The Gulf countries have taken significant national, regional, and international steps to stem the flow of funds to terrorist groups over the past decade. Various measures have been instituted to better regulate and secure the formal banking sector, alternative remittance systems like hawalas, and charitable organizations in the Gulf. The tragic January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, perpetrated by disciples of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have galvanized the world's attention and demand to combat terrorism and the financial networks that fund and support these acts. In the fight against AQAP and ISIL, Gulf states will play a critical role on the military, ideological, and financial fronts of the campaign to degrade and destroy these groups. While the Gulf countries have made substantial strides in protecting their financial systems, risks and vulnerabilities to terrorist financing such as private donors remain.
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The incorporation of women into terrorist groups has occurred in disparate ways and with commitments characterized by gradual rhythms. This paper approaches the problem heuristically from a culturalist perspective, which has as its explanatory axis the male-female relationship. It is found that women leaders of terrorist organizations, or protagonists of emblematic acts, are rather a rarity, except in the Salvadoran and German experiences; both with quasi-epic connotations. Among the explanatory keys, the environmental influence of the machismo of the time is proposed, especially in Latin America, and reflected both in the very beginnings of the Cuban guerrillas and later in the various insurrectional pockets. The environmental influence would act as a major inhibiting factor. At the same time, the proletarian internationalism that was the basis for the proliferation of such groups seems to have been, at its core, a male thing. There is no record of women (not even Cuban) fighting alongside the mythical Ché in Bolivia; nor is there any record of any revolutionary leader accompanying Guevara in his previous journeys to the Congo, Algeria and others. A second major finding aims at explaining the irruption of women as suicide bombers as a product for communicational consumption. The crudeness of this incorporation of women into the great Chechen and Palestinian terrorist causes is rather frightening and raises a very pertinent doubt as to whether this phase responds to a construct or to a reliable integration into the cause they appear to embrace.
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Through cowardly attacks against targets in the Americas, fundamentalist terrorism has made it clear that it is no longer a distant threat, becoming a serious issue of national security for all Western countries?one on which they all must cooperate in order to defeat. Nevertheless, it can be said that this is not a new conflict, rather the religious nature of the war has given the aggressors different appreciation of time and space, which has not been adequately understood by the West. The evolution and characteristics of this particular conflict can be examined from three perspectives, which, responding to different modes of action, attempt to explain the phenomenon of growing Islamic fundamentalism and its fanatic violence. First, the paper will discuss the rise to power of the Islamic revolution in Iran and fundamentalism, its global influence and actions taken as a result of its initiative. Second, the evolution of the fundamentalist guerrilla war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan will be examined, as well as Afghanistan?s participation in the holy war and the later development of the civil war. Finally, from a third perspective, the appearance of Osama bin Laden as the apparent global fundamentalist leader will be analyzed.
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