Orientul Mijlociu

Visits to Oman and the UAE in recent weeks mark another step in the Syrian president’s rehabilitation within the region, and the weakening of Western influence.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received red carpet treatment on his second official visit to Abu Dhabi on March 19, a week after he had visited Oman, showing that his isolation on the Arab stage may come to an end. Though the process began with humanitarian aid after the devastating February earthquakes that struck the northwest region, the Assad case is but a symptom of much deeper change in the Middle East.

The US military said it struck Iranian-affiliated targets in eastern Syria in response to an earlier drone attack.

The US military sustained a rocket attack on a compound in Syria on Friday following the airstrikes that Washington launched on Thursday in the war-ravaged country. The US strikes came in response to an “Iranian origin” drone assault that killed one US contractor.

The core lesson of the 2003 Iraq war is that ruptures in autocratic settings are inherently fraught with risk. Policymakers should approach proposed interventions in such settings with caution.

When President Barack Obama admonished his foreign policy team, “Don’t do stupid stuff” (he used an earthier phrase), there was no real question what he had in mind. In 2002, as an Illinois state senator, Obama had warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be “a dumb war … a rash war”. Six years later, this prescient opposition helped him win the Democratic presidential nomination and then the White House. By the time Obama’s pithy staff guidance became public in 2014, there was a growing Washington consensus that the Iraq invasion had been the biggest U.S. foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. It was clear what he meant.

China’s mediation to normalise Saudi-Iranian diplomatic ties has been widely welcomed internationally, especially in the West Asian region. A clutch of unhappy states that do not want to see China stealing a march on any front, even if it advances the cause of world peace, mutely watched.

A push by Arab allies of the United States to bring Syria in from the cold highlights the limits of a Chinese-mediated rapprochement between the Middle East’s archrivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The effort spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates, and supported by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, demonstrates that the expected restoration of diplomatic relations between the kingdom and the Islamic republic has done nothing to reduce geopolitical jockeying and rebuild trust.

Last year saw escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war. However, it is expected that the biggest crisis the world will face this year will arise in the Middle East.

The most successful Kurdish political experiment in West Asia is unravelling due to increasing divisions between the KDP and PUK, the two biggest political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Iraq’s Kurds, as with other mainly Iranic populations across western and southern Asia, are busy preparing to celebrate Nowruz on March 21, the Persian new year which marks the beginning of Spring.

The move continues a trend reversing aspects of Kurdish autonomy gained since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq

For the first time since 2002, oil revenues from Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) will be transferred to a bank account supervised by the Iraqi central government, state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported on 17 March, citing the prime minister’s media adviser Hisham al-Rekaby.

Tehran and Riyadh recently agreed to restore diplomatic relations under the auspices of China

Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan said on 15 March that investments in Iran could happen “very quickly” following the signing of a normalization agreement.