Islamic State’s victories in Palmyra and Ramadi have been painful blows for the US-led coalition in both Syria and Iraq respectively, underlining the flaws in a strategy that has been widely criticised as both wrong-headed and half-hearted.
Derasat in the News
“France’s foreign minister says Iran wants 24 days before international inspectors could visit its nuclear sites in the event of a suspected violation of a deal with world powers over its atomic program.”
Washington says it provides arms to the Middle East in the name of defense, but this activity has fomented wars while fragmenting the region, says Brian Becker from the anti-war Answer Coalition.
A deliberate strategy to secure its own long-term security is the motivation driving the tiny Gulf state of Qatar to invest heavily in the UK. Last week, it emerged that the ruling family had bought a further chunk of prime London property, a Victorian town house in Mayfair for £40m.
Washington’s policy toward Iraq has been consistently focused on and committed to a unified Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. America has poured billions of dollars and thousands of lives into ensuring the survival of this artificial, unworkable state.
THE last several months have brought a dramatic escalation in conflict across the Middle East, almost all of it involving tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims — which are in turn fueled by a power struggle between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for regional supremacy.
You say the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is attacking the Iraqi city of Ramadi? Stay calm. We’ve got it covered. Vice President Biden assured the Iraqi prime minister last Friday that the U.S. is fast-tracking AT-4 shoulder-held rockets and other heavy weaponry to Iraqi government…
As if the Mideast weren’t troubled enough, we now learn from Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times that Saudi Arabia has apparently “taken the ‘strategic decision’ to acquire ‘off-the-shelf’ atomic weapons from Pakistan.”
The Islamic State’s takeover of Ramadi on Sunday highlights an uncomfortable truth about the group’s offensives across large parts of Iraq in the last year: the largesse of US arms exports in recent years to an unstable Iraqi government has helped provide IS with equipment, arms, and…
For months, President Obama has been trying to find a way to silence Israeli objections to a nuclear deal with Iran. Up until now, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been adamant in his opposition to what he and many Americans feel is an effort to appease the Islamist regime that will have…