The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 illustrated in graphic terms the vulnerability of the United States to asymmetrical attack. The relative ease with which the nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes and used them as deadly ballistic missiles was inconceivable to the citizens of the world’s only remaining superpower. In an instant, it became painfully clear that despite it...

Twenty years ago, a number of significant objects in the United States underwent terrorist attacks. As result, several thousand people were killed, and members radical Islamist group Al-Qaeda its leader Osama bin Laden declared terrorists, although there are other opinions about organizers customers these In this article, author examines ideological prerequisites that have been accumulated for ...

In various parts of the world, the continent of Africa is struggling with the phenomenon of terrorism and extremism more than other regions. This continent, for various reasons, including the various weaknesses of software and hardware, including economic backwardness, political instabilities, social inequalities, and foreign interventions that find their interests only in insecurity and instab...

f the mid-1990s through 2001 two of the West’s most implacable terrorist foes, Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Khabab, carried on what appears to have been a long-running feud within al-Qaeda, a feud that came to an end only when Abu Hafs al-Masri was killed by the U.S. military. Abu Hafs joined al-Qaeda early on and served as the group’s military commander from 1996 onward. Abu Khabab was a member o...

Social network analysis investigates the structure of human groups using pairwise links among their members. We show how matrix decompositions can be used to extend the standard repertoire of social network and link analysis tools to allow, for example, the inclusion of other information about individuals, and higher-order information about the relationships among them. We show how these extens...

Introduction Over the past decade, decapitation, particularly high-value targeting (HVT), has come into vogue and is being increasingly applied in a variety of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and anti-organized crime settings around the world. There are several reasons for this widespread adoption of high-value targeting as a dominant interdiction pattern. First, there is a long tradition ...

W e can say with some certainty, al Qaeda loves the Internet. When the latter first appeared, it was hailed as an integrator of cultures and a medium for businesses, consumers, and governments to communicate with one another. It appeared to offer unparalleled opportunities for the creation of a “global village.” Today the Internet still offers that promise, but it also has proven in some respec...

Al-Qaeda is commonly described as a highly flexible and adaptable non-state network, making it difficult for states to combat. Although these features are associated with networks in theory, they are not inherent to networks in practice, and rely largely on organisational learning. A network that fails to learn is not likely to adapt successfully. This paper explores the learning implications o...