Iraq: What to Expect From Muqtada al-Sadr Iraq’s parliamentary elections have left Muqtada al-Sadr politically ascendant, a development that will sit uneasily with both the United States and Iran and marks something of a transformation for the populist Shia cleric. As the dust settled after... MORE

Having once held domain over some eight million people and controlled territory reaching nearly to Baghdad, Islamic State (IS) has undergone a monumental decline. Where the group was once in control of massive swathes of northeastern Syria and western Iraq, its so-called caliphate has since... MORE

Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida published a report, on May 3, that cited “an informed source” alleging Israeli intelligence services had used the territory of Azerbaijan to smuggle half a ton of seized secret files regarding the Iranian nuclear program from Tehran to Israel. The source did... MORE

In summer 2017, leaders of the three main factions of the Syrian opposition with fighters from the Caucasus, Muslim al-Shishani, Abdul Hakim al-Shishani and Salahuddin al-Shishani, released a joint video message, where they reaffirmed neutrality in the confrontation between the Syrian rebel groups Akhrar al-Sham... MORE

Buoyed by their role helping to defeat Islamic State (IS), a number of the most prominent groups from among the more than 60 that make up Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have come together under the banner of the al-Fateh coalition to contest this month’s... MORE

Russia’s General Staff has a long-established interest in automatizing and enhancing command and control, which has shown remarkable advances since the reform of the Armed Forces was initiated in 2008. These changes, propelled forward by recent experience of combat operations in Ukraine and Syria, are... MORE

The end of April was extraordinarily rich in high-profile international events—and Russia was conspicuously absent from all these dynamics. The president of South Korea and the North Korean dictator planted a pine tree of peace just to the south of the ceasefire line that still... MORE

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) jets have been hitting Syria intermittently, primarily targeting Iranian-connected assets, but also attacking the air-defense installations of president Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) (Haaretz, April 10). Officially, the Israelis proclaim neutrality in the seven-year-long Syrian civil war, but the IDF... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   On March 28, Russian media presented information that members of the Private Military Company (PMC) Wagner may have been spotted in the East Ghouta region (southwestern Syria), coordinating a “normalization of the post-war situation.” The same sources... MORE