After a long thaw, Turkish-Syrian relations reached new heights in 2009 as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad initiated a new phase in bilateral relations. In September of that year, visa restrictions were lifted and cross-border trade flourished. High-level... MORE

The US reset policy has already become an object of political contention between Democrats and Republicans. The Obama Administration never ceases to point to it as a success, not least because of the progress that has occurred with Russia in regard to restraining Iranian proliferation,... MORE

Turkey has accelerated its contact with the Syrian opposition, while maintaining its criticism of the regime’s ongoing violent crackdown on the uprising. This development is in parallel to the growing involvement of the Arab League in the Syrian uprising. A recent deal agreed between the... MORE

The final outcome of the unrest that continues to shake the broader Middle East remains in the balance.  The grassroots protests that ushered in the fall of despots in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and continue to rile ruling power structures in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and... MORE

Syria ended its support for the Kurdish rebels of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK) in 1998 and expelled PKK-leader Abdullah Ocalan, a move that ultimately led to his arrest in Kenya the next year. Now Turkey fears that Syria could use the PKK again against... MORE

Last week, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, in charge of relations with the US, arms control, ballistic missile defense (BMD) and proliferation, told Jamestown that US-Russian relations are not bad. Ryabkov expressed satisfaction that President Barack Obama fulfilled his promise to help Moscow overcome... MORE

Executive Summary Hundreds of people have been arrested all around Iraq in an operation launched by the security forces against members of the banned Ba’ath party. The crackdown came a few days after U.S. President Barack Obama announced that U. S. forces will pull out... MORE

Mishaal Tammo the widely respected 53-year-old leader (speaker) of the Syrian “Kurdish Future Movement” and also a member of the executive committee of the recently formed, broadly-based opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) was assassinated in the city of Qamishli, in northeastern Syria’s al-Hasakah Governorate on October 7,... MORE

In Yemen’s troubled governorate of Marib, the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh generally has maintained a hands-off policy toward the region’s autonomous tribes. For decades, tribal infighting plagued Marib to a degree that Saleh himself had little reason to worry about these heavily armed... MORE