A court certified October’s parliamentary vote that gave Muqtada al-Sadr’s party a plurality of seats, clearing a path for a government to be formed. Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court on Monday upheld the results of the country’s October parliamentary elections, resolving a dispute that had stalled the formation of a new …

With tensions ratcheting up between the Israelis and the leaders of the Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Gaza, yet another wave of violence appears imminent. Hamas officials have been vowing renewed violence for weeks as they have criticized Egyptian mediators who have been trying to hammer out a …

Hezbollah has not yet responded to statements that over the past three years, the Israeli army has attacked dozens of Hezbollah targets in Syria, a senior Israeli security official said on Saturday. This is surprising since the attacks severely hampered the organization’s logistical and operational efforts to establish itself in …

How Self-Dealing Elites Failed in Both Countries In 2005, I visited a branch of Afghanistan’s national bank in Kandahar to make a deposit. I was launching a cooperative that would craft skin-care products for export, using oils extracted from local almonds and apricot kernels and fragrant botanicals gathered from the …

The Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster Xi Jinping is a man on a mission. After coming to power in late 2012, he moved rapidly to consolidate his political authority, purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of rampant corruption, sideline his enemies, tame China’s once highflying technology and …

Russia Seeks to Stop NATO’s Expansion, Not to Annex More Territory As 2021 came to a close, Russia presented the United States with a list of demands that it said were necessary to stave off the possibility of a large-scale military conflict in Ukraine. In a draft treaty delivered to …

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is offering to mediate the crisis, but its not clear Turkey has enough leverage to do so effectively. Turkey’s top diplomat publicly urged Russia’s government to drop what he called Moscow’s “one-sided” demands regarding NATO and Ukraine. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Russia should take a …

Offers of money by the Islamic State to join its ranks prove “irresistible” to those hit hard by Syria’s collapsed economy. A man being led by security guards shuffles into an interrogation cell in a military prison in the Kurdish-administered city of Hasakah in northeastern Syria. His hands are cuffed, …

Riyadh-led airstrikes came after Yemen’s Houthis launched a projectile into the southern Saudi province of Jizan, killing two people late last week. The Saudi Arabia-led military coalition fighting Yemen’s Houthi rebels said it launched renewed airstrikes in response to a projectile attack that killed two people near the southern Saudi …

An apparent increase in drug trafficking into the country from both its eastern and western borders, with fallout from instability in Afghanistan and ‘mafia’ groups in Syria as well as use of illicit substances in Iraq, has raised concern. In early December, the directorate tasked with drug control in Iraq’s …