Chris Stokel-Walker For six weeks after China first reported details of a previously-unknown coronavirus spreading in the city of Wuhan, the disease – now called Covid-19 – stayed…
M.K. Bhadrakumar Iran’s parliamentary election on Friday took place in extraordinary circumstances. The pandemic fear over coronavirus significantly impacted the voter turnout, which is estimated to be around…
Robert Fisk The freezing Mediterranean squalls that slash across downtown Beirut and the seafront to the west may give the impression this week that Lebanon is lapsing back into its…
An elephant trap has for years now laid in the path of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s messianic plans to establish the state of Israel between the river…
Jonathan Cook If there is one issue that denotes the terminal decline of Labour as a force for change – desperately needed social, economic and environmental change –…
Translated by Sheida Dayani On a Moon-Lit Night On a moon-lit night Moon is in my dream It takes me with it Alley to alley, Into the vineyards…
Arash Davari, Peyman Jafari, Ali Kadivar, Zep Kalb, Arang Keshavarzian, Azam Khatam, Saira Rafiee, and Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi It should be noted that this virtual roundtable took place in…
Arash Davari, Peyman Jafari, Ali Kadivar, Zep Kalb, Arang Keshavarzian, Azam Khatam, Saira Rafiee, and Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi Introduction Much of the discussion about politics in the Islamic Republic…
[On 3 January 2020, the United States assassinated Major General Qassem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Corps Guard (IRGC). The event was an escalation by the Trump Administration…
Were I a Martyr Trans. Darya Ali andAlana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse I want no flowers, no epoch of union, no dawn of disunion. I want no flowers for I…
Prabir Purkayastha With the United States walking out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—more commonly known as the Iran accord—we all enter into a heightened zone…
Simon Watkins As the deadline for the U.S. to renew its waiver on Iraq importing gas and electricity from Iran approaches later this month, the three key players…
Letters From A Man In Solitary 1 I carved your name on my watchband with my fingernail. Where I am, you know, I don’t have a pearl-handled jackknife…
Phil Hearse The Arab Spring of 2011-13 was drowned in rivers of blood, sometimes after being first diverted by the dead-end of political Islam. But in the last…
Daliah Lina “You stand with the terrorist troops. You are a jihadist.” This just covers a part of the public smearing I had to face the last couple…
Interviewer: Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen wild swings in protests in Iran: from the anti-regime protests before Soleimaini’s assassination, through the huge funeral mobilisations, to renewed…
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled new details of his long-touted plan to address the Israel-Palestine conflict. The 181-page document contained conceptual maps showing how Israel and…
I WAS PAYING my bill at the hotel when they came. There were seven of them, stiff and formal in plain-clothes. “Mr Pelham?” asked the shortest one and…
Mark Curtis and Phil Miller The UK’s secret intelligence service, MI6, worked with the CIA to provide a list of alleged Soviet agents in Iran to Ayatollah Khomeini’s…
Patrick Cockburn At the time of his assassination, General Qasem Soleimani’s strategy in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with large Shia populations had become counterproductive. He is…
Esen Uslu The ever increasing expansionist policies of Turkey have recently extended across the Mediterranean Sea and reached to the shores of North Africa. The Turkish bourgeoisie, especially…
Lyne Jabri An overview of the modern urban history of Saida, Lebanon, reveals that the biggest changes to the city occur during times of crisis. During such critical…
Edward Hunt The Syrian civil war, which has been raging since 2011, is one of the worst tragedies of the early twenty-first century. Approximately half a million people…
مرتضی دیّاری مقدمه مسئلۀ بیخانمانی و آثار فردی و اجتماعی آن، به عنوان یکی از مسائل اجتماعی ایران، از ابعاد مختلف قابل بررسی است. با گسترش این پدیده…
Juan Cole The Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdulmahdi late last week requested a meeting with the US government to plan out the departure of US troops, which has…
Oakland Socialist The best – the only – way to build a successful movement against a US war on Iran is to build a workers movement that includes…
Patrick Cockburn Iraqis have a well-honed instinct about approaching danger which stems from their grim experience during 40 years of crisis and war. Three months ago, I asked…
Juan Cole As is always the way with Western colonialists, Trump administration figures such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave it out on Friday that the people…
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flower Over the last decade, a national consensus has developed for a progressive left agenda on the economy, social services, the climate crisis and…
Hadi Ajili and Mahsa Rouhi On 20 June 2019, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down a United States RQ-4A Global Hawk BAMS-D surveillance drone over the…
Shaazka Beyerle 2019 is being called “the year of protest.” A nexus of corruption, inequality, and unaccountable and unresponsive governments has galvanized citizens across the globe. “People are…
Milad Odabaei On 15 November 2019, after a surprise announcement on Iranian state television that there would be a three-fold increase in fuel prices, a series of protests…
