Blithely ignoring the fact that his presidential predecessor ordered the invasion that plunged Iraq into its current chaos and instability, Obama seems to hold the Iraqis at fault for their present U.S.-induced predicament., argues Yuram Abdullah Weiler. Read Here – Tehran Times
The smoke rising from the Iraqi city of Baiji—so dark and thick that it’s visible from U.S. weather satellites—is evidence of one thing: The jihadist conflict engulfing Iraq is fueled by oil. Read Here – Businessweek
Iraq’s poorly led but far larger and more heavily armed government forces may eventually roll back the Sunni advance. For now they man a ragged defensive arc around the northern and western approaches to Baghdad that is 60-90km deep, writes The Economist
Ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq still suffers from the damage wrought in the overthrow of a dictator and the chaos that followed. Watch Here – Aljazeera
President Obama’s instincts about Iraq and Syria have been sound from the beginning: Greater U.S. engagement probably cannot make things better but certainly can make them worse, both for the people of the region and for our national interests. Read Here – Washington Post
The roots of the current violence go at least as far back as Iraq’s 2006-2007 civil war, which didn’t so much end as get put on hiatus. The spate of sectarian violence pitted the Shiite-majority government against Sunni militias and al-Qaeda in Iraq (a group from which ISIS emerged). The U.S. troop “surge” halted the […]
This is the first time the Palestinians have followed through to form a government. It is supposed to reunite the divided territories and prepare for overdue elections after six months. Read More
What’s in a name? Place names often change, and those changes stem from a tangle of politics and language. A fun tool from Google, the Ngram Viewer, lets us watch those changes play out across history. The Ngram Viewer charts how often a particular word appears in some five million books digitized as part of the […]
The Arabists never again came so close to implementing their vision of an American foreign policy sympathetic to Arab countries. Which isn’t to say they lost their influence in all ways. In what seems like a contradiction, Kermit Roosevelt was instrumental in the CIA-backed coup d’état that ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Muhammad […]
Ferghana is the hotspot of Central Asia. It is an ethnic soup with hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz and Tajik living in Uzbek Ferghana and vice-versa. Ethnic tensions, sporadic violence and in 2010 the region erupted in violence when hundreds were killed. Read Here – The Hindu
looking beyond borders 