Middle Orient

With few war goals achieved in Gaza, targeted killings change little strategically but send a political message to the Israeli public ahead of elections After years of pursuit, Israel killed the commander of Hamas’s armed wing, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, in Gaza last week. Describing him as a key architect of …

Tehran seems just as enthusiastic about the new prime minister as Washington—a telling sign that the militia-dominated status quo in Baghdad will be difficult and slow to change, if it changes at all. On May 14, U.S. special envoy Tom Barrack congratulated Iraq’s new prime minister Ali al-Zaidi on the …

A senior commander from Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, an Iran-aligned Iraqi armed faction, was killed and his aide seriously wounded on Thursday when an explosive device detonated in their vehicle. Iraq finds itself at a new crossroads. Will it rein in Iranian-backed militias, or let them continue to hollow out the …

In diplomatic practice, there is an unwritten but strict rule: the weaker a state is economically and politically, the more delicate the tone of any external player must be if they genuinely want reforms—not chaos. Lebanon today is a classic “fragile sovereignty.” After the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the subsequent …

As European officials moved to normalize relations with Damascus and ease years of sanctions on Syria this week, Russian cargo ships continued docking at Syrian ports carrying the oil and military support that still help keep the Syrian state afloat. The contradiction has become the defining feature of Syrian President …

The Iran war has reshaped global geopolitics by weakening U.S. credibility and the liberal world order, intensifying regional instability in the Middle East, disrupting energy markets and economies, and accelerating the shift of global power toward emerging alliances led by Russia and China. Global Disruption and the Shifting World OrderThe …

“It was the worst night since the start of the war, and this has been the worst war we have seen.” When the Israeli military repeated its displacement order for the entire city of Tyre (Sour) in southern Lebanon at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Ali Sleiman decided to head to …

The revelation that Israel established secret military bases inside Iraq during the recent war against Iran is far more than another episode in the region’s long history of covert operations. It signals a deeper transformation in Middle Eastern geopolitics: the normalization of clandestine cross-border military infrastructures, the erosion of Iraqi …

Several Syrian areas witnessed separate incidents during the days that coincided with the Eid al-Adha holiday, including shootings and clashes that left people dead and wounded in more than one governorate. In Hama countryside (western Syria), two civilians were killed and four others wounded in a shooting that targeted people …

De même que l’Europe des va-t’en guerre, les pétro-monarchies du Golfe paient le prix de la délégation de leur défense et de leur sécurité à Washington, leur ennemi déguisé en sauveur. En réalité, si les États du Golfe ne rompent pas structurellement avec la logique actuelle, la prochaine crise régionale …