Middle East & North Africa Archive

There are conflicting reports about just how many troops Turkey has sent into northern Iraq, with the general trend being bearish. Initial Turkish TV reports (passed on by the press) put the number at 10,000, citing unnamed military sources. Reuters put the number at 8,000, or two Turkish brigades. Later television reports lowered it further to 3,000, which the Iraqi government today bid down to 1,000, only to be undersold by the American military command in Iraq which claimed that only a few hundred Turkish troops took part. The Turkish military, meanwhile, closed the bidding by warning that “media reports […]

There’s been a lot of speculation about just how far the latest IAEA report on the Iranian nuclear program would go towards letting Tehran off the hook. The fact that in the past few weeks the U.S. turned over longheld intelligence to the IAEA and that France ratcheted up the rhetoric significantly is a measure of just how anxious Washington and Paris were about the possibility. Well, the report was just distributed to the IAEA Board of Governors yesterday and bits and pieces are starting to leak out, including portions that confirm increased Iranian cooperation with various outstanding issues, some […]

More than a week has passed since the assassination of Hezbollah’s terror mastermind Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, and the question of who did it remains as much a subject of speculation as the question of potential repercussions. Unsurprisingly, Israel is the prime suspect, and while Israeli officials have protested innocence, nobody pretended to be sorry. After all, Mughniyeh was not only one of the founders of Hezbollah, but also one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, accused by the West of killing hundreds in suicide bombings and hijackings in Lebanon and around the world. And it was not just Mughniyeh’s […]

Under normal circumstances, it’s nearly impossible to get countries to restrict the use of widely available weapons that are seen as militarily advantageous. At the moment, however, two groups of countries are competing to sharply cut back on one type armament that humanitarian groups claim pose a particular danger to civilians in war zones: cluster munitions. Cluster munitions are bombs, rockets, and artillery shells that disperse smaller submunitions over broad areas. These grenades or bomblets, sometimes numbering as many as 600 submunitions from a single munition, can fail to detonate immediately yet maim or kill if disturbed later. Officials of […]

A few days ago, Turkish FM Ali Babacan reiterated that Turkey still reserved the option of cross-border incursions into northern Iraq, weather permitting, to complement the artillery and bombing campaign they’ve been using to target PKK rebel camps in the Qandil Mountains. I figured the remarks were geared towards preparing public opinion for a spring offensive, since the winter weather in the Qandil Mountains is not very conducive to ground operations. But this morning come reports that the Turkish Army just sent 10,000 ground forces into northern Iraq following an artillery and air barrage. According to Hurriyet (Turkey), the U.S. […]

Laura Rozen has a must read interview with former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy over at Mother Jones. Among other reasons why Halevy argues that Israel and the US should engage Hamas, this struck me as noteworthy: [Hamas has] pulled off three “feats” in recent years in conditions of great adversity. They won the general elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006; they preempted a Fatah design to wrest control of Gaza from them in 2007; and they broke out of a virtual siege that Israel imposed upon them in January 2008. In each case, they affected a strategic surprise […]

The neighborhood militias that are the lynchpin of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq have a new name, but the problems these groups present are as old as the Iraq war. In recent weeks, the U.S. military has begun calling the groups by the patriotic moniker “Sons of Iraq,” which Baghdad proposed to replace the difficult-to-translate “Concerned Local Citizens.” But the re-branding has done nothing to resolve the poor vetting, sectarian divisions and murky motives that make the groups a potential security risk in coming years. Three years after Iraq’s Sunni minority mostly boycotted national elections, the Sunni-dominated Sons of […]

Patrick Barry over at Democracy Arsenal gives some reasons why we should take Moqtada al-Sadr’s threats to end his ceasefire seriously in their own right, and not just in the context of our strategically over-leveraged position in Iraq: Anxieties are growing that Sadr will shirk calls to stay passive and US forces are pleading with him to keep his militias at bay. And who can blame them? Violence levels, especially in Sadr’s strongholds around Baghdad, have declined steeply since he demanded that his followers temporarily lay down arms. The prospect of a reinvigorated Sadrist militia roaming the streets looms fearfully […]

