In the dead of night, around 30 gunmen in pickup trucks and motorbikes sped onto the grounds of a college in northeast Nigeria. They headed into the male dormitories and opened fire. At least 41 students were killed when the suspected Boko Haram Islamists attacked the Yobe State College of Agriculture, in a rural area 30 miles south of the state capital Damaturu. They killed students in their sleep. Others were assembled in groups outside before they were shot dead. Some fled into the darkness and were cut down by gunfire. The surviving 1,000 students left the college in terror.

There is a growing view both from Nairobi and the cloistered, heavily defended corridors of Villa Somalia – the Somali government’s main compound here in Mogadishu – that al-Shabab’s Westgate Mall attack was an act of desperation. It was, says the theory, a lashing out by a movement on the ropes; a last-ditch attempt to prove its legitimacy and win supporters in the face of continued military pressure on the ground, a brutally damaging internal power-struggle, and a growing sense of irrelevance abroad.

Shortly after the massacre at the Westgate Mall in Kenya, the alleged terrorists, al-Shabab, began tweeting about their motivations from the now-suspended account @HSM_Press. A handful of accounts, most tweeting in Arabic, cheered on the terrorist unit still inside the mall. After tweeting a series of names of alleged gunmen still inside the Westgate Mall, a second account, @HSM_Press2, was quickly suspended by Twitter.

Another day, another calamity: thirty killed by a suicide bomber at a funeral in Quetta; the commanding General in Swat blown up by Pakistani Taliban; renewed Indo-Pakistani fighting along the Kashmir border threatens to torpedo fragile reconciliation efforts. These events—all in the past six weeks—reinforce recent disclosures in the Washington Post confirming deep-seated official US doubts and fears about Pakistan.

Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, is a place of extremes. It’s a sprawl of one- and two-story mud-brick houses that lack power lines and running water, but it’s also home to the garish, McMansion-style estates of Cocainebougou, or “Cocaine Town,” a deserted neighborhood that once belonged to Arab drug lords who controlled the region’s smuggling routes for hashish and cocaine but fled, fearing reprisals from local citizens who blamed them for the Islamist invasion.

Taliban militants set off two suicide bombs in an attack on a U.S. Consulate in western Afghanistan Friday morning, triggering a gun battle with security forces that left at least two Afghans and seven attackers dead. The U.S. said all its personnel from the consulate in the city of Herat were safe and American forces later moved in to secure the site.

The rise of Islamist radicalism continues to threaten U.S. interests in the greater Middle East. Last year's attacks on U.S. embassies, instability in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, and an increase in political activism among Salafist movements are all cause for concern. In Pakistan, extremist networks use U.S. drone strikes and the killing of Osama bin Laden to rally people to their cause.

"I am French," explains the young man in the YouTube video carrying a Kalashnikov and wearing a kufiya cotton headdress as he sits in front of a waving black-and-white flag of al Qaeda. "Oh my Muslim brothers in France, Europe and in the whole world, Jihad in Syria is obligatory," says the fair-skinned youth with sandy hair, wispy beard and southern French accent, imploring viewers to join him and his younger brother in Syria.