A military delegation of high-ranking officers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE recently visited a Kurdish SDF base in Aïn al-Arab (Kobani) on the Syrian border with Turkey. They discussed practical questions connected with replacing the US military presence there with troops from several Arab nations, who would represent the League of Arab States. There…
The controversy over Iranian “advisors” in Syria and their actual battlefield function is nothing more than a word game designed to delay the “phased withdrawal” of Tehran’s forces. The US, “Israel”, and even Russia have called for the withdrawal of Iranian troops from Syria, albeit for different reasons and expressed in different ways, though Damascus…
Syria recently announced that it has handed over to its Russian and Iranian Astana partners a list of experts to participate in the upcoming UN-supervised “constitutional commission”. This is an important milestone in the peace process because it proves that President Assad was sincere when he told his Russian counterpart in Sochi last month about…
Pay very close attention to what India’s External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, said after meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif earlier this week in New Delhi: “Our foreign policy is not made under pressure from other countries … We recognize UN sanctions and not country-specific sanctions. We didn’t follow US sanctions on previous…
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent speech on Iran, although titled “After the Deal: A New Iran Strategy”, was in fact not new at all. It was something else– a tedious recitation of the same arguments, with the same fallacies and red herrings, that have become numbingly familiar in attacks on the deal in question:…
Vladimir Putin will have paid very close attention to the location of the Syrian artillery battery where four Russian soldiers lost their lives at the weekend. The desert around Deir ez-Zour remains a dangerous place – politically as well as physically – in which the Americans and Russians play an extremely risky game of war….