Bree Busk More than fifty days have passed since the Chilean uprising burst into existence. For those living it on the ground, it feels like much longer. The…
Robert Fisk I’ve always wanted to find out where the guns came from. Who were the ‘willing accomplices’ to the wars I witnessed? In 1996, I traced to…
Michael Roberts The New York Times magazine has described Richard Wolff as “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist”. And that is probably not an exaggeration as a description of this emeritus Professor of…
My beloved Has a Narcissus flower in mouth,Her souvenir From the prisons of Iran. I know that nightly From behind bars One can see the trace of flowers…
Patrick Cockburn Mass expulsion or the physical extermination of an entire ethnic or religious community – ethnic cleansing – is usually treated by the media in one of…
Moshé Machover It is generally accepted – except by people who know better – that there are just two possible resolutions to the Israeli-Palestinian national/colonial conflict: either a…
The people’s hand was wounded The people’s foot The people’s back was wounded So their sky would rain stars. When their sky rained stars The people’s body was…
Yassamine Mather Over the last five days, tens of thousands of Iranians have protested against the hike in the price of oil, following an official statement issued by…
Vijay Prashad On 13 November 2019, as part of its deadly attack on the people of Gaza, Israeli armed forces bombed a building in the Deir al-Balah neighbourhood…
Frieda Afari Police stations, banks, some public buildings, a few religious seminaries and many posters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been set on fire. Demonstrators have…
Kaveh Madani A group of Iranian conservationists, working for the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF) and known for their exemplary efforts in preserving the endangered Asiatic (Iranian) cheetahs,…
Joseph Daher Over the last week, Lebanon has been rocked by a massive protest movement, larger than any the country has seen in decades. The demonstrations erupted after…
An interview with Rosa Burç and Kerem Schamberger The death of Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi isn’t the end of the Syrian bloodbath — even in…
Patrick Cockburn Iraqi security and pro-Iranian paramilitary forces are shooting into crowds of protesters in a bid to drive them from the centre of Baghdad and end six…
Ramzy Baroud The release on November 6 of two Jordanian nationals, Heba al-Labadi and Abdul Rahman Mi’ri from Israeli prisons was a bittersweet moment. The pair were finally…
Nashwa Gowanlock Zeina Hashem Beck sits in her living room in Dubai, wrapping vine leaves, wara’ ‘enab, over a stuffing of minced meat and rice, which she will…
Gilbert Achar When in late 2018 the people of Sudan took to the streets demanding an end to Omar al-Bashir’s authoritarian rule, this immediately triggered memories of 2010,…
Certainties that had defined Turkish politics for a generation were thrown into doubt by the overwhelming victory Istanbul voters handed the opposition CHP party’s mayoral candidate Ekrem İmamoǧlu…
Eight and a half years ago when the war on Syria began, Turkey played the most important role. Weapons were smuggled from Libya through Turkey to be delivered…
Last Thursday, in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Gaza, Haifa, and the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, more than 3,000 women took to the streets until late at night under the…
Robert Fisk Revolutions are like electricity. An electric shock of the most unexpected kind. The victims think at first it must be a powerful wasp sting. Then they…
Adam Shatz A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev Head of Zeus, 804 pp, £30.00, August, ISBN 978 1 78954 462 6 David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the…
Robert Fisk Those tens of thousands of largely young protesters demanding a non-sectarian Lebanon were joyful, filled with happiness, determined that this time they would change the wretched…
Jonathan Cook There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria….
David Stockman By a vote of 354-60 last week the U.S. House of Representative proved that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and that the level of ignorance,…
Ramzy Baroud On October 9, the social media platform, Facebook, deleted the page of the popular Palestinian news website, the Palestinian Information Center (PIC). This act, which was…
Madleine Freeman On the fifth day of a series of massive protests in Lebanon, workers from the country’s largest unions have joined over a million protesters in the…
Amira Abo el-Fetouh We may be too optimistic to hope that the massive demonstrations that have spread in all the cities of Lebanon will lead to the collapse…
Zêdan Xelef, translated by David Shook and Bryar Bajalan Non-Broadcast News Today a fire broke out in two tents The families shouted, the children cried and ran bare-assed…
Kathy Kelly Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan’s largest cash crop remains opium. Yet farmers there do grow other crops for export. Villagers in the Wazir Tangi area…
The Alliance of Middle Eastern and North African Socialists condemn Turkeys invasion of Northeastern Syria and its deadly assault on the Kurds. Last week, after U.S. president Trump…
Moshé Machover I would like to deal with two aspects of Israeli politics: the attitude to Iran and the internal situation. Common to both parts is the intertwining…
Esen Uslu The months-long bargaining for a tit-for-tat deal with Turkey has eventually reached its culmination, with Donald Trump withdrawing his token forces from the Turkish-Syrian border area….
