Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism

News Stories

Deep Dive Policy Analysis of Cultural Miscommunication in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Western World

August 10, 2026 | by Noor Flanagan Almusahw

Noor Flanagan Almusahwi served as the 2026 Donnelly Spring Fellow at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. His paper argues that two decades of Western counterterrorism failure in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be explained by thin intelligence or absent political will alone. The deeper problem was interpretive. Policymakers built legitimacy out of paperwork while the populations they governed built it out of honor, obligation, and memory. Noor calls this semiotic misalignment, and he traces it through the language of liberation in Iraq and the social cost of foreign partnership in Afghanistan. His critique of the follow-the-money orthodoxy is the sharpest section. Tracking a transfer tells you how value moved. It tells you nothing about the duty that moved it. That gap is where insurgents recruit, and Noor writes about it with the authority of someone who has lived through the conditions he analyzes.

– Jason Blazakis, CTEC Executive Director 

Ghost Markets of the Darknet: Assessing the Feasibility of Military-Grade Arms Acquisition in West Africa

May 7, 2026 | by Ekaterina Grishakova and Satyajit Lall

Ghost Markets of the Darknet asks a deceptively simple question: If global e-commerce can move goods across continents in days, can a militant non-state actor in West Africa do the same with an RPG? Grishakova and Lall test the question against a hypothetical JNIM splinter faction, working through the discovery, payment, and delivery problems in turn. Their answer reframes the dark web as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for offline arms trafficking.”  

– Jason Blazakis, CTEC Executive Director 

Zakat, Proxies, and Plausible Deniability: The Financial Network of the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba

April 7, 2026 | by Satyajit Lall

In this research paper, CTEC Graduate Research Assistant Satyajit Lall traces nearly four decades of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba’s financial evolution—from its Saudi-backed origins during the Afghan jihad through the meticulously funded 2008 Mumbai attacks to the group’s continued operations culminating in the 2025 Pahalgam massacre—demonstrating that LeT’s resilience as one of South Asia’s most dangerous terrorist organizations is inseparable from the sophistication of its financial architecture. Drawing on an extensive body of scholarship, congressional testimony, and open-source intelligence, Lall maps the hybrid funding model of charitable fronts, diaspora remittances, hawala networks, and Pakistani state patronage that has allowed LeT to adapt to each successive wave of international pressure, from post-9/11 sanctions to FATF scrutiny, without ever suffering meaningful structural disruption to its financing. The paper makes a compelling case that the international community’s failure to confront the state-level enablers shielding LeT’s financial network has rendered existing designations and sanctions largely symbolic, and that only coordinated multilateral action targeting both the group’s front organizations and their institutional protectors can meaningfully degrade this persistent threat.

– Jason Blazakis, CTEC Executive Director