Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa has told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that he seeks to “restore and redefine ties” with Moscow, a key ally of ousted longtime Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad.
Al-Sharaa made the statement on Wednesday while meeting with Putin in Moscow during his first state visit to the country that has been hosting al-Assad since his exile from Syria 10 months ago.
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“We are trying to restore and redefine in a new way the nature of these relations so there is independence for Syria, sovereign Syria, and also its territorial unity and integrity and its security stability,” al-Sharaa told Putin in the Kremlin.
The Syrian leader assured that Damascus would honour all past agreements with Moscow. “There are bilateral relations and shared interests that bind us with Russia, and we respect all agreements made with it,” he said.
According to Syrian officials cited by the Reuters and AFP news agencies, al-Sharaa, who once headed the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda under the name Abu Mohammed al-Julani, plans to use today’s meeting with Putin to request Moscow hand over al-Assad.
But there was no mention of the sensitive diplomatic matter in al-Sharaa’s brief televised remarks at the beginning of the meeting.
Putin praises al-Sharaa’s ‘great success’
Welcoming al-Sharaa, Putin hailed decades of “special relations” between the two countries, in which he claimed Moscow was always guided by Syrian people’s interests, and said his government wanted to expand them.
He also praised recent parliamentary elections in Syria – the first since al-Assad’s overthrow – saying the process would strengthen ties between all political forces.
“I believe that this is a great success for you, because it leads to the consolidation of society, and despite the fact that Syria is currently going through difficult times, it will nevertheless strengthen ties and cooperation between all political forces in Syria,” said Putin.
Despite having been on opposite sides of the battle lines of Syria’s 13-year civil war that Moscow intervened in, the new rulers in Damascus have taken a pragmatic approach to relations with Moscow, as they have with other foreign powers.
For Damascus, maintaining ties with Russia is important for rebuilding the war-shattered country and shoring up international legitimacy for the government.
In a recent interview with US network CBS, al-Sharaa said, “Russia has close and longstanding relations with Syria, which relate to the basic structure of the state and to energy and food, for which Syria depends partly on Russian supplies, as well as some old strategic interests”.
The picture for the FIFA World Cup 2026 became a lot clearer on Tuesday when a number of top teams across the continents booked their place at football’s global showpiece.
The number of confirmed teams has now risen to 28 following the latest round of qualifiers, with another 20 still to be filled by various confederational playoffs, intercontinental playoffs, and – in Europe’s case – the main qualifying stage, which still needs to be completed.
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England, South Africa and Qatar were among the headline names to book their place at the tournament on Tuesday.
Al Jazeera Sport takes a look at the tournament that the nations around the world are all vying to reach.
When and where is the FIFA World Cup 2026?
The tournament is being staged across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The first match will be played in Mexico City on June 11, while the final will be staged in New Jersey, US, on July 19.
Due to the expansion of the tournament – from 32 teams to 48 – the 39-day event is the longest in its history.
When will we know all the teams for the FIFA World Cup 2026?
FIFA’s intercontinental playoffs will be the last chance saloon for teams around the world to reach next summer’s event. The finale of that route will be on March 31, 2026, less than three months before the World Cup kicks off. The European qualification process runs until March, but most of the remaining confederations will have finished their continental qualification processes long before then.
What are the FIFA intercontinental playoffs?
Once the respective confederations finish their qualification process, FIFA offers two final spots to be contested by the best-placed team from each of the six continental routes that have not already qualified.
When is the draw for the FIFA World Cup 2026?
Although we will not know the full list of teams for the event until the end of March 2026, the draw will take place on December 5, 2025.
Where will the draw be held for the FIFA World Cup 2026?
The draw will take place in the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. US President Donald Trump confirmed the location while speaking in the Oval Office at the White House, flanked by Vice President JD Vance and FIFA boss Gianni Infantino. He did not rule out overseeing the draw itself.
What will the format be for the FIFA World Cup 2026?
With the expansion to 48 teams, the World Cup will now feature 12 four-team groups. That in turn will lead to a round of 32, an extra knockout round to previous editions.
Indeed, the tournament has doubled in size since it was staged in the US in 1994, when only 24 teams competed.
Can Trump move games at the FIFA World Cup 2026?
