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.

Can The Palestinian Authority Survive? – OpEd

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is in a parlous state. Its standing with the Palestinian population has sunk to new low levels, while it has lost authority to more extremist groups in large parts of the West Bank. Voices from within Israel’s defense and security establishment have been warning for months that if the PA were to collapse, the resulting power vacuum in the West Bank would almost certainly be filled by extremist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) that would present Israel with much greater problems than it faces at the moment.

Why it’s time to repatriate IS foreign fighters

As the clock ticks down on the repatriation of Islamic State (IS) foreign fighters from Syria, a recent development has added a new sense of urgency to the situation. On June 11, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), the de facto authority in northeast Syria, announced its intention to prosecute approximately 2,000 IS foreign fighters — i.e., those who are not Syrian or Iraqi — in an effort to deliver justice to the victims of the terrorist organization. However, the lack of international recognition for the AANES and its courts renders these trials illegitimate, further complicating future international legal efforts to prosecute these combatants.

Turkish intelligence eliminates terrorist behind 2021 forest fires

Turkish intelligence eliminated Özgür Şoreş, the Türkiye officer of terrorist group PKK/KCK-YPS, codenamed Özgür Alparslan, with an operation in northern Iraq, security sources said Saturday.

Şoreş, responsible for the terrorist group’s activities in Türkiye since 2019, was also the founder of Children of Fire initiative responsible for numerous forest fires and sabotages in Türkiye, and had personally given the order for the forest fires that started in Antalya’s Manavgat on July 28, 2021 and caused the destruction of over 150,000 hectares of forest fields across Muğla, Mersin and Hatay.