Fatima Sadiqi

Read the full article on The National Interest.

Egyptian diplomats rarely have a good word to say about U.S. policies these days. In contrast, they are enthusiastic in their praise of the close relations between Cairo and Jerusalem—centered on counterterror security and intelligence cooperation in Sinai—and effusive in their acknowledgement of Israel’s response to the bloody insurgency there, led by Egypt’s ISIS affiliate in the “Sinai Province,” Ansar Beit al-Maqdis.

“Relations with Israel are great,” observed an Egyptian official recently.[1]

Salafi discourse has made considerable inroads in Turkey over the past 30 years, making contributions to sectarianism in ways that have yet to be fully studied and understood.

Imagine your child is bleeding from a severe wound. The hospital lacks the necessary medical equipment to stop it, and you are told that amputation is the only option, but the hospital has no anesthesia. Imagine losing a newborn baby, not for any medical reason, but because a power outage cut off the heat to your child’s incubator. Sadly, these are not infrequent tragedies in a number of Middle Eastern countries. In Syria, as in other areas of conflict across the region, it’s not just bombs, bullets, and shells that are killing and maiming children and others.

Ismael Mohammed of Egypt recalls the moment he lost his religion. It happened four years ago, at the age of 26, when he heard about the theory of evolution for the first time. He had come across it online by watching YouTube videos and reading all the material he could fit through Google Translate. He sent query emails to evolution scientists around the world, asking them if what they were saying was true. Some responded, sending him the nuts and bolts of Darwin’s work.

“What’s going to happen to the Syrian refugees?” This was the question I asked of everyone I met during a recent trip to Lebanon and Turkey to research Syrian displacement. Without exception, those I asked—government and UN officials, academics, business and NGO representatives, Syrian diaspora groups, and Syrian refugees—responded with the same answer: “I don’t know” (or sometimes “‘God only knows”). When pressed, almost everyone said that the war in Syria would continue for the foreseeable future and that more people would likely leave or try to leave.

In many Arab countries, the homogenizing, authoritarian, centralized state is a relic of a bygone past. However, what will replace it is not yet clear. The popular Arab uprisings that exploded in December 2010, and their overlap with already-underway geopolitical battles unleashed by the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, combined to torpedo the political orders of a number of Arab states.

Probably the most important group fighting the Syrian regime now is Ahrar al-Sham (Free Men of the Levant), a Salafi group fighting mainly in the north but also in central and southern Syria. Contrary to Western reports suggesting that the al-Qa‘ida-linked Nusra Front led the battle to capture the northwestern Syrian provincial capital of Idlib last March, Ahrar had more fighters in the battle—a fact demonstrated by its predominance in the subsequent military oversight council established for Idlib.

Though China still adheres to the principle of nonintervention, its unprecedented proactivity and break from its position to “pursue friendly, cooperative relations with all Middle Eastern countries” has already distinguished its behavior in the Syria crisis from its traditional stance.

The Iran nuclear deal has only one big surprise: it is consistent with the April 2 “parameters”  that preceded it and contains no surprises. No one caved. Nothing got walked back.

MEI interviewed Senior Fellow Alex Vatanka about the historic nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that was reached on July 14, 2015, and how it may impact regional dynamics and the long-term relationship between Iran and the West.

What has been the reaction to the nuclear deal?

Proliferation and intensification of coercive force in the Arab world since 2011, combined with apparent decay of Arab states, seems at first glance to run counter to the implicit predictions of two relevant bodies of literature.

In the last few weeks, the Syrian Druze have been a focal point in significant fighting on the ground. If their role in the fighting continues, or even if it changes, the Druze will likely have a profound impact on the trajectory of the Syrian conflict.