Tag Archives: Iraq

The US hostilities are likely to not only derail the Afghan peace process but also, possibly turn western Afghanistan into another battleground for the US-Iran proxy war.

IS will be set back for many months, and perhaps even years. It will struggle to regain the momentum it had under Baghdadi's leadership.

Turkey’s reaction to Kurdish independence from Iraq will not be a military intervention at least for now and it should not be, says one Turkish analyst.

The “great shakeout” taking place in the Middle East is a state shakeout by conservative states with conservative ideologies. Iran is not an outlier in this company. Certainly rivalry and competition are better than the wars, ethnic cleansing, flight, killing, rape, malnutrition and barbarism of the past five years.

If there is anything to be learnt from the history of India’s Second World War, it is that India’s ability to be a pivotal power in Asia is contingent on the restoration of the strategic and economic unity of the subcontinent. Decades on, this remains a project worth pursuing.

The Saudis are reluctant to send ground troops to fight the Houthis on Yemeni soil. But recent conflicts -- in Iraq, Syria and Libya -- show that air power alone is not enough to win a decisive victory. And the longer this conflict drags on, the more likely that the Houthis will gain wide popular support as the defenders of Yemen's independence against an aggressive and meddling neighbor.

With the huge reduction in its revenues and growing discomfort among its members such as Venezuela, Libya and Nigeria over its current production levels, is OPEC really getting weaker?

Pakistan is in a Catch-22 situation, damned if it joins the Saudi-led so-called “Sunni Coalition” and damned if it does not.

With journalists increasingly part of the story they’re covering, the likes of Brian Williams are tempted to aggrandize in order to enhance their image.

The Charlie Hebdo killings, whatever their connections to the current wars in the Middle East, were acts of terrorism that should be handled by law enforcement. Blowback from these wars has so far been minimal in Europe. By resisting narratives of civilizational conflict and pushing for a ceasefire in the Syrian war, European governments can do even more to reduce the threat of this blowback.