On July 1, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi issued a decree stating that the Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militias that operate under the umbrella group of the Popular Mobilization forces (PMU) should be fully integrated into the Iraqi armed forces under his direct command (alhadath.net, July... MORE

“Welcome to your second homeland,” President Emomali Rahmon told his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani upon his arrival in Tajikistan for the fifth summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), on June 15 (Radio Ozodi, June 15). The visit comes... MORE

Continued tensions between the United States and Iran have begun having second order effects on the war in Yemen. The war was, somewhat wrongfully, originally characterized as a proxy war with Iran, but the conflict is now more at risk of being driven in that... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told journalists in Moscow that an agreement had been reached with the White House on a meeting with Donald Trump on June 28, during the G20 summit, in Osaka, Japan. According to Ushakov, the meeting is... MORE

Over the past year, there has been an increased awareness of, and attention to, the activities of Iran's intelligence services and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to target Iranian dissidents and leaders of diaspora movements that are based in Europe (The National [Abu Dhabi],... MORE

Russian diplomacy is well known for its apparent readiness to engage with all parties to the multiple conflicts in the Middle East, and this characteristic has recently produced another awkward tangle of opportunistic intrigues. President Vladimir Putin fancies himself a master of communicating with difficult... MORE

On May 3, United States President Donald Trump phoned Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and had “a long and very good conversation” discussing “trade, Venezuela, Ukraine, North Korea, Nuclear Arms Control and even the ‘Russian Hoax’ [sic],” according to Trump. The two leaders did not talk... MORE

Russia tries to maintain a finger in every conflict in the Middle East, and President Vladimir Putin seeks to cultivate connections with various parties in multiple quarrels. Presently, however, the Kremlin’s access is being curtailed: Moscow, for instance, cannot find an entry point into the... MORE

The spokesperson for Gazprom, Sergey Kupriyanov, stated, on April 15, that the company had resumed gas imports from Turkmenistan (News Central Asia, April 16). His announcement was immediately confirmed by a statement from TurkmenGaz, Turkmenistan’s state natural gas company (Oilgas.gov.tm, April 15). Discussion on the... MORE

Iranian-Azerbaijani relations have been firmly on track toward rapprochement since the election of President Hassan Rouhani in Iran and the subsequent progress on the nuclear deal and lifting of Western sanctions. In the last five years, the presidents of Azerbaijan and Iran met 12 times,... MORE