Tag Archives: Iraq

Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham All the standard public relations ploys were in evidence for the recent meeting between Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad and Russian envoy Alexander Lavrentiev in Damascus. More than 230 officials from 30 federal executive bodies, five Russian regions, and the Russian defence ministry had trekked to the Syrian capital. There were 15 agreements and memorandums on …

Black people constitute a significant percentage of the global Arab population. (Brett Jordan/Unsplash), CC BY-SA Amir Al-Azraki, University of Waterloo Black Arabs are underrepresented and largely invisible in “white” Arab-dominated countries, and excluded from political, academic, artistic and religious institutions. “Black” and “Arab” are not mutually exclusive: some Black people are Arab and some Arab people are Black. As an …

EPA-EFE/Ahmed Jalil Lily Hamourtziadou, Birmingham City University Being a police officer in post-Saddam Iraq is an incredibly dangerous career choice. Since the invasion of Iraq toppled the dictator in March 2003, at least 14,000 Iraqi police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty. And things are not getting much safer. In the first four months of 2021, …

Harout Akdedian, Central European University The so-called Islamic State (IS) recently lost its last remnant of territory in Syria, but observers were quick to remind the world that the war against the organisation is far from over. What then does this loss of territorial control actually mean for IS? At its height, the self-proclaimed “caliphate” controlled an estimated 34,000 square …

Beatrice de Graaf, Utrecht University and Ahmet S. Yayla, DeSales University It is not often that regimes wither away and leave behind troves of documents for posterity. It happened in Germany with the Nazi Third Reich and under the German Democratic Republic. Now, to an extent, we have similar evidence of life under Islamic State rule as well. The terrorist …

Regional powerplay: the nuclear deal has complex implications for the regin. Dilok Klaisataporn via Shutterstock Ali Bilgic, Loughborough University As Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, speculation was rife that one of the first things his administration would do would be to seek re-entry to the Iran nuclear deal that had been quit …

Erica C D Hunter, SOAS, University of London ISIS conquests across northern Iraq have been comprehensive in recent weeks. Taking control of large parts of the region, they declared a Caliphate last month. And one group who have especially suffered at their hands are the Christians that have been a part of the region’s landscape for almost two millenia. Following …

Lily Hamourtziadou, Birmingham City University Recording casualties during a conflict can provide a body of evidence of how violence has affected particular communities or groups, such as the Yazidis in Iraq and the Kurds in Syria. When the Islamic State entered Iraq in 2014, they immediately started committing gross human rights violations and displayed violence of an increasingly sectarian nature …

Lorena De Vita, Utrecht University and Amir Taha, University of Amsterdam It was a short message to end a short war. On February 26 1991, Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz put his signature to a letter addressed to the United Nations Security Council: I have the honour to notify you that the Iraqi Government reaffirms its agreement to comply fully …

Yasin Duman, Coventry University A spate of attacks in Turkey on Syrian refugees and Kurdish internal migrants and displaced people in recent months have put both communities on edge. In July, a Syrian teenager working as a market seller in Bursa, northwestern Turkey, died after he was attacked by a group of men. Another Syrian teenager who worked in a …