DR GERAINT HUGHES Harold Wilson once noted that a week was a long time in politics, and the current Leader of the Opposition may well agree with him. On Sunday 29th November Jeremy Corbyn told the BBC not only that he opposed proposals for Britain to participate in coalition air-strikes against Islamic State (IS) in… Read More The UK Decision on Syria: The Labour Party and Air-Strikes against Islamic State
By DR AMIR M KAMEL On Wednesday 2 December, the British Parliament voted 397 to 223 in favour of extending the air bombing campaign, targeting DAISH (aka Islamic State, IS, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL) from Iraq to include Syrian territory, following a one-day… Read More The UK Decision on Syria: Will air-strikes solve the problem?
ROBERT SEELY Over 18 months into Russia’s not-so-very-proxy, proxy war in Ukraine, there remains a thriving and fascinating debate over the tools of conflict that Russia uses, how one describes those tools and where Russia’s next ‘target’ may be. I was asked to respond to Rod Thornton’s recent blog on Russia. In his excellent piece,… Read More RUSSIA HYBRID WAR – A RESPONSE
This is the fourth in a series of posts to come out of the ‘Rise of the Islamic State (IS): Ideology, Strategy, and Implications’ roundtable organized by Regional Security Research Centre on 4 February 2015. An audio recording of this roundtable can be listen to or downloaded from the Defence Studies Department’s SoundCloud page. by… Read More The Kurds as Proxies against the Islamic State
This is the third in a series of posts to come out of the ‘Rise of the Islamic State (IS): Ideology, Strategy, and Implications’ roundtable organized by Regional Security Research Centre on 4 February 2015. Subsequent posts will come out on Wednesdays and will cover topics such as the responses by the Kurds, Turkey, and… Read More Migrating to the Land of Jihad: Why European Muslims fight in Syria
by BILL PARK The 10th June fall of Mosul to the irregular forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), now calling itself the ‘Islamic State’, accompanied as it was by the total collapse of the lavishly equipped and US-trained Iraqi army, presented both threat and opportunity to the Kurdistan Regional Government… Read More The war against the Islamic State and the plight of Iraqi Kurdistan
by DR GERAINT HUGHES On 19 August the militants of the Islamic State (IS) released a video showing the beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, who had been captured in Syria two years previously. Since their offensive into Northern Iraq in June 2014 IS has committed shocking atrocities against captured Iraqi soldiers and civilians.… Read More FROM ‘CALLAN’ TO ‘JIHADI JOHN’
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