Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
As we watch the war in Gaza develop, we must not lose sight of the stark challenges the Israeli military is facing. Modern urban combat is always bloody and grueling, and the devastation it wreaks is gut-wrenching to watch. But in Hamas, Israel is facing a particularly formidable foe.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
The intensity of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Gaza and the ensuing crisis have already had a significant and dramatic impact on relations between the United States and Israel. The resolute American backing reflects the purest expression of the strategic partnership that has existed between Israel and the U.S. for more than five decades.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
The scale and brutality of Hamas’s grisly attack on Israel last Saturday has understandably triggered a massive outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with Israel. And yet, there has been no similar outpouring of sympathy for Palestinians, who are now also dying in disturbingly large numbers.
Hamas’ murderous raid on Oct. 7, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians, may well turn out to be a consequential inflection point, having unleashed political and popular forces that could lead in a positive or, just as likely, extremely negative direction.
There is an urgent need for a Global Humanitarian Coalition to Defeat ISIS to conduct human rights-centered action and build upon hard-fought military gains in the campaign against ISIS. Repatriation of all third-country nationals in the squalid detention camps and prisons in northeast Syria must be the first joint task in order to ease the burden of the local administration and to accomplish long-sought security, justice, and stabilization goals.
Two years on from the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, Afghanistan’s neighbors are increasingly concerned that their return to power has emboldened terrorist groups and networks, which are using the hospitable environment to regroup, rearm, and recruit substantially. The main question now for Afghanistan’s neighbors in the region, and the international community more broadly, is just how reliable the Taliban’s counterterrorism assurances to other states really are.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
As the clock ticks down on the repatriation of IS foreign fighters from Syria, a recent development has added a new sense of urgency to the situation. On June 11, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), announced its intention to prosecute 2,000 IS foreign fighters. How-ever, the lack of international recognition for the AANES and its courts renders these trials illegiti-mate, further complicating future international legal efforts to prosecute these combatants.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.