The truck bomb attack that killed more than 100 people in Mogadishu on Tuesday was a not entirely unfamiliar horror for the residents of a city locked in a permanent state of fratricidal warfare for two decades, but it highlighted the scale of a foreign policy challenge recently accepted by the government of Turkey.
Prime Minister …
When Qatar took a lead in the military campaign to oust Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, Western officials gushed with praise for the tiny Gulf State punching way above its weight. The nation of just 2 million sent six Mirage fighter jets to lend an all-important Arab presence in the air campaign; it cajoled the Arab League into supporting …
In Dhaka, a war crimes tribunal charged its first suspect on some 20 counts, including crimes against humanity. Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a leading figure in the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s most important Islamist party, will now go to court Oct. 30. If you haven’t heard of the case, it’s not your fault — the 1971 genocide in …
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh doesn’t act like a man with his back to the wall. Despite an eight-month-long popular uprising, major military defections, international pressure to step down and an assassination attempt that nearly took his life in June, he has made it clear that he will relinquish power only on his own terms. His …
For the past several months, reconciliation with the Taliban has emerged as a key pillar of the American exit strategy. A political end to the insurgency, combined with a strengthened Afghan security force, better governance and enhanced economic structures were supposed to pave the way towards the dignified withdrawal that is …
Last week’s Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy and other prominent ministerial buildings in Kabul brought into relief once more the brazen conviction of militants in war-blighted Afghanistan as well as their considerable tactical capabilities in pulling off the raid. U.S. diplomats quickly pointed the finger at the al-Qaeda-linked …
The handwringing in the U.S. over the rock-star reception Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is eliciting on his “Arab Spring” tour of post-dictatorship Egypt, Tunisia and Libya is misguided. Erdogan represents a reality-based, credible and very popular incarnation of the old Bush Administration idea of a moderate Middle …
There are countless great sources for those following the Middle East’s political clock by the movement of its second- and minute-hands. But for those looking to track the movement of the hour-hand, there are few better options than the New York Review of Books tag-team of Hussein Agha and Rob Malley. The former Palestinian …
Not to generalize, but in Gaza it’s said to be possible to estimate the political sympathies of the person approaching on the sidewalk without actually asking. A woman in a snug cloak, hair covered in a scarf of fuscia or some colorful print is likely aligned with Fatah, the secular Palestinian party. While a woman who understands …
During his first year in office, President George W. Bush was confronted by the key strategic challenge facing the United States in the new century, in an incident that began with the diversion of a U.S. aircraft — by Chinese fighter planes, which forced a U.S. Navy spy plane to land on the island of Hainan after a collision that …
Any reader of the George R.R. Martin Songs of Ice and Fire series (whose opening book, Game of Thrones, was turned into riveting television on HBO) might see a familiar pattern in the events that threaten to plunge the Israel-Gaza border into a new escalation of violence.
In Martin’s fantasy geopolitics, as in the real world, …
Libya’s rebels announced this Friday that a NATO air strike on the town of Zlitan — near Tripoli — killed nearly three dozen Gaddafi regime loyalists, including his son Khamis, commander of the feared 32nd Brigade, the country’s most crack military unit. This is the second time Khamis has been reported dead, and the Gaddafi …
It didn’t take the prescient gifts of Nostradamus to foresee that Thursday’s killing of Abdel Fattah Younes –commander of Libya’s anti-Gaddafi rebel forces–would exacerbate the tensions and divisions already rife within the opposition’s leadership. But it is a little surprising just how swiftly the suspicions of treason and …
