OPINION

Paul Saunders When President Barack Obama acknowledged in September 2014 that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), he stunned his supporters and detractors alike. Obama was similarly candid nine months later, when he announced in a June …

Last week’s conference in Moscow which was held under the slogan of “Journalists from Muslim countries against extremism” has provided an opportunity amongst media anchors how to combat and encounter terrorism and extremism which exploit media for the benefit of their operational efficiency, information gathering, recruitment, fund raising, …

Turkey’s latest and controversial move near Mosul have aroused the fury of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government in Baghdad and brought Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani to Ankara. He also supplied invaluable technical details of the military dimension of the move. Turkey is already entangled in …

The Saudi-led coalition said on Monday that a ceasefire in Yemen will begin the following morning instead of at midnight as earlier announced, as warring parties prepared for UN-brokered peace talks in Switzerland. The coalition which launched an air campaign against the Houthi militia and its allies in …

“Russia bombing Syria will lead to further radicalization and increased terrorism”. Prime Minister David Cameron, 4th October 2015. How desperately Prime Minister Cameron has been yearning to bomb the Syrian Arab Republic. In August 2013 when his aim was defeated in Parliament by a 285-272 vote, his vision …

In recent weeks one nation after another is falling over themselves, literally, to join the turkey shoot known, erroneously, as the war in Syria, ostensibly against the Islamic State or Daesh. The most wanted but most feared question is where will this war frenzy lead, and how can …

For decades, huge weapons shipments entered Iraq with no clear process in place to track where they were stored or how they were used The Islamic State (IS) group has captured much of its military arsenal from weapons supply points left throughout Iraq by Saddam Hussein prior to …

The aggressiveness of Turkish foreign policy is something new. It goes back to 2009 when, at Davos, President Erdoğan insulted Shimon Peres, then Israel’s president, using the Turkish form of “you” that is normally used for dogs, and accusing him of atrocities in Gaza. That went down very …