Middle East

By Danny Sjursen | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – I used to command soldiers. Over the years, lots of them actually. In Iraq, Colorado, Afghanistan, and Kansas. And I’m still fixated on a few of them like this one private first class (PFC) in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2011. All of 18, he was short, scrawny, […]

Climate Change

On top of everything, Will the Middle East run out of Water?

contributors

By George Joffe | (The Conversation) | – – The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) already the most water stressed region in the world, faces a worsening crisis in terms of its access to water in the decades to come. A country is water stressed when it cannot provide the minimum water supply to […]

Iran

The rise and rise of Iran: How Tehran has become pivotal to the future of the Middle East

contributors

By Mohammed Nuruzzaman | (The Conversation) | – – Iran and the US are once again on a dangerous collision course. President Trump’s search for excuses to decertify the July 2015 nuclear deal, negotiated by the Obama administration, is exacerbating new tensions in their frayed relations. The US, in a bid to keep the Iranians […]

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 […]

Israel/ Palestine

Gaza: Over 1 million children in ‘unlivable’ circumstances

contributors

By Jonathan Fenton-Harvey | (Informed Comment) | – – Over a million children in Gaza are living in impoverished circumstances due to electricity shortages, causing problems for public health and education, warned Save the Children on Tuesday. The international NGO says Israel’s ongoing land, air and sea blockade of Gaza, which has been in place […]

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 […]

Featured

Turkey-Backed fundamentalist Militias attack US Troops in Syria

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – US troops in Syria operating north of Manbij have been fired on twice in the last couple of weeks. The attackers are fundamentalist remnants of the Free Syrian Army, backed by Turkey. The US has tried to persuade rebel groups to concentrate their firepower on ISIL […]