Orientul Mijlociu

Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi via @Visegrád24 on X (formerly known as Twitter)

On August 6, Islamic State (IS) announced its new caliph, Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi. He is now the organization’s fourth caliph since Abubakar al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate in 2014 (allarabnews.com, August 6). The announcement also dispelled the notion that the previous caliph was killed by Turkish security forces, as the Turkish government had claimed. Rather, IS blamed the formerly al-Qaeda-aligned Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) for killing the last caliph.

US officials suggest that the Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham really was behind the death of Islamic State leader Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Quraishi.

The Islamic State confirmed the death of its most recent leader, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Quraishi, on Aug. 3. The jihadist group said its self-styled “caliph” had been killed in clashes with the rival Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that is dominant in Syria’s Idlib province, and not by Turkey back in April, as Ankara previously claimed. IS said HTS, which it called “Turkey’s tail,” had handed his body over to Turkish intelligence in a recorded message posted on the Telegram messaging app.

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.

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.

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.