Alfred McCoy. First published on TomDispatch.com on August 24, 2017. [This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the…
Eva Bartlett. Posted on MPN News on August 23, 2017. Since the liberation of Aleppo, and the restoring of peace to Madaya and al-Waer, most Western media have…
Richard Sokolsky and Aaron Miller. This article was first posted on Carnagie Endowment for International Peace on June 27, 2017. The idea du jour circulating inside the Trump administration and…
Steven Simon, John J. McCloy. Originally published on IISS on July 5, 2017. The Trump administration, for all its disarray, has a clear and consistent policy toward the…
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…
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…
This interview was posted on Links International from Left East before the constitutional referendum in Turkey. However, it covers many points that remain relevant regardless of the result…
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…
Barış Yıldırım and Foti Bensiloy, Left Voice. Turkey may hold a referendum on the transition to an authoritarian presidential system as soon as late March; however, Erdoğan’s Bonapartist…
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…
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…
Annia Ciezadlo, Souciant. As ISIS comes under increased attack in some of the region’s most fertile lands, Middle East agriculture researcher Eckart Woertz discusses how the militant group…
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;…
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…
Sean Ledwith, Counterfire. Recent events in both North America and the Middle East have illustrated how the chilling potency of the Islamic State group is far from exhausted….
Ardeshir Mehrdad, Illustrations by Ardeshir Mohassess. An illegitimate child of advanced capitalism, Political Islam has profound effects on the society that gives birth to it both before and…
Zuhal Yeşilyurt Gündüz Monthly Review This article is part of a series Middle-East-4-Change is highlighting that look at the economic impact of imperialist globlisation on peripheral countries Turkey’s…
Pierre Rousset International Viewpoint Since January 2015, the scale and momentum of “Jihadist” terror attacks in Europe have been without precedent. In spite of this, a large section…
Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian More than 33,000 civilians were killed or injured by explosive weapons in 2015, an increase of more than 50% in five years, according to…
Ellen Brown Counterpunch Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, about a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal,…
Julia Glum msn As the Islamic State group grows its presence online and in headlines, its influence among young people is shrinking. At least, that’s according to the…
Ardeshir Mehrdad Illustration by Ardeshir Mohassess Despite claims to the contrary, political Islam is a child of late capitalism, growing where capitalist development is more advanced. There are…
Ardeshir Mehrdad in interview with the Farsi site tabaqeh (class) You can see in the coming parliamentary election the central and ongoing contradiction of the Islamic regime. On…
by Adam Hanieh Jacobin In the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris, much of the Left has linked the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq…
Editorial commentary – MER276 Middle East Research and Information Project In early June 2014 the world was shocked by news of the fall of Mosul, the third largest…
By Ardeshir Mehrdad Illustration by Ardeshir Mohasses The last three decades have witnessed a relentless growth of Islamist movements, so that today political Islam is an undeniable reality…
By Mohammad Reza Shalguni There is a prevalent view of Islam that portrays it as incompatible with modernism. In its more extreme form, this is considered the main reason for the…
By Mohammad Reza Shalguni How flexible is Islam when it comes to women’s rights? The absence of rights for women in Islamic countries is usually taken as the…
By Mohammad Reza Shalguni Like all religions Islam was born under special social circumstances, and has changed under the influence of changes in social relations. In part three…
Mohammad-Reza Shalguni Islam is no more incompatible with modernisation or even modern culture than other religions There is a view that in countries where Muslims form the majority,…
Middle East 4 Change