The Syrian rebels, or opposition, or the Syrian National Coalition (the name this motley assembly of Sunnis, Salafists, jihadists, and foreign insurgents) agreed to take on in Doha as a prerequisite for U.S. support (money PLUS guns), successfully launched a surface to air missile (SAM) about ten days ago, bringing down a Syrian government aircraft. […]
Initially sprung as a pro-reform movement with demands for government accountability and transparency, today the Syrian conflict has morphed into a multiplayer geopolitical chess game that so far has proved to have no limits in inflicting pain on the players involved. With Iran fearing the loss of a key ally, Turkey aspiring to dominate a post-Arab […]
The possible Balkanization of Syria is an increasingly likely prospect – at least for the short-term – and could provide a historic counterpoint in the Middle East to what the West did to carve up the region almost a century ago. With the Ottoman Empire defeated after World War I, the triumphant Allies sought to ensure their […]
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 […]
It essentially was an accident. Saddam Hussein had been whipped in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush called on Iraq’s Kurds and Shia to rise up. They did — but Bush was all talk; there was no U.S. military help and they were slaughtered. So as Kurdish refugees clung to the freezing […]
By Alexander Corbeil The International Sphere and the Domestic Situation in America We are now witnessing a bloody and drawn own out plan of regime change by civil war in Syria. To put it plainly it’s government overthrow on the cheap for the United States, both in political and financial terms. It is true that […]
We are now deep into year two of the Arab world convulsions. Not one country across the North African-Middle East arc is settled. Even where it sounds quiet it is not. Two years from the first cry of freedom, very few things are how the outside world predicted. As Egyptians vote for their president in […]
The following piece was originally published in YOUR MIDDLE EAST. Reprinted with Permission by Eliot Benman I was standing in the kitchen of an old Damascene house in the Christian quarter of Bab Touma when a figure burst through the door, brandishing a gun and crying “Kill the Islamists, kill the Islamists!” He pointed the gun […]
There were many dangers faced by reporters during the four-year Bosnia war. Gunfire. Freezing. Food poisoning. Checkpoints manned by drugged out crazies. Yet one fear stood out, and it was usually away from the fighting. That was going to Zenica, a city in the central part of the area controlled by the Bosnian government. The […]
You hear many words of wisdom traveling through the Mideast, all which offer insightful pondering to events past and present. Watching the tragic escalation of events in Syria and the failing efforts to bring the fighting to a close bring to mind words often spoken by the Kurds of the region, who are well-versed in […]
The world has found a way to strike back at Syrian President Bashar Assad: they have slapped travel sanctions on his London-born wife, Asma, to thwart her addiction to luxury shopping. One year into Assad’s churning assault against various opposition groups, stopping his wife from shoping in Europe is one of the few things the […]
This article originally appeared on the Fikra Forum (March 22, 2012) —————————– In recent months, as uncertainty over Assad’s future continues, Turkey’s position with regard to its potential military or humanitarian intervention has been heavily debated. While Turkish leaders have condemned the Syrian government’s brutal suppression of dissent since February 2011 and warned several times […]
This following post is from Nazim Can Cicektakan, a PhD candidate at the University of Essex, Department of History, who recently returned back from a research visit to the Turkish province of Hatay, on the border of Syria. I asked him whether he could write a summary of his thoughts for the FPA blogs and […]
As Europe suffers a severe a cold snap, EU-Russian relations are experiencing a proverbial chill. The diplomatic cooling is the result of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton’s criticism of Putin’s democratic credentials. The sharpness of Ashton’s critique was for many a somewhat surprising, yet desirable development. Indeed, the tough stance on the state of […]
Dear followers of FPA’s Middle East blog, News.Az, a leading online news source of the Caucasus recently conducted an online interview with me – here you can find the full version of the interview: —————————————————————————————– Turkey is a new leader of the Muslim world in the Middle East. Are you satisfied with the Turkish policy […]