Nearly 52 years ago, a Syrian political leader hiding in exile was killed in the heart of Brazil. As Syria watchers continue to monitor and understand the country’s grinding civil…

On September 10, 2016, after mammoth negotiating sessions held in Geneva, the USA and Russia announced that agreement had been reached on a cease-fire in the Syrian civil war, to…

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…