Terrorisme, insurrection ou résistance : cartographier et nommer « l'internationale djihadiste » Depuis la fin des années 1990, on a vu naître et se développer des mouvements islamistes fondamentalistes transnationaux sans vraiment pouvoir en faire une cartographie plus précise que d’indiquer de vagues localisations géographiques où ces groupes opéraient, ou encore les lieux des attentats qui leur étaient attribués. Ces mouvements qui semblaient disparates et agir indépendamment les uns des autres, à l’exception d’Al-Qaida, se sont structurés petit à petit, tout au long des années 2000, et surtout après le début des révoltes arabes en 2011. Ils se sont transformés en organisations politiques, idéologiques et militaires, qui commencent à tisser entre elles des liens étroits. Depuis 2013, elles ont même entrepris de se « territorialiser » - avec plus ou moins de succès (certaines tentatives de territorialisation sont « contrariées » par des interventions militaires occidentales).
Cette toute première approche ignorait tout de ce qui se passait au sud du Sahara. Al-Qaida planning kamikaze attacks on ships in Mediterranean, cables claim. Al-Qaida has developed a seaborne unit to attack targets around the Mediterranean, according to a confidential report from Russian intelligence, one of a cache of secret documents from spy agencies around the world tracking jihadi terrorist groups.
According to the Russians, North African al-Qaida (Aqim – al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) has established a 60-strong team of suicide bombers to plant mines under the hull of ships and to use small, fast craft for kamikaze attacks. The claim, in a leaked document from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), is one of a string of reports on the rise of Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaida. They include a two-month briefing by Omani intelligence estimating that Isis now has up to 35,000 fighters and an income of $1.5m (£1m) a day, reports from United Arab Emirates agents about the Isis leadership structure and a dossier from Jordanian intelligence on confessions extracted from terrorist suspects.
Al-Qaida has used such tactics before. There Is No Global Jihadist ‘Movement’ Untitled. Over the past couple of weeks, the open jihad has taken ground in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Iraq. It's ongoing success is due to innovations developed by a large and growing number of contributing groups. Groups like: ISIS affiliated forces in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen toBoko Haram in Nigeria toISIS and AQ affiliated terrorist groups inside Saudi Arabia, UK, Egypt, etc. Open jihad evolves (gets better) through massively parallel co-development.
All of the groups in the open jihad, no matter how small (even down to individuals), can contribute. They do this by: tinkering with tactics, strategies, and technologies that can be used to advance the open jihad.testing the efficacy of these innovations by using them against the enemy. The groups in the open jihad can communicate successful innovations without even using the forms of communication we pay the NSA tens of billions a year to spy on. Marker-based. PS: We have a tendency to dismiss tinkering as a foolish endeavor. THE OPTIMAL SIZE OF A TERRORIST NETWORK. Distributed, dynamic terrorist networks cannot scale like hierarchical networks. The same network design that makes them resiliant against attack puts absolute limits on their size. If so, what are those limits? A good starting point is to look at limits to group size within peaceful online communities on which we have extensive data -- terrorist networks are essentially geographically dispersed online communities.
Chris Allen does a good job analyzing optimal group size with his critique of the Dunbar number. His analysis (replete with examples) shows that there is a gradual fall-off in effectiveness at 80 members, with an absolute fall-off at 150 members. The initial fall-off occurs, according to Chris, due to an increasing amount of effort spent on "grooming" the group to maintain cohesion.
Al Qaeda may have been able to grow much larger than this when it ran physical training camps in Afghanistan. This size dynamic can also be seen in criminal organizations. Visualizing Terror — Tim Stock. Diapositive11.jpg (JPEG Image, 720 × 540 pixels) The Future of Terrorism According to VICE. Photo via Flickr user US Army Garrison Yongsan When it comes to the future of terrorism, there's good news and there's bad news.
And it's mostly bad. Here's the good news: Many security experts—the kind of people who throw around terms like "creative foresight" and "horizon-scanning methodologies"—say that formal al Qaeda–esque groups as we know them are not likely to last very long into the future. Even if they do, these experts predict, they probably won't succeed in launching significant mass-casualty attacks like 9/11, much less some kind of WMD-driven Armageddon. Ten years from now, conventional terror networks—those that are sophisticated and vertically integrated—will likely have been marginalized by aggressive military, intelligence-gathering, and law enforcement efforts.
Or at least that's what an informal survey of counterterrorism sages who get paid to see into the future and predict what is on the threat horizon tell me. Belgian arms dealer confesses to supplying Paris attackers - World Israel News. Mark Babich sur Twitter : "Where do #foreignfighters in #Iraq & #Syria come from #ISIS #CharlieHebdo #JeSuisCharlie #Bosnia #Kosovo #Albania" "Je ne suis pas Charlie. Et croyez-moi, je suis aussi triste que vous." "Je ne suis pas descendu parmi la foule. " Un @sinaute exprime, dans le forum de discussion de la dernière chronique de Daniel Schneidermann, son malaise vis-à-vis de "l'union nationale" suite aux attaques meurtrières qui ont visé Charlie Hebdo.
En cause, la "dérive islamophobe" du journal et de cette gauche "Onfray/Charlie/Fourest laïcarde". Gros malaise. Je ne suis pas descendu parmi la foule. Mais cet unanimisme émotionnel, quasiment institutionnel pour ceux qui écoutent les radio de service public et lisent les grands media, j'ai l'impression qu'on a déjà essayé de me foutre dedans à deux reprises.
Première histoire: victoire des Bleus en 1998. Deuxième histoire: entre deux-tour en 2002. Quelques années plus trard: le FN en pleine forme, invention du "racisme anti-blanc", création d'une coalition Gauche/Onfray/Charlie/Fourest laïcarde et une Droite forte/UMP/Cassoulet en pleine crise d'"identité nationale" contre l'Islam radical en France, "racaille" et "Kärcher", syndrome du...
