Research & Commentary Results

I don’t think enough attention has been paid to US Central Command Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla’s public testimony on 23 March, in which he said that Iran-backed militias have attacked American troops in Syria 78 times since January 2021.

A day after Kurilla spoke, local fighters allied with Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards launched another attack with drones, killing a US contractor and wounding six other American service members.

اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.

Israeli-Azerbaijani relations are based on two main pillars: patient and cordial political relations as well as defense cooperation and arms sales. While the former reached a more intensive level this year, with the opening of an Azerbaijani embassy in Tel Aviv in late March, the latter pillar of the relationship was well developed long before, as Israel became Azerbaijan’s largest weapons supplier.

Catch up with the latest developments about Turkey’s May elections with weekly updates from MEI’s Turkey Program. In this week’s installment of Turkish Election Watch: It’s officially a four-candidate race for the presidential election, Kılıçdaroğlu meets with İnce, Kılıçdaroğlu receives a warm welcome in an Erdoğan stronghold, and Bahçeli makes an unexpected move.

The recent death of a 14-year-old girl following a botched “back alley” abortion at the house of her abuser is the latest reminder of the need to better protect women’s reproductive rights in Morocco and should push Moroccan authorities to address the multi-faceted social, legal, and economic drivers behind unwanted pregnancies.

Mohammed Mahmoud, Director of the Climate and Water Program at MEI, hosts a discussion on a variety of water resource challenges across the MENA region with Malak Altaeb, Megan Ferrando, Orestes Morfin, Youssef Wehbe, Zena Agha, and Andrei Covatariu. Questions on water availability, the relationship between water and conflict, future technologies, and more are addressed in the conversation.

ISIS appears to be regrouping inside a makeshift detention system holding 65,000 people including 10,000 hardened fighters.

French President Emmanuel Macron is taking Ursula von der Leyen with him on his trip to China next week. Von der Leyen is president of the European Commission and, until now, one of the European Union’s (EU) staunchest supporters of Ukraine. The two are scheduled to arrive in Beijing on April 4. While Macron’s visit had been announced some time ago, von der Leyen’s recent decision to join gives the trip a pan-European stamp of approval. But for what?

In January 2023, the United States began to reroute $72 million of assistance to Lebanon to support the salaries of Lebanese soldiers and police officers, most of whom could barely make ends meet due to the disastrous economic situation in the country. It took Washington more than two years to make that decision, partly because US laws regarding this type of aid were slightly unclear. But more importantly, the voices inside and outside the US government who argued against further support to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), let alone direct cash assistance, succeeded in delaying the process. This was yet another example of how, despite continued US commitment to the LAF through successive administrations, the US military assistance program remains vulnerable to US domestic politics.https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government-lebanon-bu…

The implications of the apparent rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran are likely to have significant consequences for vital neighboring regions like South Asia and other populous Muslim countries, including, notably, Pakistan.

The silence from Iran is deafening. Judging by social media reactions and media reports from Iran, few, if any, members of the Iranian public seem to care that, since 2011, the Israeli air force has attacked Iranian and Iranian-affiliated positions in Syria on more than a thousand occasions, reportedly killing a number of Iranian members of the IRGC.

As Women’s History Month in the U.S. draws to a close, women in the armed forces of several Middle Eastern countries continue to achieve historic milestones, with many now serving as pilots, engineers, peacekeepers, and in special forces units. The role of women is steadily increasing as the result of new initiatives, policies, and gradually changing mindsets in the Middle East.

اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.

Catch up with the latest developments about Turkey’s May elections with weekly updates from MEI’s Turkey Program. In this week’s installment of Turkish Election Watch: The HDP takes sides without taking sides, the dark horse candidate Muharrem İnce, and the AKP’s “People’s Alliance” coalition.

The GCC governments still cover over 40% of the cost of domestic electricity production. Yet, electricity subsidy bills alone do not reflect the full extent of their economic losses. Once the forgone revenues from the export of natural gas and oil used to meet rising domestic energy demand are added in, the total economic cost of the GCC’s electricity is too great to ignore.