Patrick Cockburn. Posted on London Review of Books vol 39 no 16, August 17, 2017 . On 22 May, Ahmed Mohsen, an unemployed taxi driver, left his house…
Aida Ghajar. First posted on The Iranian on June 29, 2017. ISIS has recently suffered a series of significant defeats in Iraq and Syria, leading Iran and other…
Sonja Zekri. Sociologist Asef Bayat talks to journalist Sonja Zekri about his views on the Arab spring and his concept of post-Islamism. First published on Koepfe und Ideen…
Mona Alami. Posted on Middle East Eye on June 9, 2017. The first attack in Iran claimed by IS follows years of low-level intensity Sunni militant activity. Already…
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. This article frist appeared on London Review of Books volume 39, number9, May 5, 2017. On the morning of 5 March a group of soldiers belonging…
Yassin al-Haj Saleh Translated by: Yaaser Azzayyaat This post first appeared on Al-Jumhuriya on May 5, 2017. In memory of Michel Seurat, our martyr. I was in Istanbul…
Arang Keshavarzian and Naghmeh Sohrabi First published May 26, 2017 on MERIP Report On May 23, 1997, Mohammad Khatami, who had spent most of the 1990s as head of…
Karma Nabulsi, London Review of Books. This essay appeared on LRB volume 39, May 18 2017. A colleague of mine at Oxford was asked to see an undergraduate…
Posted Amnesty International May 24, 2017. The US Army failed to keep tabs on more than $1 billion worth of arms and other military equipment in Iraq and…
Anas Al Horani, Al Jumhuriya. First posted on Al-Jumhuriya on April 3, 2017. Historically, whenever a criticism was leveled against Islam, what seems like a majority of Muslims were…
Tam Hussein, Joshua Landis blog. Posted by Tam Hussein on Friday, April 14th, 2017 @tamhussein I entered Najiyeh, a small town of no consequence, without their permission. The…
Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, AlterNet. After formally calling off the longstanding U.S. policy of regime change in Syria, the Trump administration is sending signals of shifting its Syria…
Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Al-Jumhurya. Even though the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, or Da’esh) emerged in Syria in 2013, its structure can be traced back to…
Omar Hassan. First published at Red Flag and appeared in Socialist Worker on February 1, 2017. It is nearly impossible to find a mainstream news report about the…
Zaid Alisa, Open Democracy. This article first appeared in Open Democracy on March 10, 2017. The highly unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections sent…
Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch. President Trump made great play when he came into office with his return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office, presenting the…
Brett S Morris, The Jacobin. Shortly after Donald Trump’s Election Day victory, many jihadists voiced their pleasure with the result: “Rejoice with support from Allah, and find glad…
Vijay Prashad, Canadian Dimension. Thirty thousand barrels of oil a day. $19 million a month. That’s apparently the revenues that are flowing to the Islamic State. Its oil…
Joseph Daher, Jacobin. Though its reputation has waned in recent years, Hezbollah has long earned plaudits from the Left for its military resistance to Israel. Many, too, have…
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, Jacobin. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s life and death highlight what’s at stake in Iran today. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chairman of Iran’s Expediency Discernment…
Craig Murray. The Morning Star has today come under massive criticism for hailing the near total recapture of Aleppo by pro-Government forces as a “liberation.” I would agree…
Sam Hamad, The New Arab. The fall of Aleppo to pro-Assad militias is a catastrophic blow to the revolutionary forces in Syria. Of this there is no doubt. Even…
Daniel Lazare, Information Clearing House. Though the U.S. has no legal right to operate inside Syria, Official Washington is boasting about its plans to liberate Raqqa from ISIS….
Dan Glazebrook, Information Clearing House. It was the big idea that was supposed to herald a new era of US-Russian co-operation in Syria: the separation of Western-backed ‘moderate…
James A Dorsey, Redress Information & Analysis. There has long been debate about the longevity of the Saudi ruling family. My initial conclusion when I first visited Saudi…
Tony Iltis, Green Left. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the start of an assault to recapture Mosul, the most important Iraqi city held by ISIS, on October…
Owen Bennet-Jones, London Review of Books. Isis: A History by Fawaz A. Gerges Princeton; Isis: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, Regan Arts;…
Joseph Daher, New Politics. The last terrible terrorist attack by the so-called “Islamic State” (also known as Daech) killed at least 300 people in Baghdad’s central shopping district…
Karim El-Bar, Middle East Eye. In wake of Arab Spring, Iran’s backing of foreign militias has drawn much attention. Why is this support so central to Iranian foreign…
Verso Books. The controversial banning of the “Burkini” by several French municipalities – and it’s overturning by the state council – has once again brought the question of…
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