Trump has been quite clear and consistent on the staging of games within the US, saying he will move the games from any cities that he deems to be unsafe.
On September 26, when Trump was asked about games being moved, he warned: “Well, that’s an interesting question … but we’re going to make sure they’re safe. [Seattle and San Francisco are] run by radical left lunatics who don’t know what they’re doing.”
How will the FIFA World Cup 2026 game staging be split between the hosts?
The US will stage games in 11 cities: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New Jersey/New York (joint host region), Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle.
Canada will host 13 games in total, split between Toronto and Vancouver. Mexico will also get 13 games, which will be played in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.
Where will the FIFA World Cup 2026 final be staged?
The US will stage the final, which will be played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
Who are the defending FIFA World Cup champions?
Argentina won the last edition of the FIFA World Cup, beating France in the final of Qatar 2022.
With the game level at 3-3 after extra time, Argentina won the penalty shootout 4-2.
Will the weather affect games at the FIFA World Cup 2026?
The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup was staged in the US, and the heat and resulting thunderstorms proved to be a huge problem for the tournament.
Three stadiums – in Arlington, Atlanta and Houston – have retractable roofs that are expected to be closed due to the summer heat, while Inglewood and Vancouver have fixed roofs.
Which teams have already qualified for the FIFA World Cup 2026?
After the latest round of qualifying matches, here is a breakdown of the confirmed contenders from each of the six regions:
Hosts: Canada, Mexico, USA
Asia: Australia, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Uzbekistan
South America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay
Which teams can still qualify for the FIFA World Cup 2026?
Africa: Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Nigeria will play off for the final intercontinental spot from the continent. The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has announced November 13 for the first matches, followed by a deciding match three days later.
Asia: UAE and Iraq will vie for one intercontinental playoffs spot when they compete over two legs in the final stage of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) qualifiers on November 13 and 18.
Europe: 53 of the 54 European teams vying for 16 qualification spots can still confirm their berths, alongside England, as their first-round matches will run until November 18. European qualification will run until March, just before the intercontinental playoffs begin.
North, Central America and the Caribbean: Three spots remain up for grabs, given the World Cup hosts take up three spots already. Bermuda, Costa Rica, Curacao, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago have all advanced to the third round, with the winners to be decided by November 18. The three second-placed teams from each group will then fight for the intercontinental playoffs spot.
Oceania: New Caledonia have qualified for the intercontinental playoffs.
The world’s largest meat company, JBS, has allegedly fuelled illegal deforestation, land grabs and human rights abuses in the Brazilian Amazon by sourcing cattle from ranches operating inside protected areas, according to a new Human Rights Watch investigation.
On Wednesday, the nonprofit issued an 86-page report focusing on the state of Pará, where the United Nations will hold its annual climate change summit, COP30, next month.
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The report highlights a gap in JBS’s supply chain: Human Rights Watch claims the meat company does not track its indirect cattle suppliers.
Investigators found that cattle raised on illegally deforested land were moved through a “laundering” system that concealed their origins before they reached JBS.
That, in turn, means JBS cannot guarantee that its beef or leather products are not contributing to deforestation and related abuses.
Without a better system for tracing livestock, JBS will continue to be “unable to root out illegal cattle ranches”, according to Luciana Téllez, a senior environment researcher at Human Rights Watch.
And what JBS does not know could make it responsible for bankrolling illegal ranches that clear-cut the Amazon, she explained.
“We cannot say with 100-percent certainty that the cattle that JBS purchased from its direct suppliers are the same ones that are coming from illegal cattle ranches, but neither can JBS,” Téllez told Al Jazeera.
“That’s a problem, because they are responsible for what they are procuring.”
Cattle walk through an illegally burned forest in the northern Brazilian state of Para on September 15, 2009 [Andre Penner/AP Photo]
A deforestation hotspot
Wednesday’s report is part of an ever-growing body of literature delving into the impact agriculture has had on the Amazon rainforest.
The construction of ranches and farmland is considered the single biggest direct cause of deforestation in the world’s tropical regions.
The Amazon rainforest is no exception. In recent years, cattle ranching has emerged as a primary culprit in the levelling of its tangled, biodiverse jungles.
The northern state of Pará is key to the fight against further loss. It has consistently recorded the highest levels of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since 2016.
