Mick Mulroy

From Israel/Palestine and Lebanon to Iran and Afghanistan, there are a number of areas where the Trump administration may make policy moves before leaving office on Jan. 20. Experts from across MEI weigh in with their thoughts on what to watch out for over the next seven weeks.

Thousands of former ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of civilians indoctrinated in the group’s extremist ideology currently sit in prisons and refugee camps across Iraq and Syria. Leaving the detainees there is dangerous, but transitioning them will require some type of accountability for the crimes committed. This paper explores options for international action to deal with the detention of ISIS members from Iraq and Syria and the foreign terrorist fighters who joined the group from around the globe.

To help prevent a U.S.-Iran war in their neighborhood, the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council have called for diplomacy. They have reached out to Iranian officials to de-escalate. And they have provided Tehran with humanitarian assistance to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2017, the advocacy group Child Soldiers International estimated that more than 100,000 children were forced to become soldiers in state and non-state military organizations in at least 18 armed conflicts worldwide. This is a global problem that is getting worse and it must be addressed.

This paper looks at the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS), and the Irregular Warfare Annex (IWA) to that guiding document, with recommendations on how to better implement the strategy. It also analyzes the current Russian way of conducting irregular warfare by reviewing their actions in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy shapes the way the U.S. military competes with state and non-state adversaries. It specifically calls for improvements in partner force operations (PFO) — especially counter-terrorism (CT) — so that regional partners can keep up CT pressure while America’s special operators shift focus to help the nation gain and maintain an advantage over the near-peer competitors of Russia and China.

In the early hours of Jan. 3, 2020, a U.S. Military MQ-9 drone fired multiple air-to-ground missiles and killed the commander of the elite Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – Quds Force, Major General Qassem Soleimani. The targeted killing of Soleimani was carried out as he left the Baghdad International Airport under overt military authorities. Given that the strike was carried out under this authority, it was publicized globally shortly after it was completed. There were other options available to target Soleimani, however.

While they’re there, the United States should refocus the partnership toward making the Iraqi Army more self-sufficient. Here’s how.