Foreign Policy

“It is always dangerous for soldiers, sailors, or airmen to play at politics. They enter a sphere in which the values are quite different from those to which they have hitherto been accustomed.”

Afghanistan Taliban attacks continue in Afghanistan A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy from the European Union (E.U.) police training mission near Kabul’s international airport on Sunday, killing three people (AP, BBC). The bomb exploded near the office of the Afghan Civil Aviation Authority, a few hundred yards from the airport’s main terminal. The blast ...

Read this and ask yourself, which was the U.S. military in Iraq?

Hold on there, technophobe hippies. When it comes to “doing no harm,” robots are a hell of a lot better than humans.

By Paul McLeary with Ariel Robinson Things fall apart. Iraqi forces broke and fled the city of Ramadi in the face of a renewed assault by the Islamic State on Sunday, recalling the full-fledged retreat from Mosul last summer that gave the extremist group access to whole divisions’ worth of American-supplied Iraqi military equipment. Despite ...

The Islamic State has taken the Iraqi city of Ramadi, it’s first major victory since the international coalition began targeting its operations in Iraq and Syria last September. The attack began on Friday when fighters disguised as police officers infiltrated the city and seized key government buildings. According to Iraqi officials, at least 500 people ...

From drone strikes to prison torture, the CIA has been pulling the strings of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. And if history is a guide, the agency will be calling the shots in the Middle East for years to come.

Delta Force operators killed a senior Islamic State leader inside Syria, but the intelligence they collected could be just as important -- and might open the door to new raids in the future.

The Camp David summit concluded on Thursday with a stack of assurances from President Barack Obama to representatives of the Arab Gulf states that America has their back. To prove his intentions, he promised to sell them more and better weapons, and to increase the frequency of combined training and exercise opportunities for their forces ...

The best stories from around the world.

The Defense Department has long praised a support program for troubled troops. That wasn't enough to save it from the budget axe.

Victoria Nuland, America’s top diplomat for Europe, has tapped an experienced Capitol Hill staffer as her new senior adviser, officials tell Foreign Policy.

Nearly every day, it seems, a new report arrives of hundreds of migrants being pulled out of the sea or drowning in anonymity. Both in the Mediterranean Sea and the waters of South East Asia, desperate migrants are being packed into rickety boats and transported across dangerous waterways toward the hope of a new life, ...

Some financial companies in the U.S. resort to carrying cash on airplanes to keep remittances flowing to needy Somalis.

A federal jury in Massachusetts sentenced Tsarnaev to death on six of 17 counts.

The country's bold strategy to fight maternal mortality flouts conventional wisdom and relies on a controversial drug -- and in the wake of the devastating earthquake, it could be more important than ever.

Islamic State fighters are pushing deeper into the key Iraqi city of Ramadi while launching new attacks against the sprawling Baiji oil refinery, but a top U.S. military official involved in the Pentagon’s training and advising mission there says that the group remains “on the defensive.” Speaking by phone from his headquarters in the Middle ...

Thousands of Nepali workers in Qatar struggle to find a way to go home -- and give back -- to a country in crisis.

The 15-year-old diarist was a singular talent. Let’s stop pretending every young woman tweeting her life under fire is doing the same.

It took 17 years, but federal prosecutors have finally won a conviction for a militant linked to the devastating al Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 224 dead and 4,000 injured and marked the group’s emergence as America’s top terrorist adversary.

A federal judge Friday sentenced Khaled al-Fawwaz, a top former advisor to Osama bin Laden, to life in prison. He was convicted in February on four conspiracy counts in connection to the 1998 attack, which killed 12 Americans.

The twin truck bomb attacks in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi prompted then-President Bill Clinton to launch Operation Infinite Reach, which consisted of cruise missile strikes in Somalia and Afghanistan. The missiles fired into east Africa destroyed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Somalia, a facility that ended up having no connection to al Qaeda or bin Laden.

Strikes in Afghanistan destroyed four training camps and were an effort to kill bin Laden, who was believed to be at the Zhawar Kili al-Badr base. He left hours before the missiles struck.

After 9/11, Clinton came under fierce criticism for not having mounted a more muscular attempt to kill bin Laden.

The bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were the second attack by al Qaeda against American targets. In 1992, the group bombed a hotel in Yemen, where U.S. troops had been staying in route to Somalia. The service members were not at the hotel when a series of bombs went off, but two American tourists were killed.

Fawwaz was not convicted for planning the embassy bombing, but on four conspiracy counts. A the time of the attacks, he was in London disseminating bin Laden’s messages and sending supplies to terror cells in Africa. He was arrested in London in 1998, then extradited to the United States in 2012 after a long legal fight.

Lawyers for Fawwaz said he deserved less than life in prison because he was not as responsible for the attacks as other al Qaeda leaders. But prosecutors argued to Judge Lewis Kaplan that Fawwaz was the leader of a terrorist cell in Kenya in the 1990s who was once the ninth most powerful person in al Qaeda.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said he is the 10th person to be convicted or to plead guilty in connection to the bombings.

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