ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Most conflicts in the world today are non-traditional. The technologically-driven forces of “creative destruction,” the nimbleness of the small, and the tendency of great powers to fight the next war with the mindset of the last one have radically changed the nature of modern warfare. So says Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, the founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He has been a pioneer in studying the dynamics of complex systems in international development, military conflict and ethnic violence. In this week’s podcast he talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about how even the task of defining the objective of war has to be reevaluated today. He explains how complex human biological systems can serve as models for understanding the new paradigm of warfare. The old paradigm — opposing armies lined up across clearly defined boundaries — has largely been superseded in a world where complex interactions are often played out among asymmetric antagonists. As Bar-Yam puts it, “...

The United States and the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda are sworn enemies. But along one battlefront in Yemen's civil war, they're fighting on the same side. The ancient city of Taiz is at the heart of Yemen's civil war, and despite efforts to maintain a ceasefire elsewhere in the country, fighting goes on in and around Taiz. The city is surrounded by an armed insurgent group known as the Houthis, who, with support from military strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, took control of much of Yemen in 2015. Defending Taiz from the Houthi fighters are forces of the US-supported, Saudi-led coalition that includes ground troops from the United Arab Emirates and fighters loyal to Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi (the Yemeni president who fled the country ahead of the Houthi tide). But there are also local militiamen and fighters from the Southern Movement — a secessionist group — and in recent months, fighters from Ansar al-Sharia, better known outside Yemen as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Each...

The fighting had raged for three days. It wasn’t unusual for the city to come under attack, but it rarely lasted this long. This time, they were under siege. Rebel fighters on the city’s edge cut off water and surrounded most of the area. Still, Rana and her family never thought for a second the insurgents would break through. When the sound of gunfire outside finally quieted, the family expected things to go back to normal. It came as a shock when the crackling speakers of the mosque echoed in the streets outside. “We heard them declaring victory. It came out of nowhere,” Rana says. “At that point, we knew that the army had gone and that Nusra was here.” A little more than a year since Jabhat al-Nusra captured the Syrian city of Idlib, the group still retains control of the city and much of the surrounding area. An offshoot of al-Qaeda, its ideology is largely indistinguishable from that of the so-called Islamic State. And yet while ISIS has been significantly weakened by its enem...

It was 2:09 a.m. in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on Oct. 3, 2015, when Lajos Jecs was woken from his sleep by a loud explosion. It was the first in a series of bombs a US plane was dropping on the hospital where he worked. Jecs, a nurse from Hungary with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), had been living and working at the MSF trauma center in Kunduz for close to five months. The fighting around the health care facility had been growing worse in the past few days. It was so bad that Jecs and his international colleagues had been unable to leave the hospital compound. They’d been sleeping in makeshift quarters in the hospital’s safe room. It was in the safe room, a building separated from the main hospital, that Jecs went to sleep at about 10 p.m. on Oct. 2. Four hours later, he was startled awake. He had heard bombs in Kunduz before, but never this close. The office was rattling and he could hear dirt and debris from the explosions hitting the walls. Jecs took shelter in his room and began tryi...

(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Nineveh Liberation Operation Command announced on Monday killing 40 ISIS fighters during the liberation operation of a village in Qayyarah south of Mosul (405 km north of Baghdad). The commander of Nineveh liberation Operation Maj. Gen. Najm al-Jubouri said in a press statement followed by IraqiNews.com, “The security forces from the Iraqi army and al-Hashed al-Shaabi backed by the international coalition aircraft managed to kill 40 ISIS fighters during the liberation of Kabrouk village in Qayyarah south Mosul.” Jubouri added, “The liberation operation of the village took less than two hours and didn’t cause any casualties among the security forces.”

DOCUMENTARY Shows ISIS Friendly Relation with Turkey, Oil and Gun Trade Exclusive eye witness reports and documents, abandoned by retreating terrorists and found by RT Documentary crew members in a region liberated by Syrian Kurds, point to commercial scale oil smuggling operations and cozy relations between ISIS and Turkey. Exclusive and unprecedented footage, along with witness accounts, was filmed by the RT Documentary crew only ten days after the town of Shaddadi in Syrian Kurdistan was liberated from Islamic State (ISIS , ISIL , IS and Daesh) terrorists. Passports belonging to Islamic State fighters bearing stamps from Istanbul The area surrounding the town is well known for its vast oil reserves and extraction activity that for months was reaped by ISIS command to generate revenue. BREAKING: ISIS ‘Department of Artifacts’ docs exposes loot trade via Turkey Following Kurdish soldiers around the destroyed and abandoned homes, RT Documentary found documents which showed a direct lin...

Human Rights Watch (HR) has criticized the US for selling cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia, urging Riyadh to stop using such banned arms that leave behind unexploded sub-munitions and endanger civilians. On Friday, Steve Goose, arms director at HRW and chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, an international coalition of groups working to eradicate cluster munitions, called on Washington to stop producing and selling the internationally-banned weapons in compliance with international law. “The US has sold Saudi Arabia cluster munitions, a weapon most countries have rejected due to the harm they cause civilians,” said Goose, adding “Saudi Arabia should stop using cluster munitions in Yemen or anywhere else, and the US should stop producing and exporting them.” Goose went on to say that Saudi Arabia has used various types of US-made cluster munitions, including CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapons, in its war against Yemen despite evidence of mounting civilian casualties. “Following multiple a...

Members of the Takfiri ISIS militant group have reportedly laid siege to two villages in Iraq’s Anbar Province, which are home to two thousand families, as the extremists continue perpetrating crimes against humanity in the conflict-ridden country. Local police chief Lieutenant Colonel Aref al-Janabi told Arabic-language al-Sumaria satellite television network that Daesh Takfiris have taken civilians, mostly, women, children and elderly, hostage in Albu Hawi and Hasi villages, which lie north of the city of Amiriyah, located about 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Fallujah, on Saturday. He added that ISIS militants have also arrested dozens of young people from the two villages, and prevented the local residents from leaving the area. Janabi further noted that ISIS terrorists are using scores of the civilians as human shields as tribal fighters together with security forces have launched an operation to retake the two besieged villages. Elsewhere on the outskirts of the northern town ...