Tag Archives: Iraq

Myriam Benraad, Leiden University La problématique des rapports entre le baasisme et l’État islamique en Irak n’en finit pas de tarauder les esprits. Depuis 2014, deux principaux narratifs se font ainsi face : l’un dépeignant le groupe djihadiste comme une sorte d’incarnation néo-baasiste, l’autre réfutant au contraire toute influence du régime défunt de Saddam Hussein. Dans l’ensemble, ces approches ne sont …

Chamu Kuppuswamy, University of Hertfordshire The genocide verdict brought recently by a German court against an Iraqi member of Islamic State for crimes including the murder of a five-year-old Yazidi girl is a landmark decision which will clear the way for similar prosecutions. That this verdict was even possible was thanks to a detailed (and remarkably speedy) report in 2016 …

Mariagiulia Giuffré, Edge Hill University At least 27 people have drowned in the English Channel attempting to cross in a small boat. There were three children, seven women, one of whom was pregnant, and 17 men. Although a joint search and rescue operation was seemingly launched in the narrow maritime area between the UK and France (which is only 20 …

Liana Semchuk, University of Oxford The migrant crisis on Belarus’s western border has escalated rapidly in recent days, forcing Poland and Lithuania to declare a state of emergency and close the borders with their neighbour. With 15,000 Polish border security personnel on one side of the barbed wire fence and an estimated 4,000 migrants desperately trying to get through into …

LEONID SCHEGLOV/ BELTA / HANDOUT / EPA Sascha-Dominik (Dov) Bachmann, University of Canberra For months, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been accused of using illegal migrants as a tool to punish the European Union for imposing sanctions on his regime. In July, Belarus loosened its restrictions on visas and increased flights on its state-run airline from the Middle East, allowing …

Sam Clarke, University of Sheffield Nearly quarter of a century after most of the world signed a convention outlawing the use of antipersonnel landmines, the number of people being killed or maimed by these insidious and lethal weapons remains high – and rising. The Landmine Monitor for 2021, released on November 10, reported 7,073 casualties in 2020, including 2,492 people …

Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham Tensions at the border between Poland and Belarus continue to rise, with thousands of vulnerable migrants stranded in a standoff between the two countries and the geopolitical blocs to which they belong. About 4,000 men, women and children are caught along the border between the two countries, having been reportedly escorted to the border by …

Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) Ten years after people rose up against their leaders in country after country around the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunisia to Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, what can we say about how society, politics and religion have changed in the region? To put it mildly, the social, cultural, religious, political …

Flag of Kurdistan on military uniform. Bumble Dee/Shutterstock.com John Broich, Case Western Reserve University Since U.S. troops left their region, roughly 180,000 Kurds of northeastern Syria have been displaced, and over 200 have been killed. Those Kurds, soldiers who’d battled the Islamic State and families, had hoped to secure a future Kurdistan state in areas now targeted by Turkish warplanes …

Popartic/Shutterstock Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) From independence until the advent of the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern states have suffered due to their constituting principle, a notion that can be traced back to the motivations and arrangements of former colonial powers. Independence may have satisfied the demands of the region’s inhabitants for autonomy, Arabness and …