In 2024 alone, 17,195 square kilometres (6,639 sq miles) of forest in the state were degraded, a 421-percent increase over the previous year, according to Human Rights Watch.
The state also reports the second-largest number of land conflicts in Brazil, with illegal ranchers, farmers and criminal groups seeking to invade protected land.
For Indigenous and traditional communities that consider the Amazon home, these invasions have been devastating. Residents have seen their crops destroyed, the forest burned, and their lives displaced.
In some cases, community members have even been threatened, attacked or killed after denouncing the land grabs.
Though federal law prohibits such activity, some land-grabbers have succeeded in fraudulently registering protected rainforest as private properties.
Wednesday’s report documented encroachments in two protected areas: the Cachoeira Seca Indigenous territory and the Terra Nossa sustainable development area.
“The level of violence and intimidation by land grabbers in Terra Nossa is truly frightening, and the absolute impunity they’ve enjoyed for years is astonishing,” Tellez told Al Jazeera.
Human Rights Watch said that Pará’s state animal health agency, Adepará, had registered ranches in both tracts of land. It also authorised the transportation of cattle in and out of the two areas.
According to the report, Adepará claimed that it has not historically been tasked with observing environmental criteria when authorising livestock movements.
But with the state agency’s approval, Human Rights Watch said cattle were raised illegally inside the protected rainforest zones and then transferred out to other ranches.
From there, they could reach major slaughterhouses, including JBS facilities.
Each transfer helped obscure the cattle’s illegal origin, effectively laundering the animals into the meat trade.
Environmentalists walk through the Caxiuana National Forest in Brazil’s Para state on March 22 [Jorge Saenz/AP Photo]
A traceability gap
Part of the problem, according to Human Rights Watch, is Brazil’s system for tracking livestock.
Brazil does not keep full histories of individual animals. Instead, their movements are documented with “animal transit permits”, known as Guias de Trânsito Animal or GTAs.
Those permits collect information about overall shipments of animals: the number of cattle involved, plus data about the sex and the age of those in the group.
But without an individual record for every cow, calf and bull, it is difficult, if not impossible, to trace their origins.
In an April filing to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, JBS acknowledged the loopholes in how the GTA system traces cattle.
“As a result, there can be no assurance that available monitoring procedures can ensure that the origin of any head of cattle was in full compliance with applicable laws,” JBS wrote.
The company has promised to require its suppliers to declare their suppliers by 2026. Yet, Human Rights Watch says it remains unclear how such information would be verified or enforced.
“The best solution is for the federal government itself to institute a traceability mechanism for cattle across Brazil,” Tellez said. “The Brazilian government is moving towards that, but it’s moving extremely slowly.”
JBS also made a similar commitment more than a decade and a half ago. In 2009, the company signed the G4 Cattle Agreement with environmental group Greenpeace, pledging to identify all its indirect suppliers by 2011. It failed to meet that deadline.
“It’s unacceptable that companies such as JBS have not fulfilled the promises that they made in the past,” Cristiane Mazzetti, a forest campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Brazil, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s something that now governments need to reflect upon and regulate in a more stringent way, because only believing in voluntary corporate commitments is not going to deliver.”
JBS did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by publication.
Cattle graze on land recently burned and deforested in Brazil’s Para state on August 23, 2020 [Andre Penner/AP Photo]
Regulatory failures and slow reform
But reform may be on the horizon. In 2023, Pará’s governor introduced a decree requiring all animal movements in the state to be fully traceable by the end of 2026.
At the federal level, the Ministry of Agriculture announced a similar plan in December 2024, mandating that all states implement tracking systems by 2032.
However, Human Rights Watch warns that this timeline is too slow and could allow illegal ranching to persist for years.
Experts and advocacy groups say that Brazil should take immediate steps, including by making GTA data publicly accessible. Such measures would help law enforcement agencies identify fraudulent movements and trace cattle back to illegal ranches.
“Companies struggle with traceability, firstly because they have minimal access to public data on the production chain,” said Lisandro Inakake, an agronomist with the Brazilian environmental nonprofit Imaflora.
He added that the struggle is compounded “because there are no universal market requirements covering all of the companies’ operations”.
While Human Rights Watch has called on JBS to voluntarily start tracing the lifespan of its cattle, Mazzetti, the Greenpeace campaigner, believes more decisive action is necessary if deforestation is to be stopped.
