Research & Commentary Results

On Nov. 23, Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, announced that his country will stage an Islamic summit in Kuala Lumpur from Dec. 19-21. The event, on the theme of “The Role of Development in Achieving National Security,” will feature representatives from the host country as well as Indonesia, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey. Around 450 leaders, scholars, clerics, and thinkers from 52 countries will attend, along with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The leaders of the six GCC member states will meet in Riyadh on Dec. 10 amid signs that the 30-month-old confrontation with Qatar by the self-described “Anti-Terror Quartet” is diminishing.

Two months into the popular uprisings in Iraq and Lebanon, both countries are mired in a painful standoff.

Political analyst Hafsa Halawa and MEI Senior Fellow Alex Vatanka join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the political crisis in Iraq following the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, the protest movements that have rocked both Iraq and Iran, and the impact of Iranian impact in Baghdad on Iraq’s development going forward.

The 12-country Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), which held its latest meeting in Equatorial Guinea on Nov. 28, has never had OPEC’s ability to control energy prices, but that is likely to change as liquefied natural gas (LNG) transforms the gas market from a regional to a global one.  

There is no end in sight to Iraq’s political crisis even though Parliament unanimously voted to remove Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi on Sunday. Abdul-Mahdi now tends a caretaker government while Iraq’s political leaders are interpreting the country’s constitution to give President Barham Salih 15 days starting from Nov. 30 to name a new prime minister.

Tehran’s reaction to the resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi is one of accepting the seemingly inevitable.

Although 350 Iraqis have died to date and close to 16,000 have been wounded, protesters are not going home. Yet, most of the ruling clique is still rejecting the idea of forcing the prime minister to resign.

Since early October, the southern provinces of Iraq have been consumed by protests and strikes. While ruthlessly attempting to suppress protests, the Iraqi government has promised legal and political reforms. Yet some of the Kurdistan Region-Iraq’s elites are suspicious that the government’s reform agenda is a “conspiracy” against Kurdish entitlements masquerading as a good faith effort to placate the protestors. The region’s hegemonic parties are concerned that legal, constitutional, and procedural reforms may overhaul the institutions that guarantee their positions of influence in the federal government and secure their territorial claims.

Four decades on, echoes of the November 1979 assault on the Grand Mosque in Mecca continue to reverberate. Coming on the heels of the Iranian revolution and days after the Iran hostage-taking, the Mecca attack, carried out by a group of several hundred Saudi extremist Islamists declaring a new Mahdi, shocked the Sunni world and pushed Muslims in a far more conservative direction.

The Saudi Aramco IPO got started this Sunday morning with shares priced at SAR 30-32 ($8-8.50) each, valuing the company at $1.7 trillion, $300 billion below the original estimate. The lower valuation has been expected for some time by most investment banks and many financial analysts. The proceeds are expected to fund the Public Investment Fund’s forays into non-energy-based companies, advanced technologies, and even robot-filled cities.

After more than two months of Saudi-mediated indirect talks between the Republic of Yemen Government (ROYG) and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC), the two sides finally reached a deal on Nov. 5. The Saudi effort, which culminated in the signing of the Riyadh Agreement, is aimed at resolving the conflict within the Arab coalition-backed front and uniting the two parties in the fight against the Iranian-backed Houthi militias. The agreement, which spans political, economic, security, and military arrangements, involves restructuring the executive, military, and security branches of the ROYG, partial disarmament of STC-loyal forces, and the demilitarization of Aden — all of which will be phased in over the next three months.

Iranian mediation might bring the two big political blocs to an agreement on a new government, but the protest movement demands only new, clean faces and won’t readily accept another cabinet drawn from discredited political blocs.

MEI’s Paul Salem and Randa Slim join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the nationwide protests that have swept through Lebanon and Iraq this week resulting in political and economic turmoil as well as crackdowns by security forces. Where do things go from here?