Experts from the U.S. Institute of Peace provide the latest analysis and perspective on the world’s critical hot spots, U.S. and global security and issues involved in violent conflict, based on the Institute’s work on the ground and with key individuals, governments and organizations. They give interviews and background briefings to journalists and write for news outlets around the world.
As the Taliban has sought to present a kinder, gentler image to a skeptical outside world, its deputy leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has often served as the movement’s public face. Given that his family name is synonymous with jihadi terrorism and he carries a $10 million price on his head from the U.S. government...
The first shipment of grain to leave Ukraine’s key Black Sea ports since the Russian invasion is expected to dock this week in Tripoli, Lebanon, the country where food inflation is the highest in the world, completing a test run for an international deal aimed at alleviating the global food crisis. The ship, carrying...
The Taliban government claimed in a statement it had “no information about Ayman al-Zawahiri’s arrival and stay in Kabul,” after the U.S. airstrike that killed the head of al Qaeda while he was on the balcony of a safehouse in central Kabul early Sunday morning. The multi-factioned group, already struggling to...
Spreading false and alarming news and fomenting dissent against the army are the outlandish charges under which a Japanese journalist has been held in Myanmar. He was detained while covering an anti-junta protest in Yangon last weekend. He is one of over 140 journalists, including at least five foreign...
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will launch a three-country tour of Africa on Sunday in South Africa. He is expected to deliver a major speech laying out the Biden administration's strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa. Experts tell VOA that human rights concerns will likely be high on the agenda. VOA's Senior...
Announcing the death of Ayman al-Zawahri – killed by a CIA drone strike on the balcony of a villa in downtown Kabul early Sunday – President Joe Biden said it demonstrated a U.S. capability to fight terrorism in Afghanistan today, even without thousands of soldiers on the ground. Yet a year after the jihadist Taliban...
A U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan this weekend killed Ayman al-Zawahri, who helped Osama bin Laden plot the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and helped al-Qaida survive and spread in the years after. By finding and striking al-Zawahiri, President Joe Biden said, the U.S. was ensuring that Afghanistan under...
Sri Lankans who have endured months of fuel and food shortages are bracing for more pain as a newly installed government scrambles to find solutions to the Indian Ocean nation’s economic emergency. Like many others, fish monger Gamini Mallawarachchi says he is pinning his hopes on President Ranil Wickremesinghe ’s...
Around six months ago, Ekapop Lueangprasert, a local government official and business owner in the Sai Mai suburb of Bangkok, was checking messages sent to his Sai Mai Must Survive Facebook page – a volunteer initiative he’d set up to try and help local people struggling financially during the pandemic – when he...
When President Biden announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan last year, one of his main justifications was that Al Qaeda had been so “degraded” that the United States no longer needed to maintain a military presence in a country once used as a Qaeda sanctuary. Mr. Biden also vowed to hold...