ISIS

In an abandoned luxury apartment building in Til Kocher, Syria, a group of young women laugh, sing songs, and prepare chai tea for their guests. In the adjacent room is an arsenal of weapons ranging from American M4 rifles to Hungarian-made Dragunovs and locally manufactured Zagrov .50-caliber sniper rifles. The cheerful young women enjoying their […]

The key to winning wars, or simply managing chaos, is understanding not only what is going on, but why, and how it has been dealt with in the past.

Terrorism strikes Paris, the heart of cultural Europe, and Europeans awaken from a very dangerous sleep. What happened in Paris shows that European Union governments have failed their policy against the jihad; they have maintained a low level of alert, but mostly, they have left the initiative to the terrorists. As explained by Boaz Ganor, founder […]

On December 27, 2014, BG Hamid Taghavi (aka Taqavi) of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force (QF) Ramazan Corps was allegedly shot by an ISIS sniper in Samarra, Iraq. His funeral was held in Tehran on December 29, 2014. This was the most senior Iranian officer killed in Iraq since the Iran/Iraq war in the […]

“Havrem,” whose real name is Alex, presents himself as an ideological warrior who ran away from home at the age of 16 to join the PKK and fight for Kurdish freedom. He talks about scaling the treacherous mountains of Turkey as a PKK fighter and of ruthless battles fought against ISIS in Northern Syria, but […]

If governments or media continually fail to diagnose these events as being Islamic-driven, albeit a radicalized version of the faith, then how effective are subsequent counter-radicalization and counterterrorism strategies going to be?

Before recruits were sent home on Christmas Exodus, they were instructed not to shave or get haircuts, and to thoroughly scrub their social media profiles. A few weeks before, on November 30, 2014, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned members of the military and their families that ISIS sympathizers here in the […]

At the dawn of 2015, the world continues its march into gradual unplanned decentralization and the chaos which accompanies it.  While Western idealists have, and continue to, see liberal democracy as the final form of government the more apt parallel of current global trends has more in common with the warring city states of medieval […]

While most of the attention given in the last few months to events in Iraq and Syria has focused on the Kurdish fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan and Rojava, the Kurds don’t particularly care about the rest of Iraq. The majority of the organizations moving to secure Arab Iraq are Shi’a militias, the most prominent (and powerful) […]

Initial reports are ISIS has claimed the downing of it’s first coalition aircraft, a Royal Jordanian Air Force (RJAF) F-16AM. The government of Jordan is confirming the loss of the aircraft, and as photos indicate, the pilot has been captured. Certainly not good news for the pilot and the Jordanians, who are especially skittish about […]

We’ve published three books that work as a surreal trilogy about the current events in the Middle East.  In Benghazi: The Definitive Report, Brandon and I wrote about how the Arab Spring migrated across the Middle East, eventually blowing up into the Libyan Civil War. While the Arab Spring had been a series of protest […]

SOFREP’s future is quite simple. Hire a bunch of ex-Green Berets, Rangers, SEALs, and other assorted lunatics to travel to and write about third-world war zones. Our writers understand the terrain and can write about it from a much more informed point of view.