Arab World

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – According to Haaretz Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu asked Vldadimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, to keep Iranian troops and Hizbullah militiamen in Syria about 40 miles from the Israeli border. The Russian replied that these were matters for the Syrian Arab Army, but that […]

Elections

Can Iran keep its Influence in Baghdad?

Juan Cole

Divisions in the Da`wa Party and Iraqi Nationalism pose Challenges to Tehran

Featured

Saudi Arabia wants to improve Image; Here’s How

Juan Cole

They have to stop intervening, fighting wars and fomenting radicalism; an image touch-up won’t help

Iraq

Will Iraqi Kurdish Independence Referendum Further Roil the Middle East?

contributors

Kurds Iraq ISIS Middle East Iran

Iraq

As ISIL dwindles, Iraq fears extremists fleeing Syria

contributors

Mustafa Habib | Baghdad | (Niqash.org) | – – Iraqi forces are upset about the safe passage granted to Islamic State fighters from Syria. They will enter Iraq, where, locals say, thousands of their comrades await them in the extremists’ secret capital. Last week, Lebanese officials confirmed that around 670 defeated members of the extremist […]

Bashar al-Assad

Have we Won yet? Was ISIL a flash in the Pan?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – With the Iraqi campaign against ISIL having wrested from it Mosul and Talafar, and with Hawija and Qaim really the last two areas where it actually controls a town, you have to wonder if ISIL was ever all that formidable. Three years after it announced its […]

Archaeology

Syria’s Heritage, and the World’s, that the War Destroyed–From Palmyra to Castles

contributors

Written by Alreem Kamal | ( GlobalVoices.org) | – – Syria's story is one that has been weaved through families from one millennium to the next. Subjugated as a Roman province under the command of Pompey the Great in 64 BC, and brought under Ottoman rule 16 centuries later by Sultan Selim I in 1516, […]

Displaced and Refugees

Are Muslims allowed to be Sympathetic Victims in US Media, or only Perpetrators?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Libyan activist Hend Amry makes an important point about the relative lack of interest of television news in stories such as the persecution of the Burmese (Myanmar) Muslims by the Buddhist establishment: When Muslims are the victims of terrorism, there isn't the fraction of western attention […]

Arab World

Arabs, Thomas Friedman and the “iron fist”

contributors

By Brian Whitaker | ( Al-Bab.com) Writing about conflicts in the Middle East for the New York Times yesterday, columnist Thomas Friedman talked of “the power that is lost to a society like Syria or Iraq that needs an iron fist to make its many into one, and when that fist is removed, how the […]