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As dozens of riot police fired volleys of tear gas towards crowds of angry youths on Bourghiba Avenue this week, the scene was disturbingly reminiscent of what happened on this very avenue two years ago. Even the chanting was the same: "We want the downfall of the regime!" The target of the crowd's anger may be a different government, but many here feel their efforts in 2011, when they succeeded in removing Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, may have been for nought. Many outsiders, myself included, always believed the Tunisian "Jasmine" uprising had the best chance of succeeding, of building a...

Late last year, largely unnoticed in the West, Tunisia's president, Moncef Marzouki, gave an interview to Chatham House's The World Today. Commenting on a recent attack by Salafists—ultra-conservative Sunnis—on the United States embassy in Tunis, he remarked in an unguarded moment: "We didn't realise how dangerous and violent these Salafists could be ... They are a tiny minority within a tiny minority. They don't represent society or the state. They cannot be a real danger to society or government, but they can be very harmful to the image of the government." It appears that Marzouki was wrong. Following the assassination...

One empire falls and another rises in its place. It’s an old story and it is what we are seeing in the Middle East. The Islamist resurgence was fed by the collapse of two world powers, the USSR and the US. The fall of the Soviet Union robbed the Arab Socialist dictatorships of their support. The last of these, Syria, is now under siege, by Sunni Islamist militias. Egypt’s Sadat had made the move to the American camp early enough to avoid the fate of Syria or Iraq, but instead his successor, Mubarak, encountered the fate of the Shah of...

....Even before the attack on the U.S. compound, according to an Oct. 2, 2012 report in The Washington Post, the White House held a series of secret meetings that came out of a growing concern that "al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb" (AQIM) was gaining strength after it took control of the northern parts of the African state of Mali, where it created a new Afghan-like sanctuary. In the last year it has begun to spread its influence across the Sahara. AQIM's weaponry came from post-Gadhafi Libya, whose arsenal was boosting the arms trade from Morocco to Sinai. Israeli sources have...

Perhaps the most radical change in U.S. foreign policy under President Obama has occurred here in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood, long shunned as a collection of dangerous Islamist extremists, is now the de facto object of American support. Not only that: Ultraconservative Salafist politicians, who make the Brotherhood seem like moderate pragmatists, are now regular visitors to the U.S. Embassy and, on the theory that it is better to have them inside the tent than out, they are able to visit the United States to learn how things work in the land of Jeffersonian democracy. Of course, the new...

Anti-regime activists say jihadist fighters linked to al-Qaeda fought with rebels to capture a Syrian military air defense base near Aleppo. Videos posted online Friday apparently shot inside the base say Jabhat al-Nusra participated in the overnight battle for the base. The videos show fighters inspecting lines of large missiles.

CAIRO — The elections that followed the Arab uprisings elevated Islamists out of decades of repression and into the region’s most powerful posts. Here in Egypt, a former prisoner became president. But to Salafists, adherents of a puritanical form of Islam who have embraced the country’s new freedoms with gusto, the emerging Islamist order has a serious flaw: It isn’t nearly Islamist enough. “They say that the people do not want sharia,” said Gamel Saber, a back-slapping Salafist activist who said he dreams of a day when his country’s courts will fully implement Islamic law. “But that is not true....

"Salafist preacher and Internet activist indicted in Germany" September 13, 2011 SNIPPET: "Ibrahim Abou-Nagie, a salafi/jihadi preacher very active online, has been indicted in Cologne, Germany. Abou-Nagie, together with Abu Dujana of Bonn, operate as Die Wahre Religion (The True Religion). They are cited in multiple cases including those of the now-deceased Bekkay Harrach, and more recently Robert M. (arrested with an associate attempting to enter Britain whilst in possession of jihadist materials including Inspire magazine), not to mention Arid Uka, the Frankfurt shooter:"

The Salafi contribution to the cartoon riots The current working theory in most media circles is that Sam Bacile, who claimed to be an Israeli Jew, was really a front for Coptic Christians. The truth may however be that Sam Bacile was a Salafist who used Jews and Copts as a front for a Salafist agenda. There is some evidence that suggests this may be the most logical conclusion. Salafist connections have covered this entire project from beginning to end. Sam Bacile, didn’t do much with his YouTube account, besides uploading two clips from the “Innocence of Muslims” film, but...

If Americans are going to understand what’s going on and process it effectively, the first thing we’ve got to realize is that this isn’t all about us. The riots in Cairo are basically part of a local power struggle. Radical Salafists are in a power struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood; attacking the US embassy forces President Morsi (as the radical strategists presumably expected) to side with the US, however slowly or reluctantly. That’s a win for the radicals, who want to tar the Muslim Brotherhood as soft appeasers who side with the Americans against their own outraged people. Striking at...

