The war on terror's emphasis on denying sanctuary and safe havens to terrorists has placed a premium on physical territory, from mountain caves and frontier hideouts to the bordered world of modern states. Denial of Sanctuary highlights the limits of conventional thinking on the subject, and suggests new approaches to understanding this complex and misunderstood feature of modern conflict. Critics of the war on terror have pointed to the futility of waging war on a tactic. Its emphasis on denying sanctuary and safe havens to terrorists, rooted primarily in traditional counterinsurgency theory and poorly conceptualized policy statements, has placed a premium on physical territory, from mountain caves and frontier hideouts to the bordered world of modern states. To fully understand sanctuaries is to uncover the problems and pitfalls of waging war on locations—exposing the secret lives of multiple hidden worlds, filled with extremists, criminals, soldiers, and spies, with the pious and the profane, with dangers that lie below the surface and in the margins. As this volume makes abundantly clear, such a murky underground is far more complex and varied than the conventional wisdom suggests. Terrorists have hidden in plain sight in modern cities, used advanced communications technology to build virtual refuges, crafted militant enclaves out of the disarray of failed states, flocked to distinctly unsafe insurgent battlespaces, and generally challenged the protective limits of law, citizenship, and state. Denial of Sanctuary brings together top experts in the field to expand the debate; to explore the roots, causes and consequences of the problem; and to clarify our understanding of sanctuary in terrorist thought and practice.

Physical sanctuary is one of the bedrocks of a successful insurgency. Denial of these safe havens is critical to a successful counterinsurgency campaign and the eventual defeat of the insurgents by the host state. The United States must create a policy or strategy to combat insurgency through elimination or minimization of safe havens. I will examine three methodologies that have proven successful in the past to deny sanctuaries and then show how each may or may not be a pertinent strategy to defeat or eliminate safe havens while combating insurgencies in Operations ENDURING and IRAQI FREEDOM.

Since early 1964, herbicides have been used to deny the enemy safe sanctuary in the jungles of Vietnam. The defoliant campaign started on an experimental basis in late 1961, with three C-123 aircraft, escalated to seven aircraft in 1965, and grew to a whole squadron during 1966.

Abbot Christopher Jamison, from BBC2's THE MONASTERY and new show THE SILENCE, suggests ways in which the teachings of St Benedict can be helpful in everyday life. Have you ever wondered why everybody these days seems so busy? In FINDING SANCTUARY, Father Christopher Jamison offers practical wisdom from the monastic tradition on how to build sanctuary into your life. No matter how hard you work, being too busy is not inevitable. Silence and contemplation are not just for monks and nuns, they are natural parts of life. Yet to keep hold of this truth in the rush of modern living you need the support of other people and sensible advice from wise guides. By learning to listen in new ways, people's lives can change and the abbot offers some monastic steps that help this transition to a more spiritual life. In the face of many easy assumptions about the irrelevance of religion today, Father Christopher makes religion accessible for those in search of life's meaning and offers a vision of the world's religions working together as a unique source of hope for the 21st century.

Denying terrorists sanctuary has become a pillar of U.S. defense strategy since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks. Violent extremist organizations in North Africa, such as the group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), have used remote and sparsely populated areas in the Sahara for protection from security forces to conduct a range of terrorist activities, such as training, planning, and logistics.1 Despite the time elapsed since the 9/11 attacks, and the resources dedicated to denying sanctuary globally, the concept of sanctuary remains largely unexplored and poorly understood. This monograph proposes a functional understanding of sanctuary and offers fresh ideas to deny it using a detailed case study of the most notorious of these North African terrorists, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, from his arrival in Mali in the late 1990s, until the French intervention in early 2013. Contents: On Sanctuary Terrain: Geographic and Human Characteristics of Saharan Sanctuary Sanctuary Seekers in the Sahara Denial of Sanctuary: Ends, Ways, and Means

First published in English in 2007 under title: The history of terrorism: from antiquity to al Qaeda.