FOREIGN POLICY AUGUST 8, 2014 By John B. Judis Last night, President Barack Obama announced that he was authorizing American airtstrikes in Iraq. He described his intervention as a “humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain” and as an effort “to protect […]
Summary Iraq is caught between glory and despair Rarely in world history do we have a case like the state of Iraq today. Iraq is everything we could be, and everything we fear to become, rolled into one land. These include foreign interests that created the country in the first […]
BY ROBERT FISK, THE INDEPENDENT He wouldn’t bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barak Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees – and the Yazidis – because of “a potential act of genocide”. Bombs away. And […]
by Robert Fisk, The Independent In the Middle East, the first shots of every war define the narrative we all dutifully follow. So too, this greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis in Iraq. Christians fleeing for their lives? Save them. Yazidis starving on the mountain tops? Give them food. […]
FoxNews.com: A growing chorus of top Muslim leaders and Arab pundits around the world are strongly condemning the “cancerous” actions of extremist Islamic State militants, saying the ruthless group’s horrific campaign of murder in Iraq does serious harm to all Islam. In the past, Muslim leaders have faced criticism from […]
The group calling itself “The Islamic State” continues its drive to conquer and rule a piece of the Middle East. Its violent campaign to spread its extreme form of Islam challenges the governments of both Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. A massive relief crisis is ongoing as hundreds of thousands of […]
The Vatican has called on Muslim leaders to denounce unambiguously the persecution of Christians and Yazidis in Iraq – and hinted that it is considering breaking off dialogue with Islamic representatives if they fail to do so. READ MORE…
Is America behind the creation of the Islamic State? The BBC’s Suzanne Kianpour, in Beirut, looks at the latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds in Lebanon. “In the Middle East, conspiracy theories are in our blood,” one former Lebanese official said over lunch in a restaurant in central Beirut. He […]
They’re Killing Us’: The Disturbing Rise of the Islamic State By Katrin Kuntz and Christoph Reuter REUTERS… Der Spiegal International The Islamic State is conquering cities in Syria and Iraq with disturbing frequency and tens of thousands of Christians and Yazidis are fleeing. The US has begun air strikes, […]
The United States is exploring options to evacuate thousands of Iraqi civilians trapped on a mountain in northern Iraq by Islamic militants after four nights of humanitarian relief airdrops, officials in Washington said. At least half of the 40,000 people besieged by jihadists on Mount Sinjar had escaped by Sunday […]
The news coming out of Iraq is really devastating. The violent extremist group known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) continues to take over major parts of Iraq, […]
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000003047774&playerType=embed President Obama’s hair is definitely grayer these days, and no doubt trying to manage foreign policy in a world of increasing disorder accounts for at least half of those […]
US President Barack Obama says he has authorised air strikes against Islamic militants in northern Iraq but will not send US troops back to the country. He said Islamic State (IS) fighters would be targeted to prevent the slaughter of religious minorities, or if they threaten US interests. Strikes have […]
http://www.cnn.com/video/api/embed.html#/video/world/2014/08/07/tsr-sot-us-humanitarian-air-drops-iraq.cnn (CNN) — [Breaking news update at 9:45 p.m. ET Thursday] U.S. President Barack Obama said Thursday he’d authorized targeted airstrikes in Iraq to protect American personnel. “We do whatever […]
After all the warnings and all the clichés about a war that would “spill” over Syria’s border, the savage fighters of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Sunni Muslim “caliphate” have at last […]
Kalyan, India: For more than a decade, as alienated young Muslim men from all over the world left home to fight on the side of Islamists in distant conflicts, it has been a truism that they were not coming from India, a country whose participatory politics and preoccupation with nearby […]
USA Today | By Kirsten Powers (RNS) Iraq’s Christians are begging the world for help. Is anybody listening? Since capturing the country’s second largest city of Mosul in early June, the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, has ordered Christians to convert to Islam, pay taxes levied on non-Muslims, or die. […]
USA Today | By Kirsten Powers (RNS) Iraq’s Christians are begging the world for help. Is anybody listening? Since capturing the country’s second largest city of Mosul in early June, the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, has ordered Christians to convert to Islam, pay taxes levied on non-Muslims, or die. […]
An interesting study on Jordan, by the Brookings Institute: (February 2014) Click to access arab%20econpaper4comolet%20v2.pdf Editor’s note: What the researchers did not realize: Why is Jordan ‘a island of peace’ among ‘troubled nations’? The main reason, as understood ‘in the streets of Amman’, is the fact that the neighbours (Israel) […]
Staff writer, Al Arabiya News Sunday, 27 July 2014 The mayor of the southern Iraqi province of Thi Qar has cancelled celebrations for the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr […]