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| 1 |
ID:
060835
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Jan-Feb 2005.
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| Summary/Abstract |
At first glance, Kenya and Tanzania, the scene of some of Al Qaida's most impressive attacks, would appear to be fertile ground for recruiting militants into the global Islamist jihad. Substantial Muslim populations, widespread poverty, poor policing, inadequate border control, and systemic political and economic corruption would seem to make these East African countries potentially rich environments in which to attract new Al Qaida members. However, other factors essential to the terrorist recruitment process are largely absent. Despite claims that the traditionally tolerant Muslim populations of Kenya and Tanzania re being radicalized, the evidence suggests that Islamist radicals have in fact made little headway. Although individuals may have forged links with Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden and his network have few followers. Of course, this is subject to change. But in the near term, absent an environment of radicalism, as in a major recruitment ground like Pakistan, it is difficult to see how Al Qaida can expect to attract more than a handful of new members. That said, the United States could do far more in the region to prevent the emergence of violent Islamist extremism.
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| 2 |
ID:
060842
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Jan-Feb 2005.
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Since 1995 Dr. Brendan O'Shea, a former European Union Monitor, has been studying developments in the Balkans with his predictive article, Kosovo—Another Bosnia in the Making, awarded the Seamus Kelly Literary Award in Ireland. Nine years after NATO troops first deployed in Bosnia, and five years after KFOR commenced operations in Kosovo, he once again examines the overall situation in the region and is ill at ease with his findings.
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| 3 |
ID:
060836
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Jan-Feb 2005.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The initial encounters between Al Qaeda and the U.S. military taught both a series of lessons that reverberate across the battlefields of Afghanistan today. Both sides entered the fray with preconceived ideas of their enemy—ideas that disappeared on the battlefields of the Shahi-Kot valley. The United States was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the siege of Tora Bora. Their battleplan called for a lightning fast operation using highly mobile U.S. and Afghan forces to envelop the enemy, but failures of intelligence and the fog of war transformed Anaconda into a long, slow struggle against an often invisible foe. Al Qaeda had all the advantages of terrain and defense but was unable to cause the massive casualties they thought would drive the American invaders from Afghanistan. Both sides left the battlefield with valuable lessons that have prevented any similar encounters since silence returned to the Shahi-Kot.
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| 4 |
ID:
060839
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Jan-Feb 2005.
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Although Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) is a pan-Southeast Asia jihadi network, it has been able to headquarter itself in Indonesia, where it has also been able to find the lion's share of its recruits. This article finds that there is little support for hardline Islamic political movements, or even violent jihadi groups, from the wider population. Yet at the same time the public is skeptical about the existence of an international terrorist problem. Not only is there general denial amongst the Indonesian population but Indonesia's political leaders have had to tread carefully on the issue. Indonesia has had a degree of success in denting the JI network but confronting terrorism on the whole is fraught with political difficultiesnotably the impression that the war on terrorism might be a plot to weaken the Islamic world.
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| 5 |
ID:
060840
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Jan-Feb 2005.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 11 September 2001 event was a turning point in the assessment of terrorism as a phenomenon and added a new dimension to the evaluation of terrorism as an academic subject. New academic courses dealing with various aspects of terrorism evolved, mostly in American universities, and more disciplines took part analyzing different angles of this phenomenon, thus sharpening its interdisciplinary nature. The enhanced interest in terrorism, though, did not change the nature of this subject area, which remained spread among various grand disciplines such as History, Political Science, Sociology, and Religious Studies. A case in point is the New Urban Geography, a new subfield of Geography that deals with urban planning in the setting of the possibility of wide-scale terrorist attack. The general trend of the new academic courses shows signs of the Stockholm Syndrome (an analogy to a person kidnapped by terrorists who comes to identify with his or hers kidnappers) because too many of these courses dealt with a better understanding of terrorists motivations, as well as better understanding of the role of Islam in the world today. Following descriptions of these trends, an attempt is made to create a model of the academic study of terrorism. The closing chapter deals with the dynamics of terrorism studies at the University of Haifa after 9/11, where a gradual growth in the number of courses on terrorism is demonstrated, as compared with the accelerated increase in these courses in the United States.
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| 6 |
ID:
060838
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Jan-Feb 2005.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The end of Greece's Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) finally came on 5 September 2002 when the group's leader of operations, Dimitris Koufodinas, turned himself to the police. Unlike Alexandros Giotopoulos, the group's chief ideologue who denied any involvement in 17N, Koufodinas took responsibility for the entire 17N experience and sought to defend and justify their violent actions. Drawing on Koufodinas's court testimony this article suggests that the world of 17N was a closed, self-referential world where terrorism had become for the members a way of life from which they could not walk away. Defending the group's campaign from beginning to end, Koufodinas contended that 17N was an authentic revolutionary alternative to a barbaric, inhumane and vindictive capitalist order that was running amok. An emblematic personality of 17N terrorism, Dimitris Koufodinas embraced the view that Greece's “self-negating democracy” necessitated exactly the kind of political violence they had undertaken
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