Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been Turkey’s prime minister since 2003, and also chairs the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which holds a majority of the seats in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, has now been elected president of the republic for a five-year term. Erdogan, the first popularly elected head of state, […]
The current war waged by Israel against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the third in six years, has again resulted in Israeli Arab protests in various towns and cities, led by the Islamic Movement in Israel, Balad (National Democratic Assembly), and Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality). Some of the protesters were reported to have waved Palestinian flags […]
As my field of research and teaching is in comparative politics, I have kept files on virtually every country in the world for decades. They consist mainly of magazine and newspaper articles, and students find them handy when researching term papers. My filing cabinets would soon have no room for new pieces if I didn’t […]
Yemen, the poorest Arab state, with a gross domestic product per capita of little more than $1,400 a year, remains a country in political crisis. Located at the south-western edge of the Arabian peninsula, the present-day Yemeni state was formed in 1990, when the north, an ancient Arab kingdom and then a republic, united with […]
Fighting has intensified in eastern Ukraine after the president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, declared an end to a 10-day cease-fire and ordered his forces to attack pro-Russian separatists. The Ukrainian military has been using air strikes and artillery attacks against them. Meanwhile, at his own request, the upper house of the Russian parliament had revoked […]
The various Sunni jihadist groups, in particular the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who are battling the Shia regimes in Iraq and Syria, are attempting to carve out a Sunni state in parts of both countries (and possibly also in Jordan). But this should come as little surprise. These countries are all artificial […]
This past week we saw something unprecedented in Turkey: In a landmark decision meant to curb the power of the country’s massive military establishment, a court sentenced two top former generals, army chief Kenan Evren and air force head Tahsin Sahinkaya, to life imprisonment for leading a 1980 coup that resulted in widespread torture, arrests […]
Iraq is imploding. The Sunni jihadis of the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have moved to within sight of Baghdad, while the Shi’ite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki becomes more dependent than ever on Iran. More and more, even Americans — who suffered tens of thousands of soldiers killed […]
Across a wide swath of Maghreb North Africa and the Sahel countries, the United States has assumed an old European role: combating Islamist jihadists. The situation has become worse since the overthrow of Libya’s brutal dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Many of his former mercenaries, along with their large stockpile of weapons, are now active […]
The biggest misconception of the present-day Middle East is a distinction between “good guy” liberal democrats and “bad guy” Islamists. There is no such distinction because there are no such democrats, at least in the tumultuous fertile crescent of Syria and Iraq. What we’re seeing in these two countries is a death struggle between Islamists, mainly […]