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Syria’s Kurdish-led forces advance into Islamic State prison

Syrian Kurdish-led fighters have advanced slowly into the Hasakah prison amid reports of hostages. Kurdish-led fighters freed nine hostages on Tuesday after entering northeast Syria’s largest prison holding Islamic State detainees the day prior. Fighters from the multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces began clearing cell blocks on the fifth day of …

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Idlib residents demand release of detainees in jihadist group’s prisons

The families of detainees in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s prisons in Syria’s Idlib province organized a series of protests, demanding that the group free their relatives, amid rumors that some of them will be executed. The number of protests demanding the release of detainees from the prisons of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham …

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Turkey’s central bank continues window dressing with currency swaps

Hit by a foreign reserves drain, Turkey’s central bank eyes fresh currency swap deals, including with the central banks of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Libya. Creating and managing perceptions seems to have become a high priority for the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as it struggles to ease Turkey’s …

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Israel prepares to receive Jews fleeing Ukraine

As tensions between Washington and Moscow keep rising, Israel prepares contingency plans for Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. On the backdrop of growing tensions and speculation over an imminent Russian invasion, Cabinet ministries in Jerusalem prepare for the possibility that thousands of Ukrainian Jews would want to immigrate to Israel. Reports …

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China Plays the Waiting Game on the Russia-Ukraine Crisis

Amid the looming threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western nations continue to use a wide-ranging toolkit of policy options, including diplomacy and security assistance, to avert the risk of a full-blown war in Eastern Europe. The U.K. is supplying short-range anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Canada is deploying a …

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Africa Seeks a More Equitable Partnership With China

The eighth edition of the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, or FOCAC, took place this week in Dakar, Senegal, marking the first time the meeting was held in West Africa. The conference, which took place days after the release of a Chinese government white paper detailing a new era of …

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China’s Hypersonic Missile Test Could Spur a Regional Arms Race

In a move that many observers have likened to the opening scene of a techno-thriller or science fiction novel, China reportedly tested an advanced hypersonic missile in August. Technically known as a Gliding Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or G-FOBS, the weapon is said to have missed its target by about …

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The U.S. Should Compete With China and Russia—but Wisely

As the Biden administration prepares to release its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, observers are searching for clues on how those reviews will grapple with the framework of “great-power competition” that anchored the previous administration’s high-level policy documents. That framework has achieved substantial bipartisan traction in the intervening …

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US Places 8,500 Troops On ‘Heightened Alert’, NATO Allies Bolster Eastern Europe

NATO allies have put their forces on standby and are bolstering their presence in Eastern Europe amid concerns over a Russian military buildup near Ukraine, in what Moscow called a provocation. Outlining a series of recent announcements by individual members of current or upcoming deployments, NATO said on January 24 …

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We Are Militarism’s Hostages

Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. …

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