China and the US have started charging additional port fees on shipping vessels as trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies soared back, following China’s rare earth export controls in response to new trade restrictions imposed by the Trump administration.
The port fees from both sides went into force on Tuesday and have caused fear among analysts, who say maritime trade has become a key battlefront between the two nations.
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The new trade tensions erupted despite a pause in the tariff war, and come as Trump is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea at the end of this month.
China has accused the US of “double standards” after it threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods following last week’s rare earth curbs by Beijing.
Here’s what to know about the new port tariffs as the two countries are engaged in ongoing trade negotiations:
FILE- In this May 21, 2018, file photo, container ships are unloaded at the Port of Oakland in Oakland, California [Ben Margot/AFP]
What are the port fees imposed by the two sides?
A White House executive order named “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” directed the US Trade Representative (USTR) to impose charges on owners and operators of Chinese-built, owned, or operated vessels entering the US by October 14 as follows:
Vessel operators must pay $50 per net ton for Chinese-owned or operated vessels arriving at a US port, to be increased to $140 by April 2028
Vessel operators of Chinese-built vessels arriving at a US port must pay $18 per net ton or $120 per container, which will be increased to $33 and $250, respectively, by 2028
Fees are to be charged for a maximum of five times per year for individual vessels
Long-term users of China-operated vessels carrying US ethane and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) are exempt till December 10
China, on October 10, retaliated and said it would also charge US-owned, operated, built, or flagged vessels additional levies starting from October 14 as follows:
Vessels owned or operated by American companies or individuals will pay a 400 yuan ($56) per net ton fee for every voyage
Ships or vessels built in the US or flying an American flag will pay the same amount
The fees will be charged for a maximum of five trips per year, and will rise to reach 1,120 yuan ($157) per net ton
Empty vessels entering Chinese shipyards for repair are exempt. Chinese-built ships are also exempt.
China’s Ministry of Transport said in a statement on October 10 that the tariffs were “countermeasures” meant to respond to the US’s “wrongful and discriminatory” practices.
In a separate but related move, China on Tuesday imposed sanctions on five subsidiaries of South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean, which it said “assisted and supported” US investigations into Chinese trade.
The US was the first to levy additional fees on Chinese-owned ships back in April in a bid to loosen Beijing’s hold on the global maritime industry and bolster US ship manufacturers. That decision followed an investigation under the Joe Biden administration that revealed China dominates global maritime, logistics, and shipbuilding using “unfair policies and practices” such as funnelling state funds into shipbuilding.
China hit back at the US and said it would also charge similar fees on the same day US tariffs were set to go into effect.
In a statement on Tuesday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said: “If the US chooses confrontation, China will see it through to the end; if it chooses dialogue, China’s door remains open.”
(Al Jazeera)
Who are the main players in the global maritime trade?
China dominates the global commercial shipbuilding industry, followed by South Korea and Japan, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Beijing built 53 percent of commercial ships in 2024, while the US produced only 0.1 percent of such vessels. Chinese state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) is the most significant player in the industry, and built more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than all of the US shipbuilders have done since 1945, according to CSIS.
The state-owned CSSC also notably manufactures naval warships, and contributes to China’s status as having the largest naval fleet by ship numbers -at 355 vessels by 2020, according to a US Department of Defense report, compared with the US’s 293 naval vessels at the time.
While analysts point out that the US maintains the strongest navy based on firepower, China’s shipbuilding dominance has raised security concerns in Washington for several years.
Why did the US impose curbs on Chinese-built ships?
The US is attempting to loosen China’s grip on maritime dominance.
Washington first began mulling taking action against China’s shipbuilding capabilities in May 2024, after five US trade unions petitioned the USTR for “relief” against what they called China’s “unreasonable” practices in the maritime and shipbuilding sector, citing extensive state-led support for the Chinese shipbuilding and maritime sectors, which the US argues gives Beijing an unfair edge over competitors.
The USTR thereafter launched investigations into Chinese shipping trade practices. In January 2025, after President Trump was sworn into office, the department determined that Chinese actions “burdened and restricted” US commerce, and that action would be taken. Over several weeks, US trade unions and lobbyists testified at public hearings regarding the action to be taken, before Trump’s Executive Order “14269 – Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” was published in April.
