Military & Security

On November 23, Gilles Kepel, Fabrice Balanche, and Olivier Decottignies addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Kepel is a professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Paris (Sciences Po), and coauthor of the forthcoming book “Terror in France: The Origin of the French Jihad,” to be …

Despite facing a series of military setbacks throughout Iraq and Syria, ISIS is consolidating its control over a key city in Libya less than 400 miles away from the Italian island of Sicily. Over the past year, ISIS has been deepening its presence in Sirte, a city along Libya’s northwestern Mediterranean …

NATO foreign ministers invited tiny Montenegro on Wednesday to join their military alliance in its first expansion since 2009, defying Russian warnings that enlargement of the US-led bloc further into the Balkans would be a provocation. In a scripted session at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, Montenegro’s foreign minister, …

In the wake of the recent escalation of tensions between Russia and Turkey and, de facto, between Moscow and NATO, experts consider if the rhetoric of a hot war between Russia and the West is not “before time?” Political analyst Ian Kearns believes the situation actually reminds “playing …

Guess who just popped up in the Kremlin? Bashar al-Assad, Syrian dictator and destroyer, now Vladimir Putin’s newest pet. After four years holed up in Damascus, Assad was summoned to Russia to bend a knee to Putin, show the world that today Middle East questions get settled not …

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s high-profile meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on November 23 has triggered speculationthat the two sides are weighing some serious policy choices about Syria. The key question, as always, is the fate of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. There is no …

Trita Parsi A senior German official told me in 2010, quite proudly, that under the leadership of Angela Merkel, Germany’s Iran policy had become a function of its relations with Israel. Whether Germany would sanction Iran or engage in diplomacy very much depended on Israel’s reaction. In its …

President Vladimir Putin is actively misinforming his domestic audience and the international community about Russia’s first military intervention outside the former Soviet Union since its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Putin has created a false narrative about the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to disguise the true objectives …

Moscow isn’t likely to bomb Turkish military facilities, but it has other ways of undermining Ankara’s presence in Syria: Russia is now aiding Kurdish rebels — a group that has been labeled as “terrorists” by Turkey. The Syrian Kurdish forces (YPG) are considered extremely valuable in the fight against ISIS. …