Tag Archives: sectarianism

Iraqi security forces raided a headquarters belonging to a powerful Iran-backed militia in southern Baghdad late on Thursday and detained more than a dozen members of the group, government officials and paramilitary sources said. The raid was the most brazen action by Iraqi forces against a major Iran-backed militia group …

A regular survey of experts on matters relating to Middle Eastern and North African politics and security (By MICHAEL YOUNG) Assaad al-Achi | Executive director of Baytna Syria, Syrian civil society activist Although leadership tensions, at least public ones, are extremely rare in Syria, they have always existed since Hafez …

A bomb blast at a Shi’ite Muslim mosque in eastern Baghdad wounded at least seven people on Friday, security sources said, correcting earlier reports of seven killed. Police sources said on Friday a suicide belt or improvised explosive device had been used in the attack in the Baladiyat neighbourhood, for …

Giza Criminal Court sentenced four people to 14 years in prison over charges including deliberately murdering prominent Shia Muslim leader Hassan Shahata, and three other Shias in 2013. The case is known in media as the “Shia strife.” The defendants carried Molotov cocktails, sticks and bladed weapons, and headed to …

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson slipped into Iraq Monday night after having spent the morning in Afghanistan, but his welcome in Baghdad was far less effusive as the Trump administration pushes to isolate Iran, an important Iraqi ally. The diplomatic challenges for the United States in Iraq have become …

Iraqi forces have demanded that Kurdish troops withdraw from oil fields and military bases around the contested city of Kirkuk, Kurdish officials and a senior militia leader said Friday, leading to a tense standoff around the city. Kurdish peshmerga soldiers rallied to protect Kirkuk on Thursday night, as Interior Ministry …

Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu (AT): Thank you, Professor Sachedina for agreeing to speak to Maydan. You are a Professor of Religious Studies and a senior scholar at the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at GMU. At the same time you hold the Endowed IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies …

Now more than ever Lebanon matters. And more than it ever has before. It matters because it continues to be a buffer zone and a contention state (be it a dysfunctional as it is now) between secularism and religious extremism. (Call them Shiite theocracy, Sunni/Wahhabi Shekidoms and Fiefdoms, etc.). The …

by Graham E. Fuller*– Iraqi politics are in turmoil—nothing new here. Not surprisingly, the post-invasion order is taking a long time to shake down, given the destruction of the old. Entirely new relationships had to be forged under the new, radically changed environment. What Iraq requires above all is the …

THE LEVANT – Saudi authorities have blamed militants linked to Al-Qaeda for an unprecedented attack that killed Shiite worshippers and stoked sectarian tensions in the Sunni-dominated kingdom. Saudi authorities have blamed militants linked to Al-Qaeda for an unprecedented attack that killed Shiite worshippers and highlighted sectarian tensions in the Sunni-dominated …

THE LEVANT – By Ramzy Baroud for Eurasia Review – Consider this comical scene described by Peter Van Buren, a former US diplomat, who was deployed to Iraq on a 12-month assignment in 2009-10: Van Buren led two Department of State teams assigned with the abstract mission of the “reconstruction” …