News on politics, security and defence in the Middle East and North Africa
Violation of Academic Freedom: Israel denies entry to SOAS scholar, which triggered a protest by Birzeit University Birzeit University condemns in the strongest possible terms the denial of entry to Dr.…
The grandiose dreams of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of Islamic State (IS) who envisioned a jihadist caliphate encompassing the entire globe under his leadership, appear to be crumbling. In…
In Yemen – as in much of the Middle East – Islam is at war with itself. As Saudi Arabia’s Sunni fundamentalist ruling family and Iran’s equally uncompromising Shia-based Islamic…
Right now hospitals are under attack in Syria. According to the Statistics compiled by the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a hospital was attacked every 18 hours during this month. This…
I wrote the first version of this essay in June 2014. Since then, I had over 4,000 hits on it in my blog. I decided to update it partly because…
Every year in Saudi Arabia, misery visits households across the land as the lives of approximately 7000 people are cut short as a result of traffic accidents. Some 39,000 more…
For years rumors of plots and counterplots have eddied around the controversial figure of Mohammed Dahlan, the charismatic Palestinian politician whom PA President Mahmoud Abbas regards as his greatest enemy,…
It is not easy to pigeon-hole Qatar, a stand-alone Middle Eastern state in more ways than one, geographically, politically, economically, influentially. That Qatar aspires to become a major player in the…
I am an American surgeon who recently spent two weeks working in an underground hospital in eastern Aleppo, Syria. I have been there a few times, and each time I…
Men in Iran are wearing hijabs in solidarity with their wives who are forced to cover their hair The campaign against enforced hijab in Iran has seen women defying morality…