The Arab awakening promised democratic change and the end of violent jihadism. Today, the losers of 2010-11 are again on the rise.
The Baathist regime is indeed guilty of great war crimes, but the human cost of a failed state would be a greater catastrophe. Washington should have learnt this lesson from Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
When is a terrorist attack a terrorist attack?
I had her phone number, and tried to call her several times after I returned to Kirkuk, but no one picked up the phone. I hope that she found her ‘Camelot’ in the end.
The power structures of the KRG remain clan-based. The extended family is trusted over outsiders and marriage between cousins is the norm, ensuring the disempowerment of a younger generation only now finding their voice.
Arab Awakening's columnists offer their weekly perspective on what is happening on the ground in the Middle East. Leading the week, Egypt's most powerful man tries to tame the media.
If Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad had worked towards unlearning the new reality which Sykes-Picot aimed to create in the Arab World, the current deadlock in the Syrian-Iraqi situation would never have happened.
Arab Awakening's columnists offer their weekly perspective on what is happening on the ground in the Middle East. Leading the week, Tunisia’s political impasse.
The two Iraqi Kurdish parties’ entanglement in the Syrian Kurdish issues seems to have resulted in anti-Assad rebels and extreme jihadists retaliating against the KRG, in a spillover of the Syrian civil war.
British MPs’ arguments and information were influenced by a strong public opinion against such a war, itself a product of a mass movement which didn’t stop a war ten years ago but has prevented a further one now.
The al-Qaeda linked “Jabhat al-Nusra” (al-Nusra Front) in Syria, stands accused of instigating a sectarian racist war against civilian Kurds in Syria’s northern Kurdish region, one that is escalating rapidly.
The already strained Baghdad-Ankara relationship has further deteriorated in recent years, due to regional crises, internal political instability, narrow perceptions and regional interests.