In March, President Trump, in an address to Congress, promised that his administration would “resurrect” the US shipping industry and added that he would create an “office of shipbuilding”.
“We are also going to resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding,” Trump told lawmakers, prompting applause from House Republicans. “We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them any more very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon. It will have a huge impact to further enhance our national security.”
In a statement following Trump’s speech, Matthew Paxton, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America, praised the president’s move. “By fully utilising the existing domestic shipyard capacity, the shipyard industrial base can meet the growing demands of national defence, restore American competitiveness, and create thousands of skilled jobs in communities across the nation,” he said.
How will the tariffs affect global trade?
Analysts say the move on both sides is disrupting global trade operations already. Chinese container carrier COSCO could bear the most burden from the US fees, expected to cost the industry $3.2bn, while shipping intelligence firm Clarksons Research said in a report that China’s new port fees could significantly affect oil tankers, which account for 15 percent of global capacity, the Reuters news agency reported.
Major shipping links, including Danish-owned Maersk, German Hapag-Lloyd, and French CMA CGM, have reportedly swapped China-linked ships from their US shipping lanes, according to Reuters.
“We are in the hectic stage of the disruption where everyone is quietly trying to improvise workarounds, with varying degrees of success,” Ed Finley-Richardson, an independent dry bulk shipping analyst, told Reuters.
The analyst added that there are reports of US ship owners operating non-Chinese vessels trying to sell their cargoes to other countries while en route to China, so the vessels can divert. Reuters reported that it was not immediately able to confirm the claim.
Meanwhile, South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean is already facing Chinese sanctions on five of its US-linked subsidiaries. Hanwha is one of the world’s largest ship manufacturers, and owns the commercial Philly Shipyard in the US state of Philadelphia. Hanwha Ocean’s shares dropped nearly 6 percent following the announcement, Reuters noted.
What are the other trade curbs announced, and will this lead to an all-out trade war?
China, which has a monopoly on critical rare-earth metals used to manufacture electronics, tightened export controls on five of them on October 9 under its “announcement number 61 of 2025”, including holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, and ytterbium. That’s in addition to curbs on seven metals announced earlier in April.
President Trump, in retaliation, has threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to 100 percent from November 1.
The US imposed heavy tariffs on Chinese goods earlier in Trump’s presidency, in an attempt to address what Washington views as imbalanced trade relations. Those tariffs were eventually eased after the two countries came to an agreement in September for a 90-day pause that is set to expire on about November 9.
After two years in an Israeli jail, Yousef Salem set out on a journey to his house in Gaza. The former detainee, who says he was tortured during his time in captivity, was confronted by the devastation of Israel’s onslaught when he finally arrived home. This is his story.
The killing of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk last month by a 22-year-old suspect has brought into focus the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. While Kirk was a victim of political violence, investigators are now pointing to a growing trend where shooters are not necessarily inspired by a clear-cut political ideology.
Federal law enforcement officials have started using “nihilistic violent extremists” to describe perpetrators who do not easily subscribe to one ideology but appear to be motivated by a desire to, as one expert put it, “gamify” real-life violence.
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The description appeared in a March search warrant application involving a Wisconsin teenager who was active on a Telegram network dubbed Terrorgram. Nikita Casap, now 18, is accused of killing his mother and stepfather in part of a larger plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, foment a political revolution and “save the white race” from “Jewish-controlled” politicians, investigators said, quoting from a document on Casap’s phone.
This “extremism” is not new, but the label seems to be.
“Nihilistic violent extremists”, a federal law enforcement officer wrote in the court filing, act “primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability”.
In such instances, perpetrators often take what they learn in online communities as fuel for real-world horror. They may not singularly ascribe to the political left or right, to white supremacist thought or antigovernment “extremism”, as they glorify violence or seek destruction.
The National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska preliminarily identified more than two dozen federal cases in which suspects fit this emerging “nihilistic violent extremism” classification, including the mass shooter at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis.
What are these cases, and how might they shape future domestic “terrorism” investigations?
How ‘nihilism’ fits with domestic violence and ‘terrorism’
“Nihilism” is a philosophical term associated with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It is the belief that all values are baseless.
