Middle Orient

The US wants the pressure to be kept on ISIS, but every time Ankara has an election cycle or a need to distract from some issue at home, it will use drone strikes and threats of conflicts in Syria. In late November, the US said that Syrian rebels in the …

Israel/Palestine Double bombing rocked Jerusalem amid heightened volatility in West Bank, and victory of far-right coalition could bring even more destabilising policies in near future. Deadly bombings struck Jerusalem as Israeli and Palestinian violence continued in West Bank. In first such attack since 2016, unclaimed bombings at two bus stops …

Yemen Back-channel talks between Huthis and Saudi Arabia signalled deal could be reached outside stalled UN process, while Huthis attacked energy infrastructure, raising risks of front-line and regional escalation. Huthis and Riyadh intensified back-channel negotiations away from UN process. As UN efforts to resurrect truce remained deadlocked, Huthis and Saudi …

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has rejected efforts by his Russian allies to arrange a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, refusing to give him leverage in next year’s upcoming elections in Turkiye. According to an anonymous source with knowledge of the Syrian regime’s thinking, cited by the Reuters …

The US has voiced willingness to end support for Iran’s protest movement if Tehran stops selling drones to Moscow and makes concessions on its nuclear program. There is a long history of western powers fuelling public unrest in Iran, even pre-dating the establishment of the Islamic Republic. But what makes …

Riyadh’s interest in Pakistan’s Gwadar port is of particular concern for Tehran and its vital oil trade with China. A $10 billion Saudi Aramco refinery is being built near the port city of Gwadar in Pakistan, about 169 kilometers (km) east of Iran’s Chabahar port in the western Sistan and …

Russia has offered to mediate and facilitate a meeting between Turkiye and Syria, with limited success On 6 December, Orhan Miroglu, the head of the Justice and Development Party, reported that Damascus turned down Ankara’s proposal to set up a meeting between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish President Recep …

US convoys in Hasakah have been limited to deterring Turkish strikes on oil installations, in fear of further degradation of the decaying infrastructure Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Akhbar reported on 7 December that the US-backed Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), has suffered immensely in the latest wave of Turkish …

As Budapest actively implements its own “Look to the East” policy, Tehran will find a potentially useful partner in Europe. Upon signing the protocol of the third session of the joint commission for economic cooperation between Iran and Hungary on 16 November, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó expressed support for …

During a two-week visit to Iran in November, I witnessed women of all ages walking freely on the streets without the hijab. But, what we’re not told, is that they have been doing so for years. The explosion of protests in Iran that began in September were not about the …