Last week, Thai police arrested Atris Hussein, a suspected Hizballah operative, at the Bangkok airport, while another suspect escaped. Elsewhere in the capital, authorities seized a large cache of chemical explosives composed of ammonium nitrate and urea fertilizer, leading the United States and Israel to issue emergency alerts warning their citizens in the country of a possible imminent terrorist attack. According to local authorities, initial intelligence indicated an attack would occur over the weekend in Thailand, yet they now believe some or all of the explosives were intended to be shipped out of the country. The U.S. embassy in Bangkok, meanwhile, continues to warn U.S. citizens of a "real and credible" threat of a terrorist attack in the capital.

Although the news may read like a made-for-Hollywood plotline, the fact that Hizballah is active in Southeast Asia should come as no surprise. Indeed, the case strongly parallels several previous Hizballah plots in Thailand and elsewhere in the region. Hussein is not the first Hizballah operative to be arrested at a Southwest Asian airport, nor is he the first to be tied to weapons caches and terrorist operations in Thailand. Hizballah operations in the country date back to at least April 1988, when group members hijacked a Kuwaiti airliner departing from Bangkok. And the discovery of chemical explosives is reminiscent of the group's use of a bomb built with the same chemicals in a 1994 plot targeting the Israeli embassy in Bangkok.

First published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the Sinai Peninsula has emerged as a new hotspot in the complex Arab-Israeli conflict, with an expanding terrorist infrastructure that makes it another front of potential confrontation. The Bedouin are now in a position to initiate crises that neither Israel nor Egypt wants, while also influencing the struggle against Hamas. In this Policy Note, leading Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari outlines the steps needed to prevent the total collapse of security in and around the peninsula, avoid the rise of an armed, runaway Bedouin statelet, and minimize the risk of Israeli-Egyptian peace imploding under the pressures of the wild Sinai frontier.

First published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

The ongoing deployment of extra-hemispheric powers in the region is not exactly a gentle breeze across the region. Among Latin America’s policy-makers and scholars two contradictory visions have erupted when evaluating these deployments. On one side are those who assess it just in accordance with the globalizing tendencies that would span the world in despite of country, culture, economy or society features. On the other side are those who assess it sceptically differentiating intensities of the pursued objectives by one or other extra-hemispheric power. Indeed, China, India, Russia and Iran, by far the most active ones, have shown different goals and motivations. The receptivity has been also uneven. However, in the niches and interstices where the extra-hemispheric influence circulates the relative absence of the once ubiquitous U.S. influence as common feature is also expressed.

First published in Letras Internacionales, ORT University in Montevideo, Uruguay

Iran has been transferring in recent years large amounts of weapons to well-known terrorist groups in Lebanon and Gaza by various means. One of the ways Iran has found to be very effective is using maritime containers which ship through intermediate ports on their way to their final destinations. Iran exploits the fact that those containers, which are also known as "transit containers," almost never have their content screened at the intermediate ports. In this article we propose a global solution for the problem, one that will increase substantially local authorities' chances of apprehending Iranian weapons at the intermediate ports before they reach terrorist organizations.

First published on the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

The Arab Spring does not constitute a single phenomenon or a disparate series of unrelated events. Rather, what we are witnessing across North Africa and the Middle East is the simultaneous unfolding of three grand, historic political processes: democratization; authoritarian adaptation/succession; and state failure. To gain an informed understanding of these processes, we shall draw upon social science theory, outlining three stylized, archetypal interpretative lenses through which to analyze the Arab Spring.

On November 4, 2011, Pentagon officials declared that "relentless pursuit" of the Haqqani Network was the top priority for American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, as this terrorist formation continued to be a major threat to US and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Navy Captain John Kirby, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Media Operations, noted, "The Haqqani Network is lethal, deadly and continues to conduct operations inside Afghanistan and is a growing concern for our commanders out there."

First published in the South Asia Intelligence Review (SAIR)

In recent days, there has been heavy American pressure at the highest level on Israel to apologize to Turkey for the deadly results of the May 2010 “humanitarian” flotilla led by the Turkish Islamist organization IHH, in which nine Turkish citizens were killed during their violent opposition to the Israeli marines’ operation to stop their attempt to breach the Gaza blockade.

The incident has produced an unprecedented crisis in relations between Turkey and Israel, and has had a negative influence on the important US regional alliance with the two non-Arab states.

First published in The Jerusalem Post on August 21, 2011

The US strategy in Afghanistan has seen a decade of unrelenting failure. The US has sought to repackage the killing of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda-Taliban leaders as a grand strategic success and a prelude to an ordered withdrawal from Afghanistan. The truth is, despite this handful of symbolic successes, the disruptive dominance of Pakistan-backed radical Islamist Forces has consolidated across progressively widening regions of Afghanistan. Kabul has little capacity to control these Forces, and will simply collapse in the face of sustained dilution of the Coalition presence. Unless current Coalition policies are dramatically reversed Afghanistan will inevitably pass into the control of an even more radicalized, violent and internationalised Islamist extremist order, than the one that prevailed before 9/11, even as a dramatically destabilized Pakistan feeds into the rising threat of transnational Islamist terrorism.

First published in the South Asia Intelligence Review (SAIR)

On May 2, 2011 American special forces killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan but the war of France against Al Qaeda and mainly its branch in North Africa (AQIM) is not over. France joined other allies of the United States in hailing the death of Osama bin Laden but its relief at the terrorist's death was mixed with concern for French hostages held by al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic organizations.

First published on the CST Blog

A new report from CST, Terrorist Incidents Against Jewish Communities and Israeli Citizens Abroad, 1968–2010, lists 427 successful terrorist attacks and foiled or aborted terrorist plots, directed against Jewish or Israeli targets in 57 countries outside Israel, since 1968. The first edition of this book, which was published in 2003 by CST and the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, was the first time that this history of post-1967 anti-Jewish terrorism had been comprehensively collated. This edition, published solely by CST, includes an updated chronology of attacks, an expanded analysis and new statistical tables. It provides an invaluable aid to Jewish security professionals and volunteers, law enforcement agencies, governments, academics and others interested in the study of terrorism, antisemitism, political and religious extremism and the terrorist threat to Jewish Diaspora communities.