US mid-term congressional elections have rendered President Barack Obama a “lame duck”, a weak executive without enough political clout to carry out his domestic or foreign policy agendas. He will face a legislature controlled by the opposition Republican Party when

The US is fighting a “phoney war” against Daesh in Iraq and Syria because it is using minimal force against an enemy that has taken over about 30 per cent of the territory of Syria and 40 per cent of Iraq. Daesh (known as the Islamic State) troops are entrenched in c

An Iraqi friend I met in London over dinner remarked: “My country is gone, finished… and Syria is gone as well.” The toxic combination of Bush wars, terrible policies adopted by the international community and the rise of radical fundamentalism have doomed the

Since the summer of 2011, the military policy on Syria of the US and the West has been based on the imaginary rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), and since December of that year, US and Western political strategies have relied on the divided and dysfunctional exiled opposition. 

As the Islamic State continued to advance on the ground in Iraq and to hold its own in Syria, US President Barack Obama addressed senior allied military commanders in a bid to formulate a strategy for rolling back IS fighters. Yet, talk is no substitute for serious action and bo

Palestinians in Gaza wait, with trepidation, to see what will happen at the international donors’ conference, which is being convened in Cairo on October 12 to raise funds for the reconstruction of the coastal strip following Israel’s brutal and destructive 50-day ass

Last week, Europe’s nearest landfall to the coast of Syria, Cyprus, received its first boatpeople and now faces the challenge posed by Syrian asylum seekers setting sail on leaky boats from Mediterranean ports. That boat carried 345 migrants — 200 men, 93 women and 5

Lebanon is already the third battlefront in the war against the Islamic State (IS) and, like embattled Syria and Iraq, it has neither the political unity needed nor the material means to fight its battle. Veteran analyst Marie Nassif-Debs said: “We have no president”

The election of former Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the country’s president and his appointment of former foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu as prime minister has made it all the more difficult for Ankara to cooperate with the coalition against the Islamic S