The US media this week broadcast videos provided by the Pentagon purporting to show American airstrikes against Taliban-run “drug labs” in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Parroting claims by the top US military commander Gen. John Nicholson, television news broadcasters reported that Washington is attempting to stop the Islamist insurgency from “profiting from narcotics trade and other…
The U.S. is now occupying north-east Syria. It wants to blackmail the Syrian government into “regime change”. The occupation is unsustainable, its aim is unattainable. The generals who devised these plans lack strategic insight. They listen to the wrong people. The Islamic State no longer holds any significant ground in Syria and Iraq. What is…
The conflict in Syria is coming to an end, with the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran, the real power brokers in Syria, on the way to work out the terms of peaceful settlement. These countries, not the US-led coalition, hold the key to the conflict resolution. With the world attention focused on Syria, the…
The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan cut a lone figure at the trilateral summit of Russia, Iran and Turkey at Sochi on Wednesday regarding a Syrian settlement. From a position of being the friend of the Assad family, close ally of the United States and leader of a major NATO power, influential voice in the…
Israel is putting in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned. The pace of physical and demographic changes in the city has accelerated dramatically since Israel…
Today the burning problem for states in Central Asia is the presence of external interests. Earlier, this influence was considered in the region of China and the European Union. Turkey has been longing to become another, though no less important external regional player for Central Asia. Turkey has always tried to conduct its active pan-Turkish policy…
