The trial of former Ansar al-Din member, Ahmed al-Faqi, was the most prominent case of a militant tried for war crimes stemming from the 2012-2013 conflict in Mali, but such trials have not continued since 2017. Ansar al-Din’s successor coalition group, Group for Supporters of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), and …

The next round of talks to restore the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal, scheduled for November 29, is unlikely to produce any breakthroughs. Iran’s demands for rapid and sweeping sanctions relief, the expansion of its nuclear program, and its regional attacks do not augur well for the coming round of …

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister’s visit to Syria furthers efforts by President Bashar Al Assad to break out of the isolation caused by his military response to the uprising. The UAE’s engagement with Assad feeds criticism that the Gulf state supports a “counter-revolution” against challenges to established Arab …

The Pakistani government has come to terms on a cease-fire with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, in an effort to end a long-running and highly lethal insurgency. There are reasons to be pessimistic that the current cease-fire will hold, as similar initiatives have fallen apart in the past, …

Turkey has sent a new batch of Syrian mercenaries to Libya despite local and international demands to withdraw all foreign forces ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for December 24. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said 150 mercenaries from the pro-Ankara Libyan National Army, including al-Majd Corps, …

It is a mistake to view Iran’s regional aggression and hegemony as purely a result of violence and terrorism. Certainly, a major impetus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and of its local militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere is the projection of violence of every sort. …

The migration crisis on the eastern border of the European Union (EU), which began earlier this summer and has ramped up dramatically in recent months, came as a surprise not only to the border countries, such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, but also to top EU leaders. After the European …

Under the Biden administration, calls for a NATO Black Sea strategy have amplified. A gamechanger for the much-needed regional strategy is Georgia’s and Ukraine’s path to membership. NATO’s strategic reassessment, to be finalized next year at the Madrid summit in June, will likely fall short of granting Ukraine and Georgia …

After almost two years of work, the first draft of the European Union’s (EU) so-called Strategic Compass was presented on Nov. 15. The objective of this military strategic plan is to agree on a set of proposals to guide the bloc’s defense cooperation efforts for the next five to ten …

In recent months, a series of analytical publications sparked fresh debate in Iran about the status of Iran’s oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian Sea as well as why it has still not taken greater efforts to exploit those resources. Namely, a piece in August predicted that a …