Hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj are joined by MEI Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow Amb. (ret.) Robert S. Ford to examine what is at stake for Iraq in the Iran war. The only country to have been hit by both sides, Iraq is caught in the middle of a regional conflict, with the local Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) carrying out attacks on American interests and personnel — and the US responding. This escalation comes at a period of internal political transition in Iraq, which has been locked in negotiations to form a new government since the November 2025 elections. Ford, who served as Deputy and later Acting Ambassador in Baghdad from 2008 until 2010, unpacks how Iraq is navigating the current moment, how the Kurdistan region fits into this equation, and what this all means for the future of US-Iraqi relations.
With the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil production from Iraq’s south in free fall, Baghdad’s failure to maximize the Iraq-Turkey Pipeline is no longer a policy dispute. It is a national emergency.
Media and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are hyping the idea that President Trump’s attempt to gain sovereign control of Greenland has caused unprecedented and irreparable damage to the over 75 year-old Transatlantic Alliance. This “analysis” stems from multiple sources. On both sides of the ocean, there are those who pounce on any deviation from the norm by Trump as evidence the world as we know it is ending. And in Europe, there is the human but unattractive reaction of weak, dependent states against their one powerful ally when it rejects Europe’s preferred script. Much of the US media criticism is summarized by the concept that our other NATO allies can never again “trust” the US.
With the Syrian civil war raging and the ISIS offensive in northern Iraq creating a fresh crisis, Turkey now effectively has two failed states on its southern border and is dealing with new security, political, and economic challenges. Gonul Tol, director of MEI’s Turkish Center, explains how Turkey is responding to this predicament.
The swift and violent rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues to rattle the cages of power in Tehran. Overnight, Iran’s ally in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, is suddenly fighting for his political life and the country of Iraq, which he had largely inherited from the Americans. Maliki has been a solid friend of Iran, but rapidly shifting realities inside Iraq can turn him into an expendable ally, making him more into a liability than an asset.
President Obama’s decision to send 300 troops to Iraq to help Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government organize and gain the intelligence needed to fight off a Sunni rebellion spearheaded by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is getting decidedly mixed reviews.
Sectarianism as a concept has gained renewed prominence following an offensive by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in early June 2014, which resulted in the fall of Mosul and a string of Iraqi towns. These land grabs have resulted in a flurry of commentaries blaming the conflict on sectarian differences between Iraq’s Shi‘a and Sunnis and predicting the fragmentation of Iraq along sectarian lines. This piece seeks to provide an analysis as to whether sectarianism, in and of itself, is the driving factor behind the renewed conflict in Iraq or the three-year civil war raging in Syria.
A common dichotomy that emerges in discussions of Sunni-Shi‘i “sectarianism” in the contemporary Middle East is that of secular versus sectarian. The logic underlining this false duality is obvious enough: a sect is, after all, a subgroup of a religious denomination that exists as a result of theological or jurisprudential peculiarity as shaped by history, politics, and geography. Therefore, logic would suggest that “secularism” is a plausible antonym for “sectarianism:” a temporal, civic approach to public space rooted in modern understandings of the nation-state and its master institutions and the need to separate church from state. As intuitive as this undoubtedly seems, it remains a false dichotomy that misrepresents sectarian identities and sectarian dynamics in the Arab world and overlooks the role played by class, politics, and power in what is ostensibly a religious issue.
This op-ed first appeared in The New York Times on June 16, 2014. Click here to view the full article.
This article was originally posted on Charles Duelfer’s blog.
A possible path ahead is to take advantage of the post-election negotiations and configure a leadership that accommodates Sunni interests. This would by necessity mean someone other than Maliki becoming prime minister.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a Sunni militant group controlling territory spanning the border between the two country’s northern regions, made a rapid advance toward Baghdad this week, seizing control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and Tikrit, and attacking the refinery town of Baiji. Forces from Iraqi Kurdistan have since moved to secure Kirkuk as the Iraqi central government’s military has fled in disarray. Robert Ford, former U.S.
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika casts his ballot on April 17.
In the current two months between mid-April and early June, five Arab countries—Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and even war-torn Syria—are holding key elections, with little sign that any is moving in the direction of meaningful democratic transition.
أقدم مطبوعة محكمة مخصصة لدراسة الشرق الأوسط المعاصر، تغطي مجلة MEI الرائدة السياسة والمجتمع والثقافة في المنطقة.
