ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Indonesian and Malaysian authorities are keeping a close eye on local supporters of the hard-line Middle East group. Emilia Az was threatened with beheading for representing religious minorities   Jakarta, Indonesia - Emilia Az opens a folder on her Blackberry labelled "Wahhabis" and flicks through her recent messages. One is a cartoon depiction of an Arab fighter holding a necklace lined with severed heads. Another is a masked Indonesian man holding aloft the Islamic State flag. "I get text messages like these all the time now. They have said they know where I live, that I will be killed. They said, 'If you don't turn to Sunni, back to the real path of Islam, we will behead you'," Emilia says. "Sometimes they throw stones at my house. Once I had a dog, a great dane, and they killed him with a big stone, like they wanted to show me that, 'I know your house, and we are here'." As a Shia Muslim, and a representative f

Russia has said it will adopt a beefed up military doctrine over NATO's plans to establish a rapid-response force in the wake of the rebellion in Ukraine's east, according a top Russian official. "The fact that the military infrastructure of the NATO member states is getting closer to our borders... will preserve its place as one of the external threats for the Russian Federation." Mikhail Popov, senior Russian security official The Russian reaction came a day after the NATO chief said that the alliance would respond to the Ukraine crisis by creating a "spearhead" rapid reaction force, potentially including several thousand troops, that could be sent on operations in as little as two days. "The fact that the military infrastructure of the NATO member states is getting closer to our borders, including via enlargement, will preserve its place as one of the external threats for the Russian Federation," Mikhail Popov, the deputy secretary of Russia

US President Barack Obama has arrived in Estonia on a visit apparently aimed at showing Washington's solidarity with the three Baltic states, one day before a NATO summit in Wales, where Russia's involvement in Ukraine is expected to be the main topic. Obama will meet with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania later on Wednesday to offer reassurances to the three NATO member states located near the Russian border, following the alleged Russian-backed military offensive in Ukraine. The Baltic states are seen by some as especially vulnerable to Moscow's attention because of their Russian minorities and high dependence on energy shipments from their larger neighbour. At the two-day summit in Wales, the Baltic states will press for some kind of deployment of NATO troops, in addition to increased air patrols already announced by the alliance this year. NATO agreed this week to create a "spearhead" rapid reaction force, potentially including several thousand tr

Steven Sotloff is shown in the YouTube video of the beheading of journalist James Foley. (A screenshot from a video) A new video has been posted on the internet purported to show Islamic State militants beheading American journalist Steven Sotloff. The Associated Press and the SITE Intel Group, an organization that tracks the online activity of terrorist groups, both reported on Tuesday that the Islamic State has posted a video of the execution barely two weeks after the group formerly known as ISIS published a similar clip of American photojournalist James Foley suffering the same fate. “I’m back, Obama, and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State,” a masked militant believed to be the same who executed Foley addresses the president in the latest video. Kneeling in an orange jump suit, Sotloff is seen in the clip reading a statement to the president as Foley did before him. “Obama, your foreign policy of intervention in Iraq was supposed to be for

By Owen Jones " The Guardian " - - The so-called war on terror is nearly 13 years old, but which rational human being will be cheering its success? We’ve had crackdowns on civil liberties across the world, tabloid-fanned generalisations about Muslims and, of course, military interventions whose consequences have ranged from the disastrous to the catastrophic. And where have we ended up? Wars that Britons believe have made them less safe ; jihadists too extreme even for al-Qaida’s tastes running amok in Iraq and Syria; and nations like Libya succumbing to Islamist militias. There are failures, and then there are calamities. But as the British government ramps up the terror alert to “severe” and yet more anti-terror legislation is proposed , some reflection after 13 years of disaster is surely needed. One element has been missing, and that is the west’s relationship with Middle Eastern dictatorships that have played a pernicious role in the rise of Islamist fundamentalist terr

By Alastair Crooke " Huffington Post " - - BEIRUT -- The dramatic arrival of Da'ish (ISIS) on the stage of Iraq has shocked many in the West. Many have been perplexed -- and horrified -- by its violence and its evident magnetism for Sunni youth. But more than this, they find Saudi Arabia's ambivalence in the face of this manifestation both troubling and inexplicable, wondering, "Don't the Saudis understand that ISIS threatens them, too?"  It appears -- even now -- that Saudi Arabia's ruling elite is divided. Some applaud that ISIS is fighting Iranian Shiite "fire" with Sunni "fire"; that a new Sunni state is taking shape at the very heart of what they regard as a historical Sunni patrimony; and they are drawn by Da'ish's strict Salafist ideology.  Other Saudis are more fearful, and recall the history of the revolt against Abd-al Aziz by the Wahhabist Ikhwan (Disclaimer: this Ikhwan has nothing to do with the Muslim Brothe

Following comments from Ukraine’s Defense Minister Valery Geletey of Moscow threatening with a nuclear attack on its neighbor, Moscow said it was shocked by the statement. Russia warned that such rhetoric only deepens the civil stand-off in Ukraine.  “Geletey’s calls to get ready for ‘tens of thousands’ of new victims in what he called ‘Great Patriotic War’ and what in fact is a new punitive operation in his own country are appalling. He only drags the Ukrainian people into a new round of the bloody civil stand-off,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Monday. Earlier Geletey wrote in his Facebook that the operation “to cleanse Ukraine’s east from terrorists” was over. He, however, proceeded to accuse Russia of direct military involvement in the east that followed the rebels’ “defeat.” “A big war has come to our home, a war Europe has not seen since WWII,” Geletey wrote alleging that Russia not only attempted to secure its position on the rebel-held territories, but also ad

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War 1, formerly called the Great War. Not surprisingly, this has brought all sorts of stories and op-eds discussing the disastrous events that killed some 16 million people and wounded an additional 21 million others. To this day, most observers continue to claim that World War I was an inadvertent war: that is, that none of the countries involved particularly wanted war but war came nonetheless. Some claim it was the major armament programs and offensive military doctrines adopted by European countries in the run-up to the war that made WWI inevitable. Others claim it was the hypernationalistic populaces that caused the war. Still others blame the tight alliances that European nations formed in the years prior to WWI, which created an environment in which the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by an anarchist could plunge the entire continent into a bloody war. And then there are those that blame the situation on the