Middle Orient

In his memoir, Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani shares that Turkey’s former President Turgut Ozal had once floated the idea of “annexing” Iraqi Kurdistan. As Turkey escalates its campaign against Kurdish militants in the north of Syria and Iraq and Kurdish politicians within its borders, Masoud Barzani, the preeminent leader …

The mullahs appear convinced that once the Biden administration capitulates completely to their demands for reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, they will be able to step up their already significant efforts to eliminate Israel and export their Islamic Revolution to Arab and Islamic countries. Iran already occupies four Arab …

Prior to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in early 2011, Damascus consciously sought to pursue a relatively balanced foreign policy toward most of its neighbors. Its challenges with Israel notwithstanding, Syria tried to maintain diversified and even-handed relations with Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world regionally and with …

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that he is planning a new military offensive in northern Syria directed against the Kurds. If one authoritarian leader can defy world opinion, invade the territory of a sovereign state and incur only minor consequences, why not another? This may well have been …

Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has said the agreement to ship Ukrainian foodstuffs could be a stepping stone toward peace. Flushed with the success of the Ukrainian grain shipment deal it helped negotiate, Turkey is hoping to eventually translate its position as a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow into a peace …

Turkish strikes on Syrian government troops and overt Kurdish attacks on targets inside Turkey signal that both sides are changing the rules of the game as Ankara eyes normalization with Damascus. Ankara’s reconciliation overtures to Damascus have been accompanied by growing Turkish attacks on Syrian Kurdish and government forces along …

When the regime’s television host asked him about the video showing concrete being poured into the Arak reactor’s pipes to block them, Ali Akbar Salehi, former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran responded: “[N]ot the pipes you see here. We had purchased similar pipes, but I couldn’t announce …

“The US has started packing its bags to leave the Middle East. It is no longer able to impose maximum pressure on us.” — Major General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, August 4, 2022. Like their patrons in Tehran, these proxies are all staunchly committed to …

The U.S. and Russian presidents staged high visibility visits to the Middle East in the past week and a half. The visits were designed to assert each great power’s influence in the region at a time of escalating great power conflict. But both presidents cut a diminished figure on the …

The decades-long confrontation between Israel and Iran is now arguably becoming more dangerous. Economic, political, and military pressures have failed to stop Iran from becoming an almost nuclear threshold country. The Islamic Republic does not recognize the Jewish state and the latter considers the former an existential threat. Now, amid …