With Libya’s rebel forces having entered Tripoli on August 21, 2011, the country’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, has seemingly lost power after 42 years. Although the rebels appear to have exaggerated their control of the capital – as evidenced by the defiant reappearance of Qadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam on August 23, thereby contradicting rebel claims… [Read more]

At long last, the Iraq War appears to be over. The US has been winding down its troop presence in Iraq for many months now, and will have reduced this to 50,000 by the end of August from a peak of 170,000 at the height of the ‘surge’ against the insurgency there in 2007. Under… [Read more]

Monday’s twin bombings in the Moscow Metro demonstrate that the war in the North Caucasus is neither over nor just a conflict in a peripheral part of Russia. The Moscow attacks came just four months after the Moscow-St Petersburg railway was bombed, showing that Islamist terrorists are capable of carrying out their threats to take… [Read more]

Russia’s annual Caucasus military exercises, which began on Monday, carry added significance this year, since Moscow last week suffered a blow to its regional strategy with the near-assassination of the President of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. A bit of background here: Ingushetia is an ethnic republic within Russia, tucked in between Chechnya to its east and… [Read more]