It looks like Moqtada al-Sadr, or one of his proxies, is threatening to call off his ceasefire again. Normally I don’t pay much attention to this regularly recurring story. But this time it reminded me of this recent AP report about a Sunni Awakening Council that had protested an alleged strafing incident by halting its cooperation with the American military. Neither story alone seems very significant, and together they still don’t add up to much. But they triggered a line of thought that goes something like this: We’ve reached a point in Iraq where everyone has accepted the limits of […]

A U.S.-backed gas pipeline that would reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian energy supplies received a fillip earlier this month when German power giant RWE joined the project, but questions about where the Nabucco pipeline’s supplies will come from persist. “Nabucco has got the cart before the horse. It’s all driven by an increase in demand for gas in Europe and the drive to diversify supplies away from Russia,” said Andrew Neff, senior energy analyst in Istanbul, Turkey, with Global Insight, a London-based think tank. “Putting infrastructure in place has become a political animal more than a commercial venture.” Still, RWE […]

At 10:45 p.m. on Tuesday night, a loud explosion rocked the neighborhood of Kafr Soussa in Damascus. Residents rushed to see the gruesome spectacle left by the explosion of a car bomb. It was the kind of scene that has become eerily common not in this, the Syrian capital, but in Beirut, where the victim of this attack, terrorist mastermind Imad Moughniyah, found most of his followers, and more than a few of his many enemies. Moughniyah was the No. 2 — some say No. 1 — man in Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization. The group reported his death declaring it was […]

PARIS — When Nicolas Sarkozy took office last May, everyone expected him to be an active president. Known for his relentless pace and tireless work ethic, Sarkozy had promised to reinvigorate France’s foreign policy, which had suffered from an accumulation of failure and fatigue under his predecessor, Jacques Chirac. To that end, Sarkozy has not disappointed. In a little over eight months as president, he has visited 25 countries on four continents, strengthening historic bonds (America), nurturing new ones (China, India), and above all raising France’s profile around the world. Indeed, if there’s been a surprise in Sarkozy’s foreign policy, […]

DAMASCUS CRACKDOWN ON DISSIDENTS CRITICIZED — Human rights groups and Western politicians have united in the past two weeks to criticize the Syrian government’s latest efforts to crack down on dissidents. Thirteen activists have been detained and allegedly tortured as part of a crackdown against individuals who participated in a Dec. 1 meeting of opposition and pro-democracy groups. They face several charges, including “weakening national sentiment,” “membership in an organization formed with the purpose of changing the structure of the state,” and “joining a secret association.” The detained include a cross-section of Syrian artists, writers, medical professionals and journalists, as […]

If you believe the claims of conspiracy theorists, you probably think supporters of Israel have already held their secret meeting — picture a dark room and flickering candlelight — to decide who they will anoint as the next president of the United States. Chances are you also think the “Israel lobby” all but hand-delivered George W. Bush to the White House. Sorry to disappoint — on both counts. Supporters of Israel are as torn as the rest of the country during this election, and they were not exactly in control the last time around. First, the last elections: Bush received […]

WOMEN’S RIGHTS DRIVE CONTINUES IN SAUDI ARABIA — A royal decree on Jan. 21 allowing women to check in to hotels or rent apartments without male guardians has raised hopes among Saudi women’s rights campaigners that another key restriction on Saudi women — the ability to drive a car — may soon be removed. Campaigners have submitted two petitions to King Abdullah since September and are collecting signatures for a third. Meanwhile, a number of Saudi royals have issued fairly pointed statements saying they support women’s desire to drive. Since coming to power in 2005, the king has staked out […]

EHUD BARAK ON WHERE HE WOULD SPEAK TO HAMAS — Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was in Paris at the end of January and he gave an interview to the French daily Le Figaro. This is what he had to say about an Egyptian proposal to hold four party talks on Gaza involving Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: I don’t see how we can accept the Egyptian proposal. We have nothing to say to Hamas. We speak to them when we interrogate them in our prisons. But this is a fundamentalist group that says openly that it has […]

It has often been pointed out that Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna: the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in the history of Islamic fundamentalism. And it has at least just as often been pointed out that this should not matter, since, after all, no one chooses their parents and grandparents. In a debate with Tariq Ramadan on the French public television channel France 3 last Wednesday, the Franco-Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb posed what is the real question in this connection: Is Tariq Ramadan faithful to the legacy of his grandfather’s ideas? Below is a […]