Orientul Mijlociu

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.

London-based Iran International says Javad Ghafari, who previously commanded Iranian troops in Syria, was appointed to orchestrate assassinations of Israelis in Istanbul

A London-based Iranian opposition news outlet on Friday published the name and details of an Iranian commander who it said was in charge of plans to kill Israelis in Turkey in recent months.

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.

Defense Minister Hulusi Akar has said the agreement to ship Ukrainian foodstuffs could be a stepping stone toward peace.

Flushed with the success of the Ukrainian grain shipment deal it helped negotiate, Turkey is hoping to eventually translate its position as a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow into a peace agreement.

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.”

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.

“The US has started packing its bags to leave the Middle East. It is no longer able to impose maximum pressure on us.” — Major General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, August 4, 2022.

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.

Algeria will try to find a consensus about the return of Syria to the League in the upcoming meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo, according to Asharq al-Awsat.

Algeria, as the host country of the next Arab League summit, still insists on Damascus’s invitation, an official of the Algerian Foreign Ministry has said.