Visualizing Terror — Tim Stock. Westgate mall attacks: urban areas are the battleground of the 21st century | World news. Things aren't where we left them when we headed off into the mountains after 9/11. When the hangover clears, and the generation that fought in Afghanistan and Iraq comes home from these wars, we'll find that much of what we thought we understood has changed. The future (crowded, coastal, urban, connected) will be so different from Afghanistan (remote, landlocked, rural) that we'll have to reconsider much of what we think we know about 21st-century conflict. Attacks like this week's siege in Nairobi reinforce what we've already seen in places like Mumbai and Karachi: that urban environments, including complex pieces of urban terrain like shopping centres, hotels and industrial facilities, are the battlegrounds of the future.
And the urban siege, with its commando-style tactics and guerrilla infiltration of a big city's ebb and flow, is increasingly the tactic of choice for a wide range of adversaries. What does all this say about the future environment? The future of al-Qaeda: Results of a foresight project by Open Briefing. Terror financiers are living freely in Qatar, US discloses. 4 Rules of War from Al-Qaeda. A World of Terror. Alain CHOUET (Direction de la securite a la DGSE) au Sénat sur al qaida. Number of Islamic Extremists Groups Up 60 Percent Since 2010.
Tribal structure collapse. Terror: The Hidden Source by Malise Ruthven. Radical Islamic Terrorism in Context, pt I | The Scholar's Stage. How to make sense of radical Islamic terrorism? This violence is barbaric - but it is not senseless. When you understand the society from which savagery has sprung, the cold logic behind these attacks becomes all too apparent. Part I in a series; Part II is here. Brendon O'Niell says it is time to recognize the sheer barbarity of 21st century Islamic terror attacks: "In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint.
This goes beyond the BBC's yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. I applaud Mr. There are problems with this line of thought. "The Mongols now entered the town and drove all the inhabitants, nobles and commoners, out on to the plain. If barbarity is not an inherit part of Islam, then from what source does it spring? Radical Islamic Terrorism in Context, pt II | The Scholar's Stage. How to make sense of radical Islamic terrorism? This violence is barbaric - but it is not senseless. When you understand the society from which savagery has sprung, the cold logic behind these attacks becomes all too apparent. Part II of a series; Part I is here. How do you save a civilization from implosion? Modernization has never been pretty.
It destroyed Christendom before the growth revolution picked up steam and left the European subcontinent in disorder for two centuries more. SPIEGEL: Monsieur Todd, in the middle of the Cold War, in the days of Leonid Brezhnev, you predicted the collapse of the Soviet system. Monsieur Todd explains the fall of the old order from the heights of the ivory tower. In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. All this, only eight miles from the Yemen border.
Totalitarian regimes have it easy. The historian William W. The Middle East's Tribal DNA. Conflicts within the Middle East cannot be separated from its peoples' culture. Seventh-century Arab tribal culture influenced Islam and its adherents' attitudes toward non-Muslims. Today, the embodiment of Arab culture and tribalism within Islam impacts everything from family relations, to governance, to conflict. While many diplomats and analysts view the Arab-Israeli dispute and conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim communities through the prism of political grievance, the roots of such conflicts lie as much in culture and Arab tribalism.
Tribalism and Predatory Expansion Every human society must establish order if it is going to survive and prosper. Balanced opposition is a "tribal" form of organization, a tribe being a regional organization of defense based on decentralization and self-help. Maximizing livestock possession is also important. There are also important social reasons to maximize livestock possessions. The concept of "honor" infuses raiding and predatory expansion. The state of al-Qaeda: The unquenchable fire. Is Al-Qaeda's Central Leadership Still Relevant? Government officials, scholars, and analysts continue to debate the extent to which Al-Qaeda's central leadership remains relevant to today's battle against terrorism. After U.S. forces eliminated the group's safe haven in Afghanistan in late 2001, many argued that Al-Qaeda had transformed into a decentralized organization with little vertical hierarchy, that it had become "more of an ideology than an organization.
"[1] In the words of one analyst, Al-Qaeda was seen as "a fragmented terrorist group living on the run in the caves of Afghanistan. Analysts such as Jason Burke, a reporter for London's Observer and the author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, and Stratfor's Peter Zeihan have underestimated the importance of Al-Qaeda's central leadership, in part because they overstate what that leadership needs to do to remain relevant. How Centralized is Al-Qaeda? Analysts differ on the question of Al-Qaeda's centralization. Historical Evidence Al Qaeda's Leadership Regroups.
West embargoes arms to Syrian rebels over their resale to al Qaeda | Eurasian Hub. An Arms Pipeline to the Syrian Rebels More than 160 military cargo flights for Syria’s rebels, mostly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have landed in Turkey and Jordan since January 2012. By Sergio Peçanha – The New York Times DEBKAfile Special Report, March 30, 2013, 2:45 PM (GMT+02:00) The Western arms pipeline to the Syrian rebels fighting Bashar Assad is starting to run dry since the discovery that some of the weapons are being resold and used by al Qaeda in its conquest of southern Syrian and takeover of positions on the Jordanian and Israel borders.
French President Francois Hollande for this reason reversed his government’s policy. That day too, Ankara announced that Turkish authorities had impounded 5,000 shotguns, rifles, starting pistols, gunstocks and 10,000 cartridges in the village of Akcakale before they were sent across into Syria. Those plans and centers switched over last week to operational mode. Me gusta: Me gusta Cargando... An Arms Pipeline to the Syrian Rebels - Graphic.
Training camps. Monitors. Maps & Charts. To class. Analysis. Funding. Al Qaeda. Geographic repartition.