The UK’s Special Forces have been reported on operations in almost twenty countries in just over 10 years. Here we outline why this might be concern.

Libya: Country overview The oil-rich country of Libya is located in northern Africa, bordering Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Algeria, and Tunisia. The Libyan population stands at 6.4 million people. A popular uprising in 2011 led to the removal, and later murder, of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, ending his 42-year rule over the country. The opposition toppling […]

Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) records incidents of explosive violence as they occur around the world. Since 1 October 2010 AOAV has used English-language media sources to capture information on attacks, including on the number of casualties and the weapon type used. This month there were more than 4,000 casualties of explosive violence (people killed and […]

Libyan armed forces and armed groups must immediately stop the reckless shelling of populated areas, Amnesty International said today. The last few weeks has seen heavy clashes erupt in eastern Libya, particularly in and around the flashpoint city of Benghazi. Forces affiliated with a renegade former general Khalifa Haftar have been bombing militia camps with […]

Advances in technology mean that there are now more ways than ever for people to report or identify acts of violence. More data means better information and hopefully better-designed interventions. These technologies are no longer the preserve of rich and powerful governments. Now anyone with an internet connection or a smart phone can contribute. If […]

From besieged cities in Syria to American street-corners, and countless other places in between, armed violence continues to take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people a year. It fundamentally reshapes the world we live in. Yet for a vast number of people, violence and conflict are abstractions far removed from their daily realities. […]

Tony Birtley is a reporter for Al Jazeera. During his 30 year career, Birtley has covered conflicts in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia and Bosnia, amongst others. In 1993 Birtley was the only journalist to report from the besieged Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia, and in 2007 was the only international correspondent to enter […]

Stephen Farrell is a Metro reporter for the New York Times. After covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, he joined Times’s Baghdad bureau, where he set up and ran the Baghdad Bureau blog from the field. In 2009, he helped launch and run the Baghdad Bureau’s successor At War blog, […]

Sebastian Junger is an American journalist who has been an international reporter for over 20 years. In 2000, his in-depth reporting on Afghanistan became the subject of the National Geographic documentary “Into the Forbidden Zone”, and his knowledge of the region made him a special correspondent for ABC News and Vanity Fair. He has also […]

Richard Engel is Chief Foreign Correspondent of NBC News. He is known for his reporting on the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the conflict in Libya and the unrest throughout the Arab world. Engel is one of the only Western journalists to have covered the entire war in Iraq. He has reported from Afghanistan, and also […]

Remy Ourdan is a French journalist who is a deputy editor of newspaper Le Monde. In 1992 Ourdan began as a reporter in Sarajevo, and covered the siege of Sarajevo and the Bosnian war for four years. In the Balkans, he also covered the Kosovo war and Serbia after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. In Africa, […]

Rana Jawad is an academic and journalist who has reported on the Middle East and North Africa. One of only two foreign correspondents based in Tripoli in February 2011, in the midst of the protests which led to the Libyan civil war, she contributed some of the first reporting from the conflict. After covering the conflict […]