Middle Orient

A security official warned that Iran will give a prompt response to any pretext for an attack on the bases inside Syria established at the Damascus government’s request for the purpose of fighting terrorism. Keivan Khosravi, spokesman for Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued the warning on Saturday after American …

Perhaps a more interesting sign has come with the purges carried among security forces with some of the more hardline officers moved aside or sent into early retirement. If there is indeed a change of course, the most important part of the scheme is the prospect of normalization with Saudi …

Turkish authorities have caught a total of 20 people, including six terrorists, in the northwestern Edirne province bordering Greece, the Defense Ministry announced Thursday. Greek border guards were pushing the group back into Türkiye when Turkish border units grabbed them, the ministry said. The authorities later understood the group included …

The agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations, facilitated by China and signed in Beijing on 11 March, was a jolt to the geopolitics of the Middle East. While much attention is rightly focused on what the agreement – and China’s role in it, in particular – …

The Sultanate of Oman’s longstanding ties to Iranian leaders position it to broker agreements between the United States and Iran, particularly the release of detained U.S. nationals.S. officials consider Oman, despite its close ties to Iran, as an integral component of U.S. strategy to deter Iranian aggression and secure the …

The disintegration of the Soviet Union left the Middle East bereft of any alternatives to US leadership. Washington, a prisoner of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny – the mythical doctrine used by the US to expand and extend its dominion, never proved itself up to the leadership role. The US …

“Palestinians don’t exist.” (https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/03/paris-israels-smotrich-says-palestinian-people-dont-exist-calls-them-fictitious) This was the recent statement by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich that made shocked headlines around the world. And, of course, he meant it as an affirmation of Jewish nationalism, the right of Israeli Jews to dispose of all Palestinians from the Jordan to the Sea. …

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – known less formally as the UN’s nuclear watchdog – spent March 4 and 5 in Tehran as the guest of the Iranian regime. After discussing nuclear matters with Iranian officials, he met foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and then Iran’s …

In his testimony to the 9/11 Commission, then-CIA Director George Tenet described the harrowing intelligence picture that had emerged in the summer of 2001. “The system was blinking red,” he famously recalled. What followed, of course, was the well-documented, multi-agency failure to prevent an avoidable disaster that changed the course …

In framing the Ukraine war as a fight between democracy and autocracy, Biden shows that the US hasn’t learned from Iraq Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations …