The German Ministry of Interior Horst Seehofer announced on April 30 that the Lebanese organization Hezbollah would be fully banned from carrying out any activity on German soil. The announcement was followed by raids on four mosques and organizations suspected of being linked to Hezbollah,... MORE

The Libyan Conflict and the Moroccan-Algerian Arms Race Brian M. Perkins Algeria and Morocco have long been in competition for diplomatic and military supremacy in the Maghreb and have intermittently faced off in the conflict over Western Sahara. Algeria has been the region’s preeminent military... MORE

Western analysts tend to focus on the Iranian navy almost exclusively in terms of its ability to harass or block oil tankers coming through the Strait of Hormuz, an understandable perspective given the danger that Iran could disorder world oil markets if it was successful... MORE

Isolationist Turkmenistan, which proudly claims to be COVID-19-free, has nonetheless been affected by the pandemic (Izvestia, May 10). A recent closure of its borders due to pandemic concerns has halted imports, reportedly leading to food shortages. The provincial situation became so dire before the borders... MORE

The Russian government long assumed that Western sanctions on Iran would allow it to steal a march on the world by expanding its railroad connections to the south via the Islamic Republic while simultaneously ensuring that the South Caucasus remains a Moscow-dominated hub for both... MORE

"All Americans in Iraq will be hostages if a war broke out between the U.S. and Iran. Because we will stand with Iran, period,” said Abu Ala’a al-Walai, the prominent Iraqi Shia militia leader, in a TV interview last August (Alalam TV, August 28, 2019; YouTube,... MORE

Eastern Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region—comprising more than half of the historical mountainous region of Badakhshan, which it shares with northern Afghanistan—is one of the most isolated, impoverished and unsettled places in Central Asia. Gorno-Badakhshan was a center of resistance to Dushanbe during the civil war... MORE

Following the large coronavirus outbreak in Iran, neighboring countries quickly closed their borders with the Islamic Republic. More than a thousand Turkish trucks carrying goods to Central Asia found themselves stuck at checkpoints due to the closure of the Iran-Turkey and Iran-Turkmenistan borders (Daily Sabah,... MORE

Executive Summary: Defeats, plummeting oil prices, and a global pandemic are forcing Saudi Arabia to rethink its involvement in Yemen. Ironically, the end of overt Saudi involvement in Yemen may help it achieve some of its aims as new alliances dilute Houthi control and minimize... MORE

On February 26, the U.S. State Department designated Ahmed al-Hamidawi, the new secretary general of the Iraqi Shia militia, Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), as a specially designated global terrorist (State.gov, February 26). The designation came amid ongoing tension between the United States and Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia... MORE