Peter Bergen Quotes
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Assad owes his continuation in power to the intervention of Russia in 2015 to prop up his regime.
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The Turkish government will never tolerate the creation of a Kurdish state.
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My quest to meet Osama bin Laden began in North London early in 1997. In the Dollis Hill section, I contacted Khaled al-Fauwaz, the spokesman for a Saudi opposition group, the Advice and Reformation Committee, which bin Laden had founded.
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Afghanistan's winters in the north are legendarily harsh, and southern Afghanistan, by contrast, is bleak desert. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that Afghanistan is one of the world's most heavily mined countries.
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Ground operations are inherently very risky in Yemen. The two previous JSOC raids in Yemen were both in 2014.
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If the Arab Spring was a large nail in the coffin of al-Qaeda's ideology, the death of bin Laden was an equally large nail in the coffin of al-Qaeda the organization.
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A little exposure to a city like Sulaimani will help Trump understand that the Middle East is a much more complex place than he seems to believe. Perhaps Trump could even give a speech at the American University in Sulaimani, just as President Obama did at Cairo University early in his first term.
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ISIS despises the Russian government for its support of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and so it's no surprise that ISIS began targeting Russia in 2015, around the same time that Russia first intervened in the Syrian civil war.
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Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during his attack, the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11.
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Will there be a political backlash against British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose ruling Conservative Party is traditionally seen as 'stronger' on terrorism than its main rival, the Labour Party?
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In one notorious episode in 2002, in the holy city of Mecca, the religious police prevented girls from fleeing a school that was on fire because they were not properly dressed.
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The American incarceration of Sheikh Rahman was a hot-button issue for al Qaeda for many years.
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Bin Laden was intelligent, well-informed, and low key. The people around him treated him with great deference, calling him 'sheikh,' a term of respect.
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It is in American and Afghan interests for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan so it doesn't turn into Iraq circa 2014, with the Taliban controlling much of the country while hosting a strong presence of ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as every other jihadist group of note.
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Using vehicles as weapons is a tactic that has often used by Palestinian terrorists to target Israelis, but in 2014, an ISIS spokesman had encouraged such vehicular attacks in the West, saying of ISIS' enemies, 'Run him over with your car.'
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Abedi appears to be one of the many thousands of Western Muslims who have embraced militant Islam, often as a way of trying to resolve the tension between their split identities.
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Al-Qaeda, which means 'the base' in English, lost its base and training camps in Afghanistan, while its leaders were on the run, captured, or dead. One year after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was still on life support.
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The only lethal terrorist to immigrate to the United States as an adult and conduct an attack shortly after arriving is Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan.
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Hydrogen peroxide-based bombs were used in the London bombings in 2005; in al Qaeda's foiled plot to attack subways in New York City in 2009 and also in the ISIS-directed Paris attacks in 2015 and the ISIS-directed attacks in Brussels a year later.
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The thing that's very puzzling to somebody who's been in Pakistan repeatedly since 1983 is lots of people live in compounds with high walls in Pakistan. I mean, that's so completely routine. In fact, you know, it would be un-routine to have the reverse.
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As early as 1993, members of bin Laden's group had been planning an attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.
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A decade and a half ago, the U.S. Air Force dropped massive 15,000-pound 'Daisy Cutter' bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001.
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The hard reality is that attacks by vehicles in public places are very hard to defend against in a free and open society. The best defense against such attacks is good intelligence, and that often comes from inside the Muslim community.
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The Trump administration launched the cruise missile strikes in Syria, an act of war, without a U.N. resolution or Congressional authorization.