After the 9/11 attacks, The United States of America (USA) destroyed al Qaeda’s established training bases and removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Thus, al Qaeda is forced to find new havens to continue operating safely as well as new sources of recruits. Unfortunately, if the conditions in the ground do not change, West Africa will be the next recruiting front for Osama bin Laden’s ...

How can we tell if an Al Qaeda cell has been broken? That enough members have been captured or killed so that there is a high likelihood they will be unable to carry out a new attack, and military resources can be redirected away from them and toward more immediate threats? This article uses order theory to quantify the degree to which a terrorist network is still able to function. This tool wi...

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 illustrated in graphic terms the vulnerability of the United States to asymmetrical attack. The relative ease with which the nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airplanes and used them as deadly ballistic missiles was inconceivable to the citizens of the world’s only remaining superpower. In an instant, it became painfully clear that despite it...

Social network analysis investigates the structure of human groups using pairwise links among their members. We show how matrix decompositions can be used to extend the standard repertoire of social network and link analysis tools to allow, for example, the inclusion of other information about individuals, and higher-order information about the relationships among them. We show how these extens...

This paper describes the procedures for a concept-based mapping of two agricultural thesauri, the multilingual AGROVOC, created and maintained by the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the bilingual Chinese Agricultural Thesaurus, created and maintained by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. Conducted under the auspices of FAO’s Agricultural Ontology Service, the mapping project a...

W e can say with some certainty, al Qaeda loves the Internet. When the latter first appeared, it was hailed as an integrator of cultures and a medium for businesses, consumers, and governments to communicate with one another. It appeared to offer unparalleled opportunities for the creation of a “global village.” Today the Internet still offers that promise, but it also has proven in some respec...

Introduction Over the past decade, decapitation, particularly high-value targeting (HVT), has come into vogue and is being increasingly applied in a variety of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and anti-organized crime settings around the world. There are several reasons for this widespread adoption of high-value targeting as a dominant interdiction pattern. First, there is a long tradition ...

f the mid-1990s through 2001 two of the West’s most implacable terrorist foes, Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Khabab, carried on what appears to have been a long-running feud within al-Qaeda, a feud that came to an end only when Abu Hafs al-Masri was killed by the U.S. military. Abu Hafs joined al-Qaeda early on and served as the group’s military commander from 1996 onward. Abu Khabab was a member o...

Al-Qaeda is commonly described as a highly flexible and adaptable non-state network, making it difficult for states to combat. Although these features are associated with networks in theory, they are not inherent to networks in practice, and rely largely on organisational learning. A network that fails to learn is not likely to adapt successfully. This paper explores the learning implications o...