Orientul Mijlociu

Turkey Seeks Economic Stability – OpEd

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Turkey’s economy is in a bad way. In June the budget deficit, seven times higher than a year earlier, reached 219.6 billion lira ($8.37 billion). The forecast for July shows it widening still further.

On July 16 Turkey raised the tax on gasoline, adding to the recent two percent increase to VAT (value added tax) and five percent hike to corporation tax. Aimed at tackling the budget deficit, those tax hikes will have the deleterious side-effect of stoking inflation, which stood at 38 percent in June. Two days after the tax hike, the Turkish lira weakened to a record low of 26.6 against the dollar.

Iran Strengthens Its Palestinian Cards

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Ongoing fighting in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp may be part of a plan to weaken Fatah and undermine normalization with Israel.

In the past week, fighting erupted in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh near Sidon between Islamist factions and Fatah, after one of Fatah’s military commanders, Abou Ashraf al-Amroushi, was assassinated on July 30. While the fighting was hardly an anomaly, the fact that the head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service, Majed Faraj, had visited Lebanon only days before fueled speculation that his visit might have triggered the fighting. Tensions between Hamas, which maintains good relations with Palestinian Islamists, and Fatah have surged in the West Bank and might have impacted the events in Ain al-Hilweh.

Taliban prepare hundreds of suicide bombers over water dispute with Iran

In this picture taken on February 21, 2023, Taliban security personnel watch horsemen compete in the traditional sport of Buzkashi in Fayzabad district of Badakhshan province. (AFP)

In mid-May, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi issued a warning to the Taliban: honor Afghanistan’s water-supply agreement or face the consequences.

A well-known Taliban figure offered a mocking gift of a 20-liter water container in response and told him to stop making terrifying ultimatums. About a week later, a skirmish erupted on the border, leaving two Iranian guards and one Taliban member dead.

Iran’s renewed Africa policy: Raisi’s ambition and the perception of Western decline

Over the past two years, as the United States and the European Union have invested in the revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Iranian leadership has opted to solidify its non-Western foreign policy approach. In line with this approach, President Ebrahim Raisi embarked on a three-country trip to Africa in mid-July, marking the first time an Iranian president has undertaken such a visit in over 11 years. Earlier in the month, Iranian officials reported that the Islamic Republic’s exports to the continent had increased by 100% over the past year. It is now clear that engagement with Africa will be a major foreign policy focus under the Raisi administration. However, this is not the first time that Iran has taken such an approach to the continent. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad implemented a similar policy from 2005 to 2013, although it did not yield significant results. This raises the question of whether, a decade on, Raisi’s Africa policy will prove any more successful.

Two decades on, Iraq’s ongoing, if fragile, cultural revival

Photo by Khalil Dawood/Xinhua via Getty Images

The view across the Tigris River from the eighth floor of the Babylon Hotel reveals a telling mise-en-scène: As a giant neon billboard that adorns the gleaming 32-story Baghdad Mall flashes the Iraqi flag in between ads for Coca-Cola, the ghost of the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid looms large over her adjacent tower in progress. Commissioned in 2010 to be the headquarters for the Central Bank of Iraq and a symbol of a “new era,” it’s not yet finished, and the Australian engineer whose company helped build it is still languishing in Iraqi prison after a dispute about payment.

Rewriting Russia’s Pursuits in the Middle East

In an interview, Leonid Nersisyan examines Moscow’s stakes in the Levant and North Africa in light of the stalemated war in Ukraine.

Leonid Nersisyan is a defense analyst focusing on the foreign and military policy of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States region. He also follows the defense industry in general, as well as armed conflict and arms control. Nersisyan is a research fellow at the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Diwan interviewed Nersisyan in July to get his perspective on how the Ukraine war and its repercussions have affected Russia’s defense posture in the Middle East.

Contrary Impulses in Iraqi Shiism Today

Is the community a purveyor of revolutionary change, a defender of the status quo, or a combination of both?

We are in the Muslim month of Muharram, a time of mourning for Shia Muslims, when they commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. Over the centuries, rituals during Muharram have been crucial in maintaining and energizing the Shia collectivity and helping to perpetuate its narratives, myths, and worldviews.

Police nab 16 Daesh/ISIS, al Qaeda terror suspects in Istanbul

Turkish anti-terror police raid 8 districts across the city to arrest suspects identified as ‘foreign terrorist fighters,’ say security sources

Turkish security forces arrested 16 foreign nationals for their alleged links to the Daesh/ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorist organizations, security sources said on Thursday.