[ICT] Commentaries
The escalation of terrorism in the Sahel region—as evidenced in late April 2026 by the extensive terrorist offensive launched by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an affiliate of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), against several Malian cities including its capital—fuels a messianic vision for the revival of the Islamic Caliphate. The colossal success of the offensive, which resulted in the assassination of Mali’s Minister of Defense, inflicted significant casualties on the Malian army, and laid siege to major cities, is perceived by global jihadist operatives as the culmination of a decade-long strategic plan. This plan aims to establish an Islamic emirate in the Sahel upon the ruins of local regimes, serving as a steppingstone toward the ultimate realization of a future caliphate.
In late April 2026, Mali experienced one of the most severe and coordinated offensives since the outbreak of the conflict in the country in 2012. On the morning of April 25, hundreds of fighters affiliated with JNIM, under the leadership of Iyad Ag Ghaly, alongside members of the rebel group the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), launched a large-scale assault on a series of military and governmental targets across the country. The offensive involved coordinated raids, massive gunfire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs) targeting military bases, airports, and administrative centers. The city of Kidal, which holds immense strategic and symbolic importance in northern Mali, was one of the primary flashpoints of the fighting. The rebel organizations claimed they succeeded in seizing control of large parts of the city and forcing a retreat of government forces and their Russian allies.
It is worth noting that Mali is perceived by Al-Qaeda as the core locus of its operations and as a “home base” intended to facilitate the creation of a jihadist territorial contiguity across the Sahel and sub-Saharan regions. In 2012, AQIM published a guide titled “The General Guidance Document of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Regarding the Islamic Jihad Project in Azawad,” which outlined a series of recommendations and directives on how to seize control of Mali. Jihadist forums at the time even circulated an image depicting Mali as the central jihadist hub, meant to aid in expanding influence and establishing jihadist outposts throughout the Sahel region.
[HumangleMedia] The British erased a town in 1906. Nigeria inherited both the method and the silence.
Summary
The article explores the erasure of Satiru, a Nigerian town destroyed by British colonial forces in 1906 after a rebellion against both British colonialism and the Sokoto Caliphate's aristocratic system.
The rebellion, led by poor clerics and fugitive slaves, denounced oppressive taxation and demanded a return to Usman Dan Fodio's ideals of just Islamic governance.
That was a mistake in concept, poor deluded darlings.
The British ensured Satiru's obliteration, exemplifying a colonial strategy of marking threatening communities, deploying excessive force, and manipulating historical records—strategies that have been inherited by modern Nigerian governments.
The piece highlights contemporary examples, such as the Kajen Shuwa killings
…General Mohammed Shuwa was killed on November 2, 2012, by gunmen believed to be members of Boko Haram while he was sitting outside his house in Maiduguri. There were soldiers on guard duty at the time, but they did not intervene during the shooting...
and the Zaria massacre,
…also known as the Buhari massacre, was a massacre carried out by the Nigerian Army in Zaria, Kaduna State, Nigeria, on Saturday, 12 December 2015, against Shia Muslims, mostly members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria. At least 1000 civilians were killed, with 347 bodies secretly buried by the Army in a mass grave …
where the Nigerian state exhibited similar patterns of excessive force and record suppression against communities perceived as threats.
The persistence of these tactics emphasizes a repeated grammar of impunity, where disproportionate violence and subsequent silence are institutionally enforced, stifling accountability and perpetuating injustice.
Academic analyses suggest such resistance to domination cannot be permanently subdued, as cultural opposition remains a powerful tool for asserting identity and demanding justice.
[IISS] In light of recent attacks on nuclear facilities and energy infrastructure in the region, Gulf states looking to nuclear energy will have to consider security risks and mitigation measures.
Always wise in a rough neighbourhood like the Middle East.
Nuclear power has always come with a high-risk tag. The attacks by Israel and the United States against the Iranian nuclear programme in 2025 and 2026 and the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (NPP) in Ukraine since 2022 have brought this risk into hyperfocus.
