Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research
Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research

BLUE SMOKE: A monthly column, from PassBlue and UNA–UK, spotlighting senior appointments at the UN

ISIS

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Will it never end? When will time run out on the array of shape-shifting militant Islamist movements intent on moving into shaky trouble spots around the world to impose their extreme ideology, harness the population and hijack the local…

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MOSUL, Iraq — For two weeks in early April and again in June, I was embedded in Mosul with an emergency-response division of the Iraqi army, which is fighting to retake the city from ISIS. The nonprofit organization I…

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ERBIL, Iraq — Despite the war crimes being committed against women and girls in northern Iraq since the extremist group ISIS invaded two years ago, rejection of entrenched violence and discrimination against females may be taking root among pockets…

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Terrorism and violent extremism are the most dramatic threats in the 21st century to state monopoly on the use of force, a cornerstone of the international system. In recent years, the failure of early counterterrorism efforts to…

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Sun Tzu’s classic work on the art of war advises would-be warriors to “know your enemy.” What were Western powers and the United Nations thinking when they first pondered ways to stop Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from beating, torturing,…

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When the United Nations Security Council recently approved timelines to begin peace talks and institute a national cease-fire in Syria, the language in the resolution gave no hint of the magnitude of such undertakings, nor did the congratulatory speeches…

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At the end of July, Physicians for Human Rights, a group of health care professionals who have been documenting abuses in conflict areas for nearly three decades, went to Turkey to hear the stories of Syrian doctors who are…

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Khalid al-Asaad, an internationally recognized Syrian scholar of antiquities, was beheaded by ISIS on Aug. 18 for refusing to disclose the location of archeological treasures apparently removed for safekeeping from Palmyra, one of the Middle East’s most important archeological landmarks…

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In 1973, Jesse Helms, a newly elected United States senator and an ideologue contemptuous of the United Nations, dismissive of international treaties and completely devoid of compassion for the world’s poor, put his name on an amendment to the…

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It was a year ago this week that the terrorist group Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) not long ago, carried out a late-night abduction of 276 girls from their boarding…

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The shocking scenes of irreplaceable centuries-old treasures being smashed and toppled from their pedestals in a museum in Mosul — with the rabid acts of destruction proudly videotaped by fighters who call themselves the Islamic State — has provoked…

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The Russian-sponsored resolution to fight more precisely the financing of the Islamic jihadists who control swaths of Iraq and Syria passed unanimously in the United Nations Security Council recently, expressing the entire council’s dread, at least for now, of…

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The news from Syria and Iraq is most often dominated by besieged cities and airstrikes on the strongholds of the Muslim extremists of the Islamic State. What those fighters are doing to women they abduct is often hidden by…

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Is the conflict in the contemporary Muslim world so unusual, given that Christians were doing similar things 400 to 500 years ago? Is it really a phenomenon that involves “Muslims,” or is it more a matter of conflicts peculiar…

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Beyond the horrific executions, the deadly assaults on Christian and Yazidi communities and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing towns to avoid their terror, fighters of the Islamic State movement sweeping through Syria and Iraq are…

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UNGA78: A quiz from PassBlue
Online Program Enrolling Now - Seton Hall - United Nations Institute for Training and Research

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