In a breathless 48 hours, a president, defence minister and security chief have all been ousted in Sudan. Omar al-Bashir held absolute power for three decades as president. Awad Ahmed Ibn Auf, the defence minister who announced Bashir’s arrest and declared the country would be run by a military council for two years, lasted all…
A little more than a decade ago, I was asked to address a London dinner-table of about twenty Gulf ‘figures’ – a mix of Ambassadors and those with ‘ties to power’. All represented the cosmopolitan, rich élite of the Gulf. Then, towards the evening’s end, talk turned to Hizbullah: the gathering simply erupted into flames….
Ever since Mr. MAGA made it to the White House, I have been awed by the level of sheer stupidity and, frankly, the immorality of this administration. Obama was almost as incompetent and evil, but Trump truly brought about a qualitative change in what we could loosely refer to as the “average White House IQ.”…
Eight years after the start of the US-led military intervention to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi and promote “stability,” Libya is still wracked by civil war. Ironically, the violence over the next few days has forced the US to evacuate its remaining forces—there for diplomatic security and counterterrorism—from the volatile country. Ever since the collapse of the old…
Libya is back in the news, as fighting escalates around the capital, Tripoli. Forces under the control of Khalifa Haftar – a former Libyan general under the government of Muammar Qaddafi – turned opposition during the 2011 US-led NATO intervention – turned “opposition” again against the UN-backed “Government of National Accord” (GNA) seated in Tripoli…
The prize is Tripoli, for anyone that can take it and secure it by this summer. That will, it’s felt by many, stabilise Libya or, conversely, at worse, make Her descend into a greater quagmire resulting in a new phase of very intense fighting and all out civil war. Not much hope, at this moment,…
