Orientul Mijlociu

Syrian foreign policy in the Caucasus and Ukraine: An unbalanced, Russia-centered approach

Prior to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in early 2011, Damascus consciously sought to pursue a relatively balanced foreign policy toward most of its neighbors. Its challenges with Israel notwithstanding, Syria tried to maintain diversified and even-handed relations with Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world regionally and with Russia, the European Union, and the United States on the global level. However, when the Arab Spring uprisings brought political crisis home to Syria, the government’s sharp domestic crackdown gradually changed these conditions, resulting in Syria’s expulsion from the Arab League and the escalation of tensions with Turkey and the Western world. This threw Syrian foreign policy out of its traditional balance, compelling the country to rely overwhelmingly on support from Iran and Russia. The constricted room for maneuver on the regional and international stage has had numerous and varied consequences for Syria foreign policy over the past 11 years. But some of the most illustrative about-turns caused by the swing toward Russia could be observed in Syria’s relations with neighbors in the post-Soviet space: namely, Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

Erdogan’s New Offensive – OpEd

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that he is planning a new military offensive in northern Syria directed against the Kurds.

If one authoritarian leader can defy world opinion, invade the territory of a sovereign state and incur only minor consequences, why not another? This may well have been the reasoning that first led Erdogan to send his armed forces into Kurdish occupied areas of northern Syria in August 2016. His precedent would have been the invasion of Crimea by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin two years earlier.

ISIS terrorist El Shafee Elsheikh jailed for LIFE: From West London QPR fanatic to Syria

As a young boy, El Shafee Elsheikh dreamed of playing football for Queens Park Rangers.

Refugees from the civil war in Sudan, he and his family had settled near QPR’s west London ground when he was five.

Footballers were soon replaced by gangsters as role models when he was drawn into a world of drugs and violence on the council estates where he grew up.

Turkey signals new rules of engagement to Syrian Kurds, Damascus

Turkish strikes on Syrian government troops and overt Kurdish attacks on targets inside Turkey signal that both sides are changing the rules of the game as Ankara eyes normalization with Damascus.

Ankara’s reconciliation overtures to Damascus have been accompanied by growing Turkish attacks on Syrian Kurdish and government forces along the border — a sign of new engagement rules in a border strip extending 32 kilometers (20 miles) into northern Syria that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to see as a “safe zone.”

A Deal Will Not Stop the Mullahs from Going Nuclear

When the regime’s television host asked him about the video showing concrete being poured into the Arak reactor’s pipes to block them, Ali Akbar Salehi, former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran responded: “[N]ot the pipes you see here. We had purchased similar pipes, but I couldn’t announce it at that time…. We needed to be smart.” — Iran Focus, August 2, 2022.

Chain Reactions: The Iranian Nuclear Programme and Gulf Security Dynamics

This paper examines the perceptions of Iran and the six GCC states of the interaction between the Iranian nuclear issue and regional security dynamics in the Gulf.

This paper endeavours to capture the perspectives of Iran and the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states on the interactions between the Iranian nuclear programme, international nuclear diplomacy with Iran, and regional security in the Gulf and the wider Middle East.