“Violent extremists” are often trying to change specific government policy, University of South Florida associate professor Zacharias Pieri said. “Nihilistic extremists”, by contrast, don’t necessarily have any clear, stated objective, he said; they are “gamifying violence in real life”.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein and extremism researcher Jacob Ware began covering the term’s emergence in federal cases in April and May.
In September, FBI Director Kash Patel told a US Senate committee that “nihilistic violent extremism” plays a significant role in domestic “terror” investigations.
“We have in this country 1,700 domestic terrorism investigations, a large chunk of which are nihilistic violent extremism, NVE — those who engage in violent acts motivated by a deep hatred of society, whatever that justification they see it is,” Patel said.
Besides the Casap case, federal prosecutors have cited the “nihilistic violent extremism” label in a handful of news releases since March.
The Department of Justice in April called the online pornography network 764 “a nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) network” when it announced the arrests of two people it said were involved in targeting children for sexual exploitation online. “The 764 network’s accelerationist goals include social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the US Government,” the department said.
Several weeks later, the FBI used the term about an Oregon 14-year-old who the agency said planned a May explosives attack and mass shooting at a mall in Kelso in Washington state. The FBI said the teenager “shared nihilistic violent extremist ideology and the plans in online chats”.
KPTV in Oregon reported that police said the teenager posted the plans in an online chat. The teenager’s defence lawyer said the online chat was connected to 764, which the teen joined after being bullied at school.
For years, experts have said some ‘extremists’ defy a single label
In 2020, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said some “violent extremists” hold a “salad bar of ideologies” containing “a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and what they are really about is the violence”.
“We’re having more and more challenges trying to unpack what are often sort of incoherent belief systems, combined with kind of personal grievances,” Wray told senators in 2022. He referred to a Minneapolis case in which two men aligned with the far-right, antigovernment Boogaloo Bois movement were charged with providing material support to the Palestinian group Hamas.
Other terms have also been used to describe these less absolute ideologies associated with violence. In the United Kingdom, law enforcement uses the term “composite violent extremism” to refer to “extremists” who hold “multiple distinct ideologies, sentiments, grievances, and fixations” and “mixed, unclear, or unstable ideologies”.
Experts said the NVE term is valid, but offered some cautions
Experts on “extremism” said they see value in using the term “nihilistic violent extremism” to acknowledge the evolving nature of threats.
Oren Segal, an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) extremism expert, said incidents in recent years involved suspects who appeared motivated to sow chaos.
“Those are fairly described as nihilistic,” Segal said.
The ADL said that school shooters in Evergreen, Colorado, Antioch, Tennessee, and Madison, Wisconsin, were active in online spaces that glorify violence and mass killings.
Marc-Andre Argentino, an independent researcher and expert on violent extremism, wrote in April that NVE “represents a convergence threat – part sadistic subculture, part extremist accelerationism, part organised cyber‑harassment – whose potency lies in its agility and absence of limiting ideology”.
Unlike a right-wing group that may study doctrine for months, “nihilistic violent extremists” share “bite-sized” information about how to carry out attacks such as knife attacks, vehicle ramming, or online crimes.
“The guiding principle is to flood the system with low‑cost, high‑chaos events – school shootings, animal‑cruelty viral clips, swatting campaigns – so that authorities expend resources faster than radicals expend effort,” Argentino wrote. “Tactically, NVEs seek maximum systemic shock with minimal organisational footprint.”
Experts cautioned against the term’s overuse.
“If everything is going to be lumped together as nihilist violent extremism, it does [a] disservice to those who try to understand where threats are emanating from,” Segal said.
Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told PolitiFact that the label risks being used by prosecutors or a politicised FBI as “a blanket term that obscures or even excuses other ideological influences, especially white supremacy”.
One case with unclear motives was the July 4, 2022 mass shooting that killed seven and injured dozens in Highland Park, Illinois. FBI affidavits said the shooter told them he wanted to “wake people up”. His online activity showed he had a fascination with violence.
“This country is facing a growing threat of heavily armed young men who use too-easily acquirable weapons to commit unspeakable acts of violence,” Segal wrote after the attack. “Some of them are extremists; most of them are not. Whatever their motivation, they need to be stopped. For now, that may be the only analysis we can all agree on.”
