Month: August 2025

Urgent: Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization – Now

A bill, H.R.3883 (Muslim Brotherhood Is a Terrorist Organization Act of 2025), was put forward on June 10, 2025 by US Senator Ted Cruz, “[to] require the Secretary of State to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization.” This designation is crucial for both US and international security. Even then, if the US government makes the FTO designation, this alone is not enough to slow down the aggression that the Muslim Brotherhood is still generating throughout the world.

What Will Syria Do with Its Foreign Militants?

Unifying and deradicalizing Syria’s armed forces will be the regime’s most formidable challenge.

The United States has now lifted all sanctions on Syria, except on some individuals and entities associated with the former Assad regime. Additionally, the United States has revoked the foreign terrorist organization designation for Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). This comes after Washington approved the Syrian leadership’s plan to incorporate thousands of foreign jihadists into the new Syrian army, dropping its longstanding demand that the new leadership deport or detain foreign fighters.

The Middle East’s New Intermediaries: Can the Gulf States Broker Peace Between America, Iran, and Israel?

Earlier this year, the Arab Gulf states were riding high. The energy crisis that followed the coronavirus pandemic had filled their coffers and renewed their roles as the stewards of global oil markets—and, in Qatar’s case, a reliable source of liquefied natural gas. Over the past few years, the Gulf countries have tactfully navigated the great-power competition between China, Russia, and the United States and successfully managed their relations with regional rivals, including Iran and Turkey.

After Xi: The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

For more than a decade, Chinese politics has been defined by one man: Xi Jinping. Since Xi assumed leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has made himself into a strongman ruler. He has remade the CCP elite through a wide-ranging purge and corruption crackdown. He has curbed civil society and suppressed dissent. He has reorganized and modernized the military. And he has reinvigorated the role of the state in the economy.

Ashes and Shame: A Sunni’s Cry from the Euphrates – The Syrian Observer

“As an Arab Sunni, I am horrified that what criminal hordes committed is being enshrined as something that represents me or my community morally”, Yassine Sweiha writes.

As an Arab Sunni, I am horrified that what criminal hordes committed—first along the coast, and now in Sweida—is being enshrined as something that represents me or my community morally. I am appalled by the belief, shared by many, that such acts can lead us anywhere politically. The core of this country—its largest and most widely distributed community—must not be reduced to a pitiful reenactment of the Serbs of the 1990s: a blind, hate-filled group locked in a genocidal relationship with everyone around them. The Serbs of the ’90s had a lost paradise—Tito’s Yugoslavia. These heedless neo-Umayyads seem to view their lost paradise as Assad’s Syria, with an Abu Uday flavor. Shame on you for thinking we would become that.