Quotes from Peter Bergen

Candidate Trump had previously opined that 'Islam hates us' and had called for 'the total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,' an argument he has since modified and moderated.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad belongs to the small Alawite sect and is therefore considered a heretic by many Sunnis; al-Assad runs a secular regime, and therefore he is considered by Sunni militants to be an apostate, and he is inflicting a total war on his Sunni population.

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

Donald Trump's own mother Mary escaped the bone-crushing poverty of Scotland's remote Outer Hebrides for the promise of New York in 1929.

Osama bin Laden fervently hoped that attacking the United States would create pressure on American leaders to reduce their support for Middle Eastern regimes. Bin Laden believed that without that American support, the Arab regimes would collapse and would be replaced by Taliban-style rulers.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brutally repressed all forms of opposition to his regime, and before the Iraq War, al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.

In short, the hunt for bin Laden could not have been accomplished without every form of American intelligence-gathering.

When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.

The E.U. is the latest of a series of multinational organizations set up after World War II to ensure that there would never again be a pan-European war and to create the conditions for a new European prosperity after the destruction wrought by the war against the Nazis. The E.U. has admirably succeeded at both.

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.

The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai - activities overseen by al-Qaeda's senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.

The less the ISIS 'caliphate' exists as a physical entity, the less the group can claim it is the 'Islamic State' that it purports to be.

Six years after al-Awlaki was born, his family moved back to Yemen, but he returned to the States for college and remained there for much of his adult life.

In the past, Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, of which SEAL Team 6 is a key component, has only launched ground raids in Yemen when the lives of hostages held by al Qaeda seemed at risk.

Ground operations are inherently very risky in Yemen. The two previous JSOC raids in Yemen were both in 2014.

In Yemen, the United States conducted more drone strikes in 2016 than any year except 2012, the peak of the campaign in the country, according to data collected by New America.

There is considerable merit to the notion of treating gun violence as a public health matter.

Between November 23, 2002, and January 11, 2003, al-Qahtani was interrogated for 48 days at Guantanamo more or less continuously, kept awake for much of that time by loud music being blasted when he was falling asleep, doused with water and subjected to cold temperatures, kept naked and forced to perform tricks as if he were a dog.

The sitting prime minister, Jose Aznar, who had strongly backed the U.S.-led Iraq War, was unseated by a challenger who then pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. The Madrid terrorist attacks are generally regarded as being the key to why Aznar, who had been leading in the polls, was defeated.

Sanctions on Pakistan have been part of the troubled U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the past and should not be considered as an option in the future.

President-elect Donald Trump has a host of national security challenges to deal with as he assumes office, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the grinding Syrian civil war to the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin to how to deal with ISIS as the terrorist army retreats in Iraq.

The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge went to great lengths to hide their crimes against humanity. Instead, ISIS posts its many crimes on social media for global distribution with seemingly no thoughts for the consequences.

On November 28, 2016, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an 18-year-old legal resident of the United States whose family was originally from Somalia, used a car to mow down a group of people at the Ohio State University.

The deep problems that afflict the Middle East are not easy to fix, but they must be dealt with if we are not to see a son of ISIS, or even a grandson of ISIS, developing in the years to come.