Anti-US protests against an American-produced film which allegedly insults the Prophet Mohammed, took a violent turn in the Middle East as the US Embassy in Cairo was attacked and its consulate at Benghazi in Libya was set on fire reportedly killing one American consular official. US officials were however were reluctant to establish any link between the two incidents yesterday in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, and Benghazi, the Libyan city. "We cannot confirm any connection between these incidents," a senior State Department official said in response to questions linking the two incidents. Multiple American media outlets said that one US...

Tunisia’s western city of Sidi Bouzid is now dry... Chanting “al-Charab haram” (“alcohol is sin”), dozens of Salafists burst into Sidi Bouzid’s Horchani hotel on Monday, September 3. The throng of men quickly homed in on the hotel’s liquor stock, seizing bottles of alcohol and throwing them against the walls or smashing them on the floor. The incident comes around four months after the city’s Salafist community first launched a war against alcohol consumption, pressuring or intimidating several bars into shutting down. Those who tried to resist saw their businesses come under attack, much like the Horchani hotel. ... I...

In the 1980s, it was Afghanistan to which international Islamic fighters came, helping the mujahedeen successfully take on the Soviet army and its puppet regime in Kabul. Then came Bosnia in the 1990s and Iraq in the 2000s, in both of which veteran jihadists fought a sectarian war on behalf of outgunned Sunni minorities.In 2012, they’re flocking to Syria With funding from private organizations in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait, they are making their way across the frontiers from Iraq and Jordan, hooking up with opposition elements in Syria and taking the battle to Damascus and the heart of the...

After 9/11, it became commonplace to ridicule the status of Saudi Arabia as an “ally.” For decades, American leaders cuddled up to the Saudi Royal Family as it spent billions of dollars to export radical Islam around the globe. Today, the U.S. is eager to have our “ally,” Qatar, take a leading role in the region while it does the exact same thing. Qatar is home to Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni theologian and top Muslim Brotherhood cleric. He uses his popular show on Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, to rally support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and...

The battle over Syria has descended into sectarian strife led by extreme Salafists and other Islamic splinter organizations in a carefully orchestrated uprising coordinated and fueled by al-Qaeda operatives. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is no longer the sole force in the fight against Assad. As in Egypt, in Syria the Muslim Brothers have succeeded in appropriating (some would call it hijacking) the revolt and ultimately becoming its backbone. Moreover, Muslim fighters from around the globe are coming to join the ranks in the battle against Assad. Yet, the majority of Syrians do not identify with these radicals.

By ULRIKE HOFSAEHS AND JEAN-BAPTISTE PIGGIN Deutsche Presse-Agentur Published: May 8, 2012 BERLIN - A 25-year-old Islamist was remanded in custody in Germany on Monday, accused of the attempted murder of three policemen as they were separating neo-Nazis from Islamic fundamentalist protesters. Two officers were stabbed in the thigh on Saturday and a third officer dodged an attack by the knife-wielding man during a melee outside a mosque in the western city of Bonn. Pro NRW (North Rhine Westphalia), a far-right party with neo-Nazi canvassers, had organized a protest event drawing nearly 30 rightists to the mosque, holding up cartoons...

Germany's right-wing populists are fond of insulting Islam in order to attract attention. On Saturday, violence prone Salafists took the bait, resulting in a riot that left 29 police injured. Despite the clash, however, the anti-Islam party can continue to display their anti-Islam caricatures, a court has decided. It was clear from the start that the tiny, right-wing populist group Pro-NRW would stop at nothing to attract attention in the run-up to state elections in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia this Sunday. With Salafists in the state now reacting violently to Pro-NRW's inflammatory parading of Muhammad caricatures in front...

Egypt’s presidential contenders have been going through a new campaign rite of passage. One by one over recent weeks, they appeared before a panel of bearded, ultraconservative Muslim clerics who meticulously question them, including on how they intend to implement Islamic law. The vetting of candidates in next month’s landmark presidential elections is part of a move by Islamist clerics to become power players in Egypt’s emerging political system, a sign of the country’s dramatic shift during the stormy transition since longtime leader Hosni Mubarak was ousted more than a year ago. For years, clerics from the ultraconservative Salafi movement...

An angry mob of Muslim zealots, led by members of the Salafist sect, set fire to a Coptic Christian church in a village northeast of Cairo, in the latest attack on the Christian minority in the wake of Egypt’s January elections. The mob violence in the village of Meet Bashar, which continued through the past weekend, ended only when leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded in persuading the Salafists to leave the scene. The Muslim Brotherhood was the main victor in Egypt’s recent elections.

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate. The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia's elections, Turkey's Islamist AKP Party purged the...