September 6, 2012 by H.A. Unver http://fikraforum.org/?p=2644 On August 20, a car bomb went off in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep on the Syrian border, killing nine civilians, including four children. The Turkish government blamed the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group on the U.S. Department of State’s foreign terrorist organizations list, for […]
The United States has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for over ten years. Over 2,000 our bravest men and women have died there during that time period. We still have over 60,000 troops on the ground fighting in the land that hosted Al Qaeda’s leadership a decade ago. Even though, President Obama, the current […]
This film tackles head on the situations modern Palestinians face every day. It revolves around two West Bank friends who have been recruited to become suicide bombers in Tel Aviv. The anguish and self doubt they experience brings the viewer closer to the minds of the would-be martyrs in the hours before they are to […]
Bijan Kian is a Senior Fellow for Global Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has served President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama from 2006 to 2011 as a member of the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. In 2011, he served as a member of the White […]
Pockets of people roaming the decorated streets of Uptown Charlotte, snapping random pictures, numerous small gangs of police officers patrolling the city: on foot, bicycles, motorcycles or cruisers, Iconic TV personalities and political figures casing the place, soaking the sunshine through the gentle breeze, yet, it is only the calm before the storm. A few […]
The following was taken from Jspace.com. The article was written by Jspace Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Rob Lattin, who also blogs about Israeli and Middle Eastern foreign policy for Foreign Policy Blogs. I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Israeli Brigadier General (res.) Eliezer Hemeli, who spent a large portion of his life on […]
Student protests this year in the streets of Montreal over a relatively small tuition hike took the Quebec government by storm. In reality, it is likely more than just tuition that fuelled this year’s protests with the Liberal Party of Quebec facing allegations of corruption after nine long years in power. The Parti Quebecois, the […]
by Max Reibman Muhammad Moursi’s exploitation of recent events in the Sinai to shuffle the leadership of the Egyptian military is only the most recent manifestation of the disproportionate influence of the Sinai on Egyptian politics. Events in the Sinai have long dictated politics in Cairo. For decades, they shaped the fortunes of powerbrokers in the […]
I haven’t blogged about Afghanistan in a while so thought I’d cover some of what I thought may be of interest. There have been a lot of reports of rogue Afghan military and police force members attacking their NATO coalition partners. As of the time I’m writing this, the total stands at 42 killed. What […]
This film is almost a documentary. It follows two Israeli medics who are sent to the front lines during the 1973 Yom Kippur war that began when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. This movie, which is in Hebrew with English subtitles, is not political. Rather, it is a study of life in wartime and the […]
In the past month, we’ve seen the United States’ worst outbreak of West Nile Virus, Ebola in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and cholera in Sierra Leone that’s spread to its West African neighbors. What lessons can be learned from these three epidemics? West Nile, which has only been endemic to […]
Today most OAS members will officially make a statement of support for Ecuador and its diplomatic rights under international law. Most Latin American nations support the concept of a country being able to maintain a secure embassy in the U.K. without British officials entering or taking actions in their embassy. In international law, an embassy […]
There were 48 homicides in Cuidad Juarez in July, according to the Washington Post: “33 by gun, seven by beatings, six by strangulation and two by knife.” Forty of the murders are attributed to drug violence. Bad as that sounds, it represents a 70% reduction in the number of murders in the city still widely […]
A new venture in training journalists to be more prepared for dealing with injury in the field is already putting graduates out into the field. RISC, founded by war journalist Sebastian Junger, is a nonprofit that gives battlefield first aid training to freelance journalists. Inspired by the knowledge that reporters on location could potentially save […]
“Violence in Haiti is systemic, that is to say, it’s related to the abandonment of the state, the abandonment of society by public institutions that fail to provide basic services.” “I reject the ontological definition of an inherently violent Haitian,” declared Anthropologist Rachelle Charlier Doucet at Port-au-Prince’s Hotel le Plaza on Friday, June 29, 2012. […]