Tag: Islamists

Security services in Norway and elsewhere in the region had recently shifted their focus to Islamist extremism, letting other forms of terror slip under...

Al Qaeda-inspired insurgents abducted and detained Somalia's newly appointed women's minister Thursday while she was on her way to take up office, officials and...

Top Pakistani military officials are concerned that their ranks have been penetrated by Islamists aiding militants in a campaign against the state, The Washington...

AMMAN - Jordanian security forces have arrested 70 Islamists after violent protests in which many people were hurt, most of them policemen, a security official told AFP on Saturday. The suspects, members of the ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Salafist movement, were rounded up during raids Friday in the town of Zarqa and nearby Rassifeh, hours after Islamist protesters attacked police, the official said. Initially 120 people were detained but 50 of them were later let go while 70 were

DHAKA - Riot police patrolled the streets of the Bangladeshi capital on Monday as a strike called by Islamic parties to protest a proposed law favouring female equality brought much of the country to a halt.
The parties, known as the Islamic Law Implementation Committee, called the strike to protest against the government's move to pass laws ensuring equal property and inheritance rights for women in the Muslim-majority country.
Most shops, businesses and schools in Dhaka

ADEN - Central government forces in Yemen fought Islamist militants on Sunday after the militants seized control of parts of a south Yemen town, residents said. The militants forced the army to retreat from a hill overlooking the town of Jaar, taking over a state broadcast building and a rest house used by President Ali Abdullah Saleh on visits to the region.
The militants seized two tanks and one soldier was killed, the sources said. The army shelled key government buildings

LONDON - As the death toll in anti-government protests in Libya since Tuesday reached at least 173 on Sunday, Islamist gunmen stormed a military arms depot in Libya and a nearby port and seized numerous weapons and army vehicles after killing four soldiers, a security official said.
"There are 173 dead," Human Rights Watch (HRW) spokesman Tom Porteous said. "It's a conservative figure based on hospital sources in eastern Libya, Benghazi and three other places. It is a very

PARIS - Tunisia's popular Islamist party Ennahdha said on Tuesday it would field no presidential candidate in planned elections and denounced the country's transition leaders as a government of "exclusion". The party's exiled leader Rached Ghannouchi "will not be a candidate, Ennahdha will not have a candidate in the presidential election," to be held in six months, the party's Paris-based spokesman Houcine Jaziri told AFP. But he said the party would take part in legislative polls.

NAIROBI - Women living in areas controlled by Somalia's Islamists say they are increasingly the target of more draconian rules meted out by the rebels bent on enforcing their ideologies. In the latest decree by the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab group that governs most of southern Somalia, women in the seaside town of Kismayu have been banned from carrying out barter trade with the male crews of ships calling at the port. The women have also been told they cannot shake any male's hands in

ISTANBUL - Police detained 32 members of the Turkish Hezbollah movement in night raids in four cities, mainly in southeast Turkey, television news channels reported on Saturday.
The raids were ordered after some members of Hezbollah and the Kurdish separatist PKK militant group, freed earlier this month after spending over a decade in prison without being sentenced, failed to report to police stations and went underground.
The Supreme Court on Friday ordered the rearrest of

BISHKEk - Kyrgyz security forces killed two suspected Islamist militants in a raid on Wednesday on rebels accused of killing three policemen on Tuesday.
One officer of the GKNB security service died of wounds sustained during the attack, a police spokesman said. Kyrgyz security officials had pledged tough punishment for "religious extremists" who they say shot the three policemen in a residential area of the capital Bishkek.
"Two terrorists were destroyed during the