On 8 December 2024, the Assad regime in Syria was overthrown by a rebel alliance led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The collapse of the family dictatorship was made possible by shifts in regional and international power dynamics. Key factors included Turkish support for the rebels, the...

Since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the Taliban took power in the country, the local branch of Islamic State (IS) - the so-called Khorasan Province - has carried out dozens of attacks on Taliban "security forces" and civilians, resulting in hundreds of deaths....

Afghanistan's Central Asian neighbours have generally reacted pragmatically to the Taliban’s seizure of power there. For the autocratically ruled, secular states on the periphery of the former Soviet empire, economic cooperation and the stabilisation of humanitarian and political conditions in...

Prevailing approaches to understanding Islamist mobilisation struggle to explain why militant Islamist movements in Libya initially spread rapidly after 2011 and then disappeared almost overnight. Their decline poses a puzzle for conventional analyses. Tactical choices, such as the search for...