Munira Mustaffa is a Non-Resident Fellow at the New Lines Institute and a Fellow at Verve Research, an independent research collective focused on the relationship between militaries and societies in Southeast Asia. She also founded Chasseur Group, a research and analytical consulting firm specializing in security challenges, and serves as its executive director and principal consultant.
Munira has worked as a security and intelligence practitioner in the corporate, public, and military sectors of the security industry since 2014. Her research on terrorism and extremism, militant group behavior, and cyber warfare has appeared in a number of publications, including the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (STRATCOMCOE) and Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET). She has provided comments to and appeared on media outlets such as Reuters, Vice, the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Arab News, The Diplomat, The Wall Street Journal, and TRT World, among others. She has an MSc in Countering Organised Crime & Terrorism from University College London. She tweets at @muniramustaffa.
Fears that the fall of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria and the return of the Afghan Taliban would give rise to a new wave of terrorism in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have proven largely unfounded.
The Chechen Kadyrovtsy, a militia led by warlord and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, has a fearsome reputation. However, their performance in Ukraine indicates that the hype about their ferocity in battle is not to be believed.
