peace rally near the city's main train station

The attack may have been retaliation for a recent change in Turkey's stance toward confronting the ISIS threat -- shortly before the attacks it had allowed the U.S. to launch strikes on ISIS from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

Russia's recent, increased involvement in the fight against ISIS has seemingly escalated the terror group's responses.

Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, in which all 224 people on board were killed, the recent attacks in Lebanon and France suggest that the jihadists are lashing out.

A revelation Sunday that at least one of the Paris terrorists who killed more than 120 people on Friday entered Europe under cover as a refugee appears likely to fire up the security debate over what to do with them

Eventually, he made his way to Paris, where he was one of three men who blew themselves up at the Stade de France.

Seven people have been arrested in relation to the attacks in the raids, he said.

The authorities there have been making headway, however. At the beginning of the year a terror cell on the brink of carrying out an attack was the target of a raid which left two suspects dead and a third injured and apprehended.

Abu Nabil, an Iraqi national and longtime al Qaeda operative, was taken out in an airstrike authorized and initiated prior to the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

he infamous masked British executioner, who has apparently appeared in a number of gruesome videos in which ISIS captives were decapitated, was very likely killed in a drone strike earlier in the month.

Obama met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of this weekend's G20 summit in Turkey and reportedly reached an informal agreement that there was a necessity for a ceasefire and transitional government in Syria to effectively combat the threat.