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Sara Sadek is an affiliated researcher and coordinator at the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) at the American University in Cairo. She obtained an MA in Refugee Studies from the University of East London. Since 2005, she has worked on various research projects on Iraqi and Sudanese communities in Egypt, contributing to a report on Iraqis in Egypt and recently producing a paper on challenges of integration for Iraqis in Arab states for the Henry L. Stimson Center’s forthcoming volume Transnational Challenges.
Why Khamenei is unlikely to pick his son to succeed him as Iran’s supreme leader
Amid the ongoing circus over efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, two rumors have started to gain traction inside and outside Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is on his deathbed and preparations are being made for his son, Mojtaba, to succeed him.
Dispatches from Jerusalem: On the brink in the Middle East between escalation and de-escalation
My week of meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials and analysts in mid-September has left me groping for a coherent through line in the story about today’s Middle East. It’s the best of times and the worst of times, depending on where one sits.
Technology represents one potentially fruitful area where the I2U2 member states — Israel, India, the U.S. and the UAE — could cooperate together, expand their format to include more countries, deliver tangible results, and avoid agitating other global and regional powers.
CENTCOM’s Got a New Mission. It Needs More Support.
U.S. Central Command is quietly making a historic transition from a wartime command center to something like a hub for cajoling the region’s partners large and small toward stouter collective defense. But since CENTCOM’s new commander has vastly fewer resources for his tough new mission, defense and national security leaders in Washington need to back him up with a larger measure of policy coherence.
Iraq’s crisis of elite, consensus-based politics turns deadly: The Sadrists
More than 11 months after Iraq’s October 2021 parliamentary elections, the government has yet to be formed. The government formation power struggle pits the Sadrist Movement against the Coordination Framework. The ongoing Arba’een religious pilgrimage forces political downtime, but the deadlock continues and many fear future violence unless both camps can agree on mutually acceptable concessions.
Iraq: A crisis of elite, consensus-based politics turns deadly
Iraq is facing one of its worst political crises in years. Following the bloody street battles at the end of August that left more than 30 dead, violence has stopped, for now, but the political crisis is far from over, even if superficial solutions may be found in the interim. Iraqis anxiously await the end of the Arba’een holiday on Sept. 17 to see what will happen next.
