Monday, July 4, 2016

What Is Al Qaeda Doing?

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Jason Burke, The Guardian: As Isis strikes, al-Qaida plays the long game in Islamist supremacy struggle

Attacks in Turkey and Bangladesh may be part of a desperate Isis attempt to keep the dream of a caliphate alive

If their aim is to capture public attention, then last week can be counted as a success for terrorists.

Despite the post-Brexit crisis, Islamist militants managed to cut through the noise. They did this with two high-profile attacks. One on Turkey’s main international airport left 41 people dead. A second, almost 4,000 miles away in Bangladesh, killed 20 expatriates having dinner in a restaurant in the diplomatic zone of the unstable south Asian state’s capital, Dhaka.

Many other strikes around the world went ignored. These included a suicide attack that killed 11 people in northern Cameroon, a raid in Kenya, and a bloody bombing in Afghanistan. The sheer number of militant strikes we are seeing at the moment means that only the most spectacular – and those which kill the most westerners – are reported in any significant way. The rest are reduced to background noise.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: Al Qaeda's ideology is going to be with us for a very long time .... and in this context Al Qaeda is well situated to play (and win) the long game within Islam's more radical fringes.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

" The sheer number of militant strikes we are seeing at the moment means that only the most spectacular – and those which kill the most westerners – are reported in any significant way. The rest are reduced to background noise."


Since when has the western press given a comprehensive view of the military or of terrorism etc?

There is a reason Janes has been around for so long.

Is it too hard to give a dashboard view of world events.

My big beef with western journalist is their follow the spotlight narratives. They will shine as a spotlight for a time on an area, subject =, sequence of events only to flit away and come back after several months or several years.

Any more news should be served up in stats, dashboard etc. It also take a more knowledgeable consumer.