Analysis

Reports of a secret war being waged by Hamas against Salafi-jihadist groups in the Gaza Strip are indicative of increasing challenges to the former’s security control within the enclave. Hamas’ current approach to violent Salafist cells in Gaza is equally demonstrative of an ongoing warming of relations between Cairo and Hamas, and one that has afforded Hamas international legitimacy and an ease in border restrictions.

This article examines Japan’s response to Myanmar’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingyas. The author sharply critiques Japan’s practices of investing in and extending aid to Myanmar ostensibly to contribute to nation-building and democracy.

Deep political, familial, and religious ties have allowed Druze communities across the Levant to remain largely unified against external threats, but eight years of violence in Syria and a coordinated campaign by the regime and its allies now threaten to destabilize regional Druze politics and erode the sect’s political and military power. An Iranian-backed campaign by Hezbollah to incite inter-Druze violence in Lebanon has curtailed this unity, laying the groundwork for Hezbollah to expand into Syria’s Suwayda province with impunity.

With an estimated $1 trillion in natural resources and sitting astride an international crossroads of increasingly critical importance, Balochistan is becoming a stage on which the world’s powers are playing out their ambitions. China, the U.S., and India have all formulated Balochistan policies in the past few years, hoping to utilize the region to achieve wider international goals — and the three countries across which Balochistan is divided, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, have been eager to use it as a bargaining chip for their own purposes.

The team of researchers from the Syrian Association for Citizen’s Dignity worked for months under extremely challenging conditions to document the security situation of returnees and those living in areas covered by “reconciliation agreements” in parts of Syria under the control of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The results of that research are stark and the main conclusion is that it is not safe for displaced Syrians to return to Assad-held areas.

They won’t make up for backing out of Syria and failing to stand up to Iran.

While the Turkish military offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria might, once again, bring Moscow and Tehran together tactically in support of Assad’s rule and Syrian sovereignty, the two powers have fundamentally different visions for the war-ravaged country’s future.

Turkey’s cross-border incursion into northeastern Syria has stirred up a hornet’s nest of instability and threats. If left unchecked, this latest “war within a war” will have deeply destabilizing consequences for many years.

European Council President Charles Michel may have the most prestigious political post in the European Union, but the true power lies with the European Commission, the Union’s executive branch, whose president represents the EU abroad. Will the nomination of Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman to hold this post, affect relations between the EU and the Middle East in the years ahead?  For her part, von der Leyen has said she will focus mainly on such matters as an “ambitious climate agenda,” a fair social market economy, and safeguarding democratic values in Europe, but the president-elect will also have to address developments in the Middle East. This will not be new territory for her.

On August 5, 2019 Turkey’s Foreign Ministry launched the Asia Anew initiative, whose declared aim is to give greater weight to cooperation with Asian countries in four substantive areas. This article shows that, although few details have emerged regarding how Ankara intends to implement this initiative, there is nonetheless sufficient reason to question whether it is viable or sustainable.

In a stunning announcement on Sunday, the Trump administration gave the nod to a Turkish military incursion into northeastern Syria, an operation that would entail clashes with Washington’s Kurdish allies in the area. The U.S. military, which has around 1,000 troops in Syria, would not “support or be involved in the operation.” But the White House said it would pull back U.S. forces stationed near the Syrian-Turkish border to clear the way for Ankara’s troops.

“We reached a level of injustice we could no longer take. For every action, there is a reaction,” explained one civil society activist following the Oct. 1 outbreak of protests in Baghdad and central and southern Iraq.

The erosion of U.S. global hegemony in recent years is rarely a matter of dispute among American strategists. The United States has lost its preeminence in part because others, most notably China, have caught up, but also because it has overextended and exhausted itself abroad, leading to budget constraints, rightist populism, and acute political polarization at home.

President Vladimir Putin heads to Riyadh to try to pry loose multi-billion-dollar investments that Saudi Arabia has pledged to Russia but failed to deliver on. Putin also hopes to persuade the kingdom to increase two-way trade.

Female labor force participation levels in Arab countries are the lowest in the world — despite the rising educational attainment of women reaching working age. Indeed, young women across the Arab world exceed the education levels of young men, who are worrisomely falling behind. Remedying the underrepresentation of Arab women in the labor force and reviving the educational motivation of young men are both social and economic imperatives.