Pieter Van Ostaeyen
Pieter Van Ostaeyen studied Medieval History with a specialisation in the history of the Crusades (KULeuven 1999) and Arabic and Islamic Studies, focusing on the history of Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi and the Assassins (KULeuven 2003). Van Ostaeyen has been analysing the conflict in Syria since the outset in 2011. In 2012 he began reporting on foreign fighters and extremist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar as-Sham, Jund al-Aqsa and The Islamic State. Since September 1st 2016 he is a PhD applicant at the University of Leuven researching the usage of social media in the ideological strife between al-Qaeda and The Islamic State.
The situation Mali has hit the headlines quite often in the last years, with journalistic articles and reports mainly focusing on the threat posed by terrorist groups in the country as well as in the region. Besides attracting the attention of the media, the presence of terrorist actors in the country has become a top […]
Some 5000 men, women and children have travelled from Europe to Syria and Iraq since 2012. Less than a year after this process began, European intelligence services started to openly express their concerns about the dangers emanating from the potential return of seasoned fighters. Policy responses, however, were slow in coming and mostly ad hoc, […]
In this Research Paper, Marieke Liem et al provide a bivariate analysis of lone actor terrorists and common homicide offenders. Liem et al’s findings problematise the classification of lone actors as an entity fundamentally different from the sample of single homicide offenders and call for future in-depth assessments of possible differences in homicidal drive.