Speculations about a presidential pardon for the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked National Security Agency’s classified information to the press in 2013, have grown since last month after Donald Trump commented on the case in an interview [1] with The New York Post on August 13. “There are a lot of people that think that he is not being treated[Read More…]
During his stint in power as Pakistan’s prime minister until July 2017, Nawaz Sharif had nurtured cordial working relationship with India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi. This, along with his role in Kargil conflict of 1999 with India, was precisely the reason why Pakistan’s military establishment turned against him and he was eventually disqualified[Read More…]
It baffles the mind whether it’s willful blindness or anterograde amnesia but while drawing parallels with coronavirus outbreak, mainstream media appears to vividly recall Spanish flu of 1918 from a century ago and doesn’t seem to have an inkling about a much more pertinent example of H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, even though it shared a lot of[Read More…]
A joint American-Israeli program [1], involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early this year when commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in a[Read More…]
Since the planting of limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of the UAE in May, the subsequent downing of the US surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf and the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14, choreographed protests have erupted in Lebanon and[Read More…]
Speculation is rife in the local Turkish media that the founder of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, might have been running away from someone before he fell or was pushed to his death in a case that was initially ruled as a suicide. Reputed Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reported [1] on Tuesday: “The biggest question is why Le Mesurier[Read More…]
The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an Armageddon for the global oil industry because it processes five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production. The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the biggest spike witnessed[Read More…]
Reputed Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reported [1] on Thursday that the Turkish police had identified the cause of death of the founder of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, as ruptured aorta in the chest, and not the fractured skull as previously described by the police in its preliminary report. Le Mesurier was found dead on November 11 in suspicious[Read More…]
Three Taliban commanders have been released today, on Tuesday, by the Afghan government as part of a prisoner swap involving two Western hostages. Reportedly, the militant leaders, including senior Taliban leader Anas Haqqani, had landed in Qatar, which hosts the Taliban political office. In exchange, two university professors identified as US citizen Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks were reportedly[Read More…]
There are a lot of similarities in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October last year and the alleged suicide of the founder of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, who was found dead on November 11 in suspicious circumstances after falling off a two-story apartment building in downtown Istanbul. Before his[Read More…]
The founder of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, was found dead on November 11 in suspicious circumstances after falling off a two-story apartment building in downtown Istanbul. He was a former British army veteran and a private security contractor from 2008 to 2012 working for Good Harbor [1], run by Richard Clarke, the former Bush administration counter-terrorism czar. Much[Read More…]
Although the Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed the responsibility for the September 14 complex attack involving drones and cruise missiles on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and they have UAV-X drones having a range of 1,500 kilometers, Washington dismissed the possibility. Instead, it accused Tehran of mounting the[Read More…]
A car bomb exploded [1] in northern Syria killing 13 and wounