One of the most critical issues in Iraq currently is the relationship between its Shia-led government and Iranian-backed Shia militias. This issue has been important for U.S. military strategy in the Middle East. The only two military actions ordered by President Joe Biden thus far... MORE

Although Russia’s Caspian Flotilla remains the dominant naval force on the Caspian, it is not the only one that matters anymore. All four other littoral states—Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan—have been building up their own naval presences, particularly since various intra-regional disputes over access to... MORE

As the self-styled Islamic State (IS) “caliphate” collapsed in March 2019, the international community was faced with the problem of more than 70,000 IS family members stranded in Syria. The Kurdish Peshmerga gathered these family members into camps in northeastern Syria. Currently, these camps still... MORE

At the end of April, Minister Fahrettin Koca announced that the Ministry of Health had granted emergency use authorization in Turkey to Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine (Anadolu Agency, April 30).  Sputnik V became the third vaccine to receive such approval, after China’s Sinovac and the Pfizer-BioNTech... MORE

Russia has traditionally excelled at exploiting crises in the Middle East as a way to boost its own global stature, but the sharp escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent weeks has left Moscow uncharacteristically muted. At the United Nations Security Council, Russia ceded the... MORE

In late April, the Turkish military launched a large-scale cross-border counter-terrorism campaign into northern Iraq, targeting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its network. The push into northern Iraq followed two main axes: Operation Claw-Lightning and Operation Claw-Thunderbolt (Pençe-Şimşek and Pençe-Yıldırım). Thus far, the counter-terrorism... MORE

A German court sentenced on February 24 the alleged “Islamic State leader of Germany” to a lengthy prison sentence. The trial against Salafist preacher Ahmad Abdelaziz Abdullah Abdullah, better known as Abu Walaa, lasted three-and-a-half-years and provides insights into radicalization and Islamic State (IS) recruitment... MORE

On January 28, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi announced that the wali, or governor of Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, Abu Yasser al-Issawi, was killed during a security operation. Issawi was assassinated in the Wadi al-Shay valley in southern Kirkuk, an area known for an... MORE

A February 2017 airstrike in Idlib, Syria targeted and killed Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, a deputy to al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Masri was one of the first foreign terrorists to have been killed using the U.S. military’s newest counter-terrorism weapon: the AGM-114R9X (R9X) Hellfire missile, often... MORE

Putting military pressure on Ukraine could have seemed to the Russian leadership to be the most practical way to assert Moscow’s central role in international affairs. The standard working assumption in the Kremlin is that facing a risk of violent conflict, the disunited West would... MORE