Islamic State

By The SecDev Group The devastating terrorist attack in Kabul by the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) and the hasty departure of the US and coalition partners from Afghanistan is generating geopolitical tremors across Central and South Asia and beyond. And while Afghanistan is geographically distant from Bangladesh, the IS-K’s expansive digital footprint and the Taliban’s return to state power after ...

By Saimum Parvez Bangladesh is an often overlooked country in violent extremism research.  At least 40 pro-secular writers and activists, foreign nationals, and members of minority religious groups were murdered in Bangladesh by violent extremists between 2013 and 2017. On July 1, 2016, Islamic State-affiliated violent extremists stabbed to death 20 hostages, including Indian, Italian, ...

By Louise Laing and Maura Conway One of the questions we get asked quite often at VOX-Pol—by not just PhD students and early career researchers, but established scholars too and, in fact, that we quite often ask ourselves! — is ‘what are appropriate academic journals for publication of research on online extremism and terrorism?’ A generic ...

By Anne Speckhard “If I was going to die at least I could die helping children. [It’s] illogical that you are entering a war zone that you don’t know anything about … I felt if I did something good it would overwrite the bad that had happened.” — Canadian 46-year-old Kimberly Pullman, speaking about her decision ...

By Moign Khawaja It has been almost two years since the Islamic State, also known as IS or ISIS, lost its final stronghold in eastern Syria and four months since its leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi was killed in a US military raid. Have these two game-changing events led to the demise of the group ...

Deplatforming terrorists from messaging apps may damage existing networks, but those who remain often double down in their beliefs. By Amarnath Amarasingam Earlier this week, a fellow terrorism researcher and friend sent me a text which stated: “TamTam is amazing. I missed all the early ISIS stuff on Telegram. Now I feel like I was ...

By Manuel R. Torres-Soriano The collapse of Islamic State’s “caliphate” has had an enormous impact on jihadist activism on the Internet. In a short space of time, we have witnessed a shift from an ecosystem that orbited around the leadership of a strong organisation capable of shouldering the initiative and most of the work needed to ...

Summary of Tech Against Terrorism’s analysis: Analysis of more than 45,000 URLs since 2014 across more than 330 platforms shows that smaller platforms are heavily targeted by ISIS and that 49% of all URLs were found on just eight of these platforms. Key conclusions: ISIS experimentation with small social media platform Koonekti is the most ...

By Nancy Jamal In the aftermath of the Christchurch attack, attention has been drawn to the role of mass media in the aftermath of such attacks, including by the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, Neil Basu. Last week’s Blog post also addressed responsible reporting, as does Virginie Andre’s report Understanding the Impact of Terrorist Event Reporting on Countering ...

By Nathan Shea The first news that militants had taken to the streets of the Islamic City of Marawi on May 23, 2017, came from Facebook. Pictures of masked men carrying assault rifles and waving the black flag of the Islamic State were swirling across social media well before Philippine and international news channels picked ...