Iran has been, and will continue tobe attacked because it has a nucleare bomb program. If it only had non-breeder nuclear power plants, neither Israel nor America would care.
Nuclear-security risks are very real, and the laws and norms meant to prevent them are under severe strain. For potential nuclear newcomers in the Gulf, these risks might prove high enough to make them rethink their nuclear plans.
The case of the 2025–26 US/Israel–Iran conflicts is both familiar and novel. Both Israel and the US have carried out preventive attacks against nuclear and weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities they regarded as potential proliferation risks in Iraq in 1981 and 1991 and in Syria in 2007. Yet the scale of the attacks on Iran’s nuclear programme since 2025, coupled with the attacks on energy infrastructure in this recent conflict, may compound the perceived risk to NPPs, which run the highest risk of radiological emergencies.
Norms do not exist in a vacuum and nuclear facilities are not sacred. The norm against attacking them exists to prevent the catastrophic consequences of such an attack. While greatly strained, the norm against attacking NPPs specifically has held.
Gulf states’ nuclear-energy ambitions – which have materialised in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and are in the planning stages in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – are not merely prestige projects. They are intended to address real needs that underpin their economic and energy strategies. Gulf states have shown keen interest in acquiring traditional reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs), both of which have vulnerabilities. Therefore, this situation warrants a sober assessment of the risks and possible mitigation measures associated with pursuing nuclear power in a conflict-prone environment.
#1
...Honestly, the only way they're going to get real security for this stuff is to hire it out to the West. Inshallah is still the attitude towards even the most crucial tasks, not to mention far too many would put religious ties above their duties.
#2
The security concern is Israel bombing it to rubble, Mike. The only security they can create for that is to not have even the precursors to a nuclear bomb program.
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[Newsweek] The strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 began with an American secret. According to CBS News, intelligence gathered over months by the CIA, and shared with Israel, fixed the location of Iran’s leadership and opened the way for the first salvo of Operation Epic Fury. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said plainly that the operation was driven by intelligence collected by the United States and Israel. The thousands of missiles and drones Iran threw across the Gulf in the weeks that followed, and the interceptors that laced the skies over Dubai, Bahrain and Doha, were the loud and visible end of a fight decided in silence. The 2026 war was an intelligence war wearing the costume of an air campaign, and the decisive intelligence was American.
Consider what the killing of a head of state demands. To reach Khamenei, an adversary must know where a man will be, when he will be there, who stands beside him, and how to deliver a strike inside the minutes that knowledge stays good. This is a problem of collection and human sources, solved over years rather than in a final hour. The munition is the trivial last step. The intelligence is the war. On February 28, the piece that mattered most, the fix on the leadership itself, came from the United States. Iran’s adversary-in-chief said so himself: President Donald Trump wrote that Khamenei could not escape “our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems.”
That American contribution rode on a decade of patient penetration by its closest ally. In 2018, Mossad officers removed half a ton of Iran’s nuclear archive from a warehouse in Tehran. In 2020, the physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed on a road outside the capital by a remote-operated weapon. In July 2024, Ismail Haniyeh died in a government guesthouse in the heart of Tehran. Weeks later, thousands of pagers and radios that Hezbollah had carried in through its own supply chain detonated across two days. In the 12-day war of June 2025, Israel killed the commander of the Revolutionary Guard and the chief of the armed forces in the opening hours. Read together, these describe a state opened from the inside. The American achievement of 2026 was to fuse its own collection onto that opening and fix the leadership in place. As David Petraeus, a former CIA director, observed, the operation was led by precise intelligence, and the killing was its product.
More at the link
Posted by: badanov ||
06/07/2026 00:00 ||
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#1
According to CBS News, intelligence gathered over months by the CIA, and shared with Israel, fixed the location of Iran’s leadership and opened the way for the first salvo of Operation Epic Fury.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
