Latest in Somalia
The new secretary of defense's attempt to open negotiations with the Somalia-based al-Qaeda affiliate raises the question: Does the United States have conditions for negotiating with terrorist groups?
Warlords are often necessary tools of statecraft, but support for them often comes at the expense of building a functioning central government.
New rivalries among the Gulf states and beyond are redefining the region.
The at-times fraught relationship between Kenya and Somalia took a new turn in 2014, when Somalia submitted a compromis before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming that Kenya was conducting illegal acts in what Somalia claimed to be part of its territory. The territory in question is a 100,000 square kilometer (38,610 square mile) triangular patch created by projecting the Kenya-Somali border eastward into the Indian Ocean.
On March 13 and 14, a German court considered two challenges to the U.S. drone program in the Middle East and East Africa. Both cases, brought before the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia in Münster, assert that Germany bears legal responsibility for the consequences of U.S.-led drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia that were conducted from the U.S. Air Force’s Ramstein base, located in southwestern Germany.
Jordan’s King Sacks Prime Minister amid Economic Protests
U.S. Launches Punitive Strikes on Assad Regime’s Chemical Weapons Facilities
The House Armed Services Committee is holding a hearing Wednesday morning at 10:00 a.m. on "Space Warfighting Readiness: Policies, Authorities, and Capabilities." The committee will hear testimony from the following witnesses:
Are we about to see a significant shift in U.S. government policy relating to the use of targeted lethal force for counterterrorism purposes?
Maybe, according to an important article by Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times. Here’s what you need to know:
I would have missed this story if Phil Carter hadn’t flagged it on Twitter, since the Post categorized it as a merely “Local” item: a U.S. citizen from Virginia by the name of Mohamad Khweis apparently was held in detention for three months by Kurdish authorities in Iraq (after having traveled there to join the Islamic State), with the U.S.