Shelley Kasly Russia’s decision to greatly reduce its military presence in Syria, coming as it did with little warning, has left the world struggling for explanations. Russia is to maintain a military presence at its naval base in Tartous and at the Khmeymim airbase. In fact Russia is …

Extremely rapid developments have taken place in the last couple of days regarding Turkish-Russian relations. Letter diplomacy, which commenced on the 12th of June with the letters send by the Turkish President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Yıldırım to their Russian counterparts, was followed by a letter sent to …

Amy Zalman We humans have a relentless desire to create narratives. We do so out of the random material of our daily lives. As the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner noted many years ago, this storytelling impulse pervades our daily existence. And yet, most of the time we barely …

It is not a reform or a renewal of our mind that we need. It is in fact a migration – a hijra – from an old model to a new one In 1994 Nelson Mandela declared a new era in South Africa. The rainbow nation was born, …

By Katherine Zimmerman, Jennifer Cafarella, Harleen Gambhir Executive Summary The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute conducted an intensive multi-week planning exercise to frame, design, and evaluate potential courses of action that the United States could …

Ambitions of Turkey’s President Erdoğan are damaging the nation’s standing with regional and international partners. By Mohammed Ayoob* The Turkish political system, touted only a few years ago as a model for other Muslim countries in the Middle East to emulate, lies in tatters. The parliament’s May 20 …

by James M. Dorsey We have been given the impossible task of telling you in the words of Hollywood director and actor Woody Allen everything about the Middle East that you want to know and never dared to ask and all of that in 15 minutes. So what …

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ISIL/ISIS is a covert western army designed to carve out a Sunni mini-state in a chaotic Middle East, which is to be fractured along artificial sectarian and ethnic lines. Iraq has been plunged into a further state of chaos over …

Nabih Bulos , W.J. Hennigan and Brian Bennett Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners …