ISIS appears to be regrouping inside a makeshift detention system holding 65,000 people including 10,000 hardened fighters.
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.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
On March 20, the EU will hold an international donors’ conference in Brussels to raise funds for Turkey and Syria’s recovery from the devastating earthquakes that struck in early February. While Turkey’s foreign minister will speak before the pledging session, no one will represent or even speak on behalf of Syrians.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
MEI Managing Editor Matthew Czekaj speaks with scholars Iulia-Sabina Joja, Alex Vatanka, Yörük Işık, Charles Lister, and Roger Kangas on Russia’s current standing in the Middle East a year since re-invading Ukraine.
How has Russian aggression in Ukraine redrawn Moscow’s relationships in the MENA region? And as the Middle East increasingly becomes a key area of global great power competition, is Russia still a meaningful player there, politically, economically, militarily, and diplomatically?
The difficulty of quickly providing mechanized and armored equipment to Ukraine, training Ukraine to employ this equipment in combined arms operations, and ensuring Ukraine can maintain and sustain combat power should not be underestimated. As the examples of Turkey’s 2016 military operation in Syria and the U.S. operation in Fallujah in 2004 illustrate, dislodging Russia from its prepared defensive positions will be a daunting task for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“Idlib is under siege” — this is the common sentiment shared with me by both local leaders and residents alike. The dual earthquakes on Feb. 6 not only rocked the physical foundations of the cities in Syria’s last opposition-held region, it cracked the social foundation of trust Syrians had with the international aid community.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
In the center of Harem, Idlib, hundreds of Syrian families huddle around stoves and in tents as they look on at the row of collapsed apartments they used to call home. “This disaster hasn’t happened to Syria in a thousand years,” says Abu Ahmed, the director of the new camp. “The international community must witness what is happening to us and help.”
Russia left the war-torn region with only a single border crossing—and it’s no longer open for aid.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
With the acute impacts of US-Chinese global tech decoupling becoming clearer, MENA is slowly emerging as an important region to watch. Economic and geopolitical ties with the West have long dictated the shape of the region’s digital environment, but more recent great power competition and Middle Eastern countries’ pursuit of economic and technological sovereignty have slowly deconstructed these dynamics.
Southern Turkey and northern Syria were struck by a crippling 7.8 magnitude earthquake at 4:17 AM, on Feb. 6. Twelve hours later, at least 2,400 people are known to have perished, with death tolls rapidly rising. This natural disaster could not have come at a worse time or struck a more vulnerable region — with notoriously poor construction in southern Turkey and the effects of more than a decade of brutal conflict still afflicting northern Syria.