struggle within Islam

South Asia

Pakistan launches new offensive on Baloch rebels

Pakistani authorities say that more than 100 insurgents have been killed in Balochistan province over the past week as security forces intensify a large-scale campaign against the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and other militant groups. The campaign, dubbed “Operation Shaban,” was launched after a series of attacks on security personnel. The army, Frontier Corps and Balochistan Police have been deployed in coordinated aerial and ground assaults across the province. (Map: PCL)

Syria

Syria: ‘Barrel Bomb Mufti’ on trial

The trial of Syria’s former grand mufti, Ahmed Bareddin Hassoun, opened at the Palace of Justice in Damascus. Hassoun led Syria’s official religious establishment under the Bashar Assad dictatorship. He is accused of incitement to murder and abusing his position as mufti to provide religious cover for the crimes of the regime, as well as participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. He famously issued fatwas justifying the bombing of civilians and called the regime’s use of indiscriminate barrel bombs “liberation,” winning him the epithet “Barrel Bomb Mufti.” He also issued a fatwa in 2017 authorizing the execution of detainees held at the notorious Sednaya Prison, where the Assad regime killed thousands, many through torture and starvation. (Photo: SANA via Arab News)

Syria

Fighting again erupts in Syria’s Suwayda

Clashes broke out in Syria’s southern as-Suwayda province between the central government’s Internal Security Forces and Druze armed groups affiliated with the region’s self-declared “National Guard.” Fighters from the Guard’s “501 Knights of Hamza” battalion attempted to advance toward government lines in the governorate’s western countryside under heavy cover fire, including from truck-mounted machine-guns and rocket-launchers. Government forces responded with mortar fire. Since the fall of the Bashar Assad dictatorship in December 2024, Israel has occupied large areas of eastern as-Suwayda, and is believed to have dropped arms to Druze fighters in the region. The province has been effectively divided since fighting broke out last year between Druze militia and central government forces and their local Bedouin allies. (Map: Google)

Africa

Podcast: MAGA-fascism and the struggle in Nigeria

With his Christmas air-strikes on Nigeria, Trump is blundering into a conflict fundamentally driven by desertification related to the very climate change that he denies, and which now threatens democratic rule throughout the West African region. And while the Muslim-Christian sectarian strife that Trump hypes is a large element of the situation, the violence has gone both ways. Furthermore, making Christians the perceived beneficiaries of imperialist intervention is only likely to exacerbate the tensions and make Christians more of a target. In Episode 310 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes an in-depth and unsparing look. (Photo: AFRICOM via Long War Journal)

Africa

Sudan: massacres, ‘execution spree’ as El Fasher falls to RSF

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have fired on fleeing civilians, plundered hospitals, and carried out over a dozen “field executions” in El Fasher in the days since the paramilitary army took the city, local observers report. The Sudan Doctors Network issued a statement saying the RSF had carried out a “heinous massacre [of] unarmed civilians on ethnic grounds in what amounts to an act of ethnic cleansing.” Among those slain in targeted summary executions was reportedly Siham Hassan, a longtime activist and former member of parliament. She was known for running a community kitchen to feed the hungry in El Fasher, and as an outspoken advocate for women’s rights. (Map: PCL)

Afghanistan

Fighting breaks out along Durand Line

According to reports in Pakistan’s media, the Afghan Taliban and affiliated militants launched an attack from the Afghan side of the border, killing at least 23 Pakistani troops and injuring some 30 others. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar stated that troops responded to cross-border raids by “Fitna-e-Khawarij and Fitna-e-Hindustan terrorist elements.” This appears to be a reference to the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which Islamabad accuses the Afghan Taliban of providing sanctuary to. In contrast, a statement from Hamdullah Fitrat, spokesman for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said that conditions on the “imaginary line” with Pakistan are under control. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fraught with tension, especially around the disputed Durand Line border. Established in 1893 between British India and Afghanistan, this border has never been officially recognized by any Afghan government since the partition of India in 1947, leading to a persistent territorial dispute. (Map: Google)

