Turkey’s President Erdogan makes no secret of his ambition to spread his neo-Ottoman wings all over the Balkans. He views Macedonia as another Turkish satellite in the making, which sadly the Macedonian government seems to have embraced without carefully assessing the long-term adverse ramifications. Very few Albanian voices in Macedonia have the courage to publicly…
About 80 kilometers off the coast of Haifa in Israel, a string of rigs, platforms and pipelines now work day and night, extracting natural gas from one of the largest reservoirs in the Eastern Mediterranean. This resource, known as the Tamar Field, now powers businesses and homes throughout Israel. It has helped the country approach…
Iran has opted not to wait for further unfriendly steps by Washington in response to its nuclear deal and the Iranian presence in Syria, fully comprehending that the USA is preparing for military action against the Islamic Republic of Iran and are simply buying time by creating an international coalition to initiate this action and…
The so-called “Manbij Model” that the US and Turkey agreed to in jointly administering the strategic city following the YPG’s withdrawal is promising but nevertheless imperfect because it fails to address the Kurdish-led “deep state” that controls the SDF’s political and military activities in northeastern Syria. The US and Turkey finally reached a deal to…
From “De-Ba’athification” in Iraq to “De-Shi’afication” in Syria Of the dozens if not scores of tactical, strategic and fundamental mistakes the US made in Iraq after illegally invading and occupying the country in 2003, was a strategy which sought to inflict a punitive socio-political and economic disenfranchisement of the Sunni Arab population of the Arab…
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…
