Research & Commentary Results

The three uprisings in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon represent the revolt of a new generation seeking to build a better future for itself. Since 2011, there have been 11 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. All 11 uprisings have similar drivers: the explosive dysfunction of high demographic growth, low levels of economic development and job creation, poor government performance and services, and high levels of corruption and inequality.

The protestors are demanding a radical change of the ethno-sectarian power-sharing system put in place after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

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.

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.

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?

Only one leader has the moral standing and mass appeal to be able to move Iraq out of the deadly stalemate in which it now finds itself and which may degenerate into more violence and chaos if the status quo is not upended: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

The launch of Turkey’s military incursion into northern Syria on Oct. 9 represents an existential threat for the Autonomous Administration in Northeast Syria (AANES) and Kurdish parties in Syria as a whole, prompting Kurdish political factions, both within Syria and abroad, to reevaluate their survival strategies and alliances. This report explores the various political factions within the Kurdish coalitions in Syria as they functioned under the AANES and the major rifts between them. Even under these dire circumstances Kurdish political factions in Syria have responded to the Turkish invasion independently.

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.

“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.