ROAR collective Since 2012, with the leading role of women, the people in North and East Syria have been building a social system that enables a peaceful, radical-democratic,…
Patrick Cockburn Iraq is poised at a turning point in its modern history as its people wait to see if the government curfew and close down of the…
The current unrest in Iraq began a week ago after a prominent general was removed from his post: Lieutenant General Abdul Wahab al-Saadi was the great Iraqi military…
Robert Fisk The Saudis are taking a pasting. Video pictures from the Houthis of Saudi soldiers and their allies killed or surrendering inside the Saudi border town of…
Michael Roberts As we enter October, the global recession is with us – in manufacturing. The PMI manufacturing activity indexes for most of the major economies are below…
Federico Pieraccini Many may have hitherto been led to believe that the Houthis were a ragtag armed force lacking in sophistication. Many, seeing the drone and missile attacks…
Celebrated Iraqi playwright and actor Yusuf al-Ani (1927-2016) is at the center of the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, which has…
Ramzy Baroud Experience has taught Palestinians not to pay heed to Israeli elections. But to every rule there is an exception. Although it is still true that no…
Elektra Kostopoulou. Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. by Aslı Iğsız. Stanford University Press 2018. At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people…
Nick Engelfried. It began as a call to action from a group of youth activists scattered across the globe, and soon became what is shaping up to be…
Shireen Hunter. According to an article in the Petroleum Economist, during Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s visit to China in late August, Tehran and Beijing updated an agreement…
Meron Rapoport. While political analysts wonder if we have come to the end of the Netanyahu era, little attention is being paid to another major outcome of this…
Mustafa Habib. The process to install new governors in Basra and Baghdad is proving almost as chaotic as the formation of the federal government. In Basra last weekend,…
Michael Safi and Greame Wearden. What happened on Saturday morning? Saudi pipelines, oil installations and tankers have occasionally been attacked over the past two years, but analysts say…
Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Immanuel Wallerstein, a giant of the critical social sciences and a steadfast ally of contemporary social movements, passed away at the age of 88…
Said Soltanpour, poet, playwright and director changed the pace of the revolution that toppled the Shah. It was mid October 1977. Already the voices of protest against the…
Leïla Ouitis When in early February Algeria’s ailing octogenarian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his intention to run for the presidency for a fifth term, millions of Algerians took…
Esen Uslu. As the temperature rose to an unprecedented high at the beginning of August, the Turkish army was poised to invade Rojava in Syria. While this was…
Alastair Crooke. It’s pretty clear. Saudi Arabia has lost, and, notes Bruce Riedel, “the Houthis and Iran are the strategic winners”. Saudi proxies in Aden – the seat…
Cigerxwin (“The bleeding heart”), is a pseudonym for Sheikmous Hasan. He came from north Kurdistan and was mainly known as a poet. He made a great impact on…
Michael Snyder Are we about to see World War 3 erupt in the Middle East? Over the past several days, Israel has attempted to prevent attacks by Iranian…
Saghf (Persian: سقف)(Literary: Roof) is one of the most beautiful Iranian songs. It was first performed by Farhad Mehrad in the 1970s. The lyrics are composed by Iraj…
Paul Khalifeh. The New Hezbollah has emerged. In the past, the Lebanese Shia party proclaimed its allegiance to Iran through resistance to the state of Israel, and by…
Bashar al-Assad has started confiscating the homes of Syrians who fled during the Civil War. For decades, his clan has purged the state of all but the most…
Norman Finkelstein and Colter Louwese. Norman Finkelstein is a leading authority on the Israel-Palestine conflict. While most observers have proclaimed Jared Kushner’s ongoing ‘peace’ initiative to be dead…
Today Saudi Arabia finally lost the war on Yemen. It has no defenses against new weapons the Houthis in Yemen acquired. These weapons threaten the Saudis economic lifelines….
Robert Fisk. We like our anniversaries in blocks of 50 or 100 – at a push we’ll tolerate a 25. The 100th anniversary of the Somme (2016), the 75th anniversary of…
Civaka Azad and Mahmut Şakar. Mahmut Şakar talked to Civaka Azad about his experience as Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan’s attorney. On May 2, 2019, Öcalan’s lawyers had…
Yassamine Mather. The conflict between Iran and the United States is in its early stages, yet we are already witnessing war propaganda, and the presentation of outright lies…
Cesar Chelala. Gender violence, manifested essentially as violence against women, is one of the most significant epidemics in the Middle East today. This kind of violence occurs in…
Your eyes are a thorn in my heart Inflicting pain, yet I cherish that thorn And shield it from the wind. I sheathe it in my flesh, I…
Robert Fisk. It’s about time we wised up to what is going on in this utterly farcical “crisis” in the Gulf, this charade of lies and pomposity which…
Kourosh Ziabari. Iran is a country in which many aspects of public life: governance, education, foreign relations and even people’s lifestyles are peculiarly determined by ideology. The authorities…
Esen Uslu. The Turkish airforce base at Mürted near Ankara had an interesting history. The name means ‘renegade’, and it has been associated with the Battle of Ankara…
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