Iraq

Reaching a quorum in Iraq’s presidential election remains an insurmountable obstacle so far for Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr and his tripartite parliamentary alliance.  The last round of voting for the president, which went nowhere, showed this quite clearly. Negotiators and political leaders believe, local media reported, that the influential Shiite cleric and his political allies...

Since Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr won Iraq’s widely boycotted elections last October, there has been a steady stream of news reports, forecasts and analyses claiming that this could be the beginning of the end of Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs. While such estimates are certainly optimistic, they are perhaps somewhat naive and misguided. Iran remains the most...

Even though the US has been seeking to withdraw from the Middle East to relocate its sources to the Indo-Pacific region to tackle China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia, extricating itself from a region the US has been dominating since the end of the Second World War has proved to be a lot harder than the US policy makers might have expected when they decided to revive...