Iraq

By Elif Selin Calik | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – In 2022, the biggest energy issue in the Middle East was Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil cut as the world economy entered into a period of ‘heightened uncertainty and rising challenges’. In October, OPEC cut its 2022 forecast for growth […]

Featured

Top 8 Political and Geopolitical Shifts in the Middle East in 2022

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – We saw a lot of pivotal developments in the Middle East this year, including the impact of climate change in the form of increasing aridity and massive dust storms. But there were also realignments of interests that affect the U.S. Here are some of them: 1. President Biden in July […]

Iraq

In Iraqi Kurdistan, Yazidi girls box their way to a new future after Daesh terror

Juan Cole

By Roshan De Stone | – ( Middle East Monitor) – After the 2014 Daesh genocide which left them reeling from the effects of mass abduction and rape, Yazidi refugee girls are rebuilding their lives with the help of boxing, art and music classes. Emma Loffhagen and Charline Bou Mansour report from Iraqi Kurdistan In […]

Featured

Could Iran’s Kurdish Protests and the Ayatollahs’ Determination to Crush Them Destabilize Neighboring Iraq?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The protests roiling Iran this fall have had an epicenter in Iranian Kurdistan in the west of the country. The death in the custody of the Shiite morality police of Tehran of a Kurdish young woman, Mahsa “Zhina” Amini, rallied Kurdish-Iranian subnationalism. Cities like Mahabad, Saqqez, and Sanandaj have seen […]

Afghanistan

How the Bush “War on Terror” Fed US White Nationalism and brought the Terror Home

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about […]

Afghanistan

The Ukraine Moment: Lessons from the War on Terror

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Ukraine is obviously a powder keg. With each passing day, in fact, the war there poses new threats to the world order. Only recently, Vladimir Putin’s Russia intensified its attacks on civilian targets in that beleaguered land, while threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons and adding Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus to its […]

Eritrea

Why does the Ukraine War overshadow the Middle Eastern Wars?

John Feffer

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The war in Ukraine has dominated the headlines in U.S. and European newspapers, not to mention outlets in other parts of the world. The explosion this weekend that destroyed part of the bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland, along with Russia’s retaliatory missile attacks on Ukrainian cities […]

Iraq

America’s Fickle Relationship with the Kurds: Review of “Rethinking State-Non-State Alliances: Change and Continuity in the U.S.-Kurdish Relationship”

Marc Martorell Junyent

Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Ozum Yesiltas, Rethinking State-Non-State Alliances: Change and Continuity in the U.S.-Kurdish Relationship (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022). The Kurds of Syria and Iraq have been at the forefront of the fight against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Their fight against the radical group brought […]

Iran

Did the U.S. Permanently Destabilize Iraq? Will There be an Intra-Shia Civil War?

Middle East Monitor

By Raed Ahmed | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – There is usually a lot of competition between near-equal armed groups in Iraq. Resisting the 2003 US-led invasion provided a good opportunity for emerging groups from Sunni and Shia communities across the country to do just that. Such groups became the main protagonists in […]