mircea

Russia’s Middle East: You probe with bayonets. If you find mush, you proceed …

There was a firefight During the winter of 2019, teams of U.S. Army Special Forces and U.S. Marines were positioned alongside their allied militia unit, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), by an oil field near Deir Ezzor, Syria. What looked like a Russian-led militia force, including a number of armored …

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Geopolitics and propaganda: Lessons from the Black Sea

“I wish Georgia had the geographic location of Moldova” a Georgian political leader told me and a group of experts in Washington recently. Georgia and Moldova have much in common, from their geography and history to their shared status as EU Eastern Partnership countries on a track to internal reform …

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Battered Survivor: Hezbollah at Home and Abroad

The past decade and a half have been a real whirlwind for Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shi’a group fought Israel to a standstill in a destructive 33-day war in 2006. It lost its iconic military chief and special operative Imad Mughniyeh in 2008 as a result of a joint assassination by …

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A wake-up call: The Idlib crisis and its effects look set only to worsen

The death of at least 33 Turkish soldiers and wounding of 60 more in Syria’s Idlib on Thursday night was a game-changing development. According to informed sources, the troops were operating in a two-story frontline command headquarters when it was attacked from the air, at night, with precision munitions, including …

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La fin du djihadisme au Sahel passera aussi par la lutte contre la pauvreté et les inégalités (ONU)

La réponse militaire seule ne suffit pas à résoudre les conflits au Sahel qui ont pour terreau les inégalités, a déclaré jeudi la Haut-commissaire de l’ONU aux droits de l’Homme, Michelle Bachelet, devant le Conseil des droits de l’Homme à Genève.

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