Attiya Ahmad

Iraq is facing one of its worst political crises in years. Following the bloody street battles at the end of August that left more than 30 dead, violence has stopped, for now, but the political crisis is far from over, even if superficial solutions may be found in the interim. Iraqis anxiously await the end of the Arba’een holiday on Sept. 17 to see what will happen next.

It appears that calm has returned to Iraq after the reported intervention of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s chief and widely respected Shia cleric. In recent weeks, violence had occurred in and near parliament, which has been unable to implement last October’s election results. The clashes involved demonstrators and armed forces loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the leading candidate in the elections, and militias loyal to a loose array of rival Shia political parties calling themselves the Coordination Framework.

Kuwait plays a larger role than is often assumed in America’s present and future military plans in the Middle East. But as Washington prioritizes the Indo-Pacific, it is critical that the security arrangement between the United States and Kuwait is thoughtfully reconfigured.

Two years after the signing of the Abraham Accords, progress in developing relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors has achieved mixed results, opening up some greater cooperation in the security sphere but failing to change Arab publics’ minds due to the lack of movement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Now in the fifth month of a ceasefire, what are the prospects for a negotiated end to the Yemeni Civil War, and the beginning of a sustained peace? MEI Distinguished Sr. Fellow on U.S. Diplomacy and Director of the Arabian Peninsula program Gerald Feierstein discusses these questions with two outstanding scholars who have followed and written extensively about Yemen over the years. Fatima Abo Alasrar is a nonresident scholar at MEI and a Senior Analyst for the Washington Center for Yemeni Studies.

شهدت مدينة الحسكة شمال شرق سوريا يوم 22 أغسطس الحالي توزيعا لمنشورات وملصقات مناهضة للنفوذ الإيراني في المدينة، حيث ظهرت الملصقات في عدة مناطق حساسة وسط المدينة في المنطقة المعروفة بـ “المربع الأمني” التي تخضع لسيطرة جيش النظام السوري وميليشيات الدفاع الوطني التي أصبحت تخضع لنفوذ إيران.

On Aug. 22, the northeastern Syrian city of al-Hasakah was inundated with leaflets condemning creeping Iranian influence in the area. The printed messages were plastered around several highly sensitive locations in the city center, including the local branch of the Ba’ath Party, the neighborhoods of al-Matar and al-Mahatah, as well as near the Great Mosque and market streets.

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Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine renewed focus on Moscow’s earlier military intervention in Syria, which often became framed as a “testing ground” for the weapons and tactics it now employs against Ukrainian cities. But crucially, the Russian forces backing Assad’s embattled regime also understood the importance of rebuilding the broken Syrian security forces into more effective fighting units.

When acclaimed Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem opened his first solo show in New York City last week, it closed the circle on a story that began more than two decades ago on Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars and chaos that followed. The 49-year-old Gharem, a seminal figure in and pioneer of Saudi Arabia’s contemporary art scene, hopes his exhibition Hospitable Thoughts, at the Marc Straus Gallery through Oct. 16, will spark a “new cultural dialogue.”