The Americans Are Gone. Will Iraq’s Militias Disarm?
On September 30, the US completed its military withdrawal from Iraq, ending a 12-year-long mission to combat ISIS that began in 2014. The date was also meant to be the deadline for disarming the largely Iranian-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), but Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has now pushed that cutoff back to June 30, 2027. MEI Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow Amb. (ret.) Robert S. Ford joins hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj to discuss what the US military withdrawal means for Iraqi security and the nature of the bilateral relationship going forward. They also speak about what it will take for Baghdad to bring the PMF militias to heel, and how Iraq may navigate the post-Iran war era.
Jordan’s Economy Weathers Iran War’s Shocks and Finds New Opportunities
In the summer of 2003, King Abdullah II told Bloomberg Jordan sits “between Iraq and a hard place,” a play on words designed to describe the kingdom’s challenging environment to an American audience amid the US-led Iraq war to the east and the lingering Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the west. Jordan is grappling with a much “harder place” today.
Proponents of the war with Iran have taken recent increases in crude-oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz as proof that the US strategy is finally working. President Trump is so confident in this that he recently rejected a seven-day plan, set forward by Iran’s foreign ministry, to end the war and open the strait. The United States is “winning tremendously,” Trump boasted.
The outlines of a US strategy to roll back ISIS, or the ‘Islamic State’ as it styles itself, in Iraq have become relatively clear, even if success is uncertain.
One hundred and sixty-three years before the Islamic State’s band of thugs rolled into the city, terrorizing the city’s minorities, my Protestant missionary ancestor, his wife, and two children settled in Mosul, a long way from the home they left behind in Utica, New York.
Paul Salem, MEI’s vice president for policy and research, examines President Obama’s decision to step up US intervention against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Iraq, and what it implies for broader US policy in the region, in this Expert Q&A.
How do you read the import and impact of President Obama’s recent announcements of airstrikes and humanitarian intervention in Iraq?
"Marked" for Exclusion: The Problem of Pluralism, State-building, and Communal Identities in Iraq and the Arab World
In this essay, the author argues that the dynamics of contemporary Sunni-Shi‘a relations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world are not fundamentally different from those animating other societal cleavages. The modern Iraqi state’s awkwardness vis-à-vis its Shi‘a population, and indeed other outgroups and minorities, was most directly a product of exclusionary nation-building based on problematic conceptions of “unity” and “pluralism.” Rather than actually fostering unity or respecting and nurturing pluralism (politically or communally), these concepts have often been used to exclude dissenters whose non-conformity was deemed a threat to the body politic.
Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza — Protective Edge — has animated the Shia Islamist leadership in Tehran.
The bloody conflict, and the global Muslim outrage it has provoked, is held by the Iranian regime as a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of the Sunni Muslim majority in the world.
When US commanders in Iraq in 2006 were trying to figure out the best way to approach the burgeoning insurgency, two points of view emerged from the debate.
The oldest peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East, MEI’s flagship journal covers politics, society, and culture in the region.