North Africa

Moroccan feminist arrested for ‘blasphemy’

Prominent Moroccan feminist Ibtissam Lachgar was arrested by the kingdom’s Judicial Police after posting a photo of herself on social media wearing a t-shirt with the word for God in Arabic (Allah) followed by the English words: “is a lesbian.” This reference to the international feminist catchphrase “God is a lesbian” won her “blasphemy” charges from the Rabat prosecutor’s office. The charge carries penalties ranging from six months to two years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to $20,000. The penalty can be increased to five years if the offense is committed publicly or electronically. (Photo via Twitter)

Syria

Syria: ISIS launches attacks on ‘apostate regime’

Presumed ISIS militants attacked a police station of the Kurdish autonomous administration at al-Sabha in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province. The attack with grenades and small arms was repulsed by the local police force without loss of life. But this was only the latest in a spate of new ISIS attacks in Syria. In a first attack on central government forces since the ouster the Assad dictatorship last December, ISIS boasted in a communique last week that its fighters had killed several soldiers of the “the apostate Syrian regime” at a road checkpoint in Talul al-Safa, in southern Suwayda province. One member of the Free Syrian Army faction was also killed in an ambush by ISIS militants on an FSA patrol in al-Tanf Deconfliction Zone, a US military outpost near the Jordan border. (Photo: SOHR via Kurdistan4)

Syria

Israel escalates Syria strikes —in name of protecting Druze

Syrian Druze leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri accused the interim government of carrying out a “genocidal attack” on his community following two days of sectarian violence that left 100 dead. Clashes broke out in the Damascus suburbs of Jaramana and Sahnaya, and armed residents began to mobilize in the Druze-majority southern city of Suwayda before a truce was reached. But by then Israel had escalated its military intervention in Syria, launching air-strikes on targets around Damascus. In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF had “struck an extremist group” that was killing members of the Druze community. This is presumably a reference to the now ostensibly disbanded Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading faction in the forces that took power in Syria and formed the transition government late last year. It is unclear who launched the attacks that sparked the fighting, which were condemned by the interim government. (Map: PCL)

Africa

Trump’s first air-strikes hit ISIS base in Puntland

US fighter jets launched from the USS Harry Truman in the Red Sea struck a hidden base of the local ISIS franchise in the interior mountains of Somalia’s northern autonomous enclave of Puntland. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the “initial assessment is that multiple operatives were killed” in these first US air-strikes under the new Trump presidency. The strikes were carried out with the cooperation of the governments of both Puntland and Somalia, whose President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud expressed his “deepest gratitude.” The Puntland Dervish Forces have for some five years been fighting the self-declared “Islamic State Somalia” in the enclave’s Cal Miskaad mountains. (Photo via Garowe Online)

South Asia

Pakistan: truce follows weeks of sectarian clashes

A ceasefire agreement was reached between two warring tribes in Pakistan’s restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province following weeks of clashes that left 130 people dead in Kurram district, along the border with Afghanistan. A Grand Jirga of tribal leaders was called to mediate the truce. The violence exploded when a convoy of Shi’ite pilgrims traveling to a shrine in Peshawar was ambushed by armed assailants, killing at least 42. The ensuing clashes pitted members of the mostly Shi’ite Bagan tribe against their Sunni neighbors, the Alizai, with shops and homes ransacked and whole villages displaced. A land dispute between the two tribes had also caused clashes that led to 50 fatalities in September, and ended when some 100,000 local residents marched for peace. (Map: USAID via ReliefWeb)

Greater Middle East

Podcast: neither Jewish State nor Islamic Republic

Israel’s long-awaited strikes on Iran targeted military and industrial installations in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam, with air-strikes also reported in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs. It is now Iran’s turn to retaliate in the escalatory tit-for-tat game, as the brink of regional and even world war looms ever closer. In Episode 249 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advocates a neither/nor position that rejects the militaristic and reactionary regimes of both Zionism and political Islam, and looks to a secular order in the Middle East. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Image: @iranprotest2019)