Orientul Mijlociu

Iran departed from its usual patterns by openly claiming responsibility for a missile strike inside Iraq.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) asserted that the attack was in retaliation for a recent deadly strike by Israel on IRGC officers in Syria.

Iran remains committed to driving U.S. forces out of Iraq and exerting preponderant influence there.
The strike might have intended to shape the formation of a new Iraqi government and maximize Tehran’s leverage in ongoing multilateral nuclear talks.

“By every indication, the Biden Administration appears to have given away the store…. What is more, the deal appears likely to deepen Iran’s financial and security relationship with Moscow and Beijing, including through arms sales.” — Statement from 49 US Republican Senators, March 14, 2022.

Removing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from a U.S. terror list would be “a dangerous capitulation,” three former senior Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said in a joint statement exclusively shared with Axios.

The voice of counterterrorism and counter narrative advocates needs to be loud enough to challenge the group’s intellectual capability by addressing the misguided so-called ‘prophetic methodology’, which the group claims to be following. One such concept is that of bai’at, or the pledge of allegiance.

This week marks the 11th anniversary of the war in Syria.

As a Syrian American, it is difficult to acknowledge such a grim milestone without feeling a profound sense of anguish over the nearly 500,000 lives lost, the displacement of over 13 million people, and the destruction of its cultural relics.

The Risks of an Unstable Authoritarian Order

little more than a decade after the Arab Spring swept away many autocratic regimes in the Middle East and plunged others into chaos, a new authoritarian order is settling over the region. Egypt and Tunisia, the first two countries to rid themselves of longtime dictators in 2011, have weathered coups that pulled them back toward authoritarianism. Sudan, which had to wait until 2018 for its revolution to succeed, has also seen its once-promising transition to democracy derailed by a coup. Meanwhile, Iran has expanded its sphere of influence across the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, while China, Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf states have increased their sway over many of the region’s weakest states. Thanks in part to these trends, President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria is being quietly eased back into the Arab fold.