... the Islamic State had all but eclipsed from its traditional base of the Levant. How has the loss of its administrative centers affected the organization’s strategy? There are two competing answers to this question. The first possible answer is that ISIS’ plan is similar to that of the Great Britain in 1940, when the government of Winston Churchill was facing the prospect of invasion by the forces of the German Reich. London’s plan at the time was to use its overseas colonies as bases from which ...
... Kiani, IRAS President, moderated the meeting.
On February 6 Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) held a video conference with the Institute for Iran-Eurasia Studies (IRAS) on Russia’s and Iran’s positions in the Middle East in post-ISIS period.
The video conference consisted of two sessions: the presentations made by the speakers and the following discussions between the sided (Q&A). Timur Makhmutov, RIAC Deputy Director of Programs, and Davood Kiani, IRAS President, moderated the ...
... Emerging Powers are all welcome to help stabilise a crucial region for world trade, resources, and security
After years of furious and brutal fighting, Syria and Iraq seem now to be slowly stabilising. A peace process in Syria is gaining momentum, and ISIS’ defeat is getting closer. However, Middle Eastern problems remain massive. Among them we have selected three main issues, which are also interconnected: the hostility between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Sunni and Shia; the stabilisation of oil prices,...
One of the main events of 2017 has been the victory won by the Russian armed forces and the Assad government in Syria. When Russian President Vladimir Putin decisively intervened in Syria’s bloody civil war in September 2015, many were taken completely by surprise. Western commentators and politicians ― including none other than then-U.S. President Barack Obama ― unanimously predicted that Moscow would get bogged down in the Syrian conflict.
One of the main events of 2017 has been the victory won...
... security.” Russian analysts, as noted by the journal Sputnik, had by this time observed a “catfight” in Washington between the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department over policies towards Syria. While the Pentagon was interested in fighting ISIS, the State Department, together with the CIA, placed the major emphasis on deposing Assad. The reason Putin knew this may have been because one of the key opponents of this State-CIA goal was Obama’s former Director of the Defense Intelligence ...
... fighting a major terrorist threat on their mainland, along with Kurds of course. But at the same time the ongoing distraction and chaos in Iraq in the past 4 years, gave the KRG a better experience in self-rule away from Baghdad. The expansion of ISIS have literally cut Iraq into two halves, an Arabic half, and a Kurdish one. Geographically speaking, this offered the Iraqi Kurds a further momentum of a de-facto independence. Barzani have been watching the continuous and recent defeats of ISIS,...
... since sometimes tried to normalize Ankara-Moscow broken relations. For years he opposed Putin’s position on Syria, and he has given up the demand that Syrian dictator Assad must go. On the contrary, he agreed with Russia and Iran, to mutually fight ISIS and Al-Qaeda associate Al-Nusra movement. Furthermore, he pushed deeper to replace NATO military hardware, with Russian and Chinese military technologies. During his visit to Kremlin, he signed a deal to purchase S-400 air and missile defense system....
... used judicious force to accomplish what Obama had failed to do in 2013 despite his own declared red line. So did the dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast), the largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal, on ISIS fighters in Afghanistan on April 14. Facing what Mattis has called a “clear and present danger” from North Korea, Trump’s team did not put the problem off in the manner of the past three US administrations. He is meeting it head on with an ...
... no-fly zones would have prevented Russia’s subsequent robust entry in the fall of 2015. Now, in the spring of 2017, the situation is quite different: Assad has obliterated many of the rebel strongholds, most notably (and most tragically) Aleppo, and ISIS, too, has been severely weakened, facing its final days in Mosul, Iraq, one of its two last major strongholds, and in the process of being encircled in its other stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, its “capital;” furthermore, not only does Assad’s ...
In these days, as Iraqi forces backed up by the US-led coalition are trying to break the last stand of ISIS resistance in the battle for Mosul, the world will witness the laying of a milestone in the war against the cancerous terrorist state, which broke out across the lands of Iraq and Syria, to rapidly metastasize its cells worldwide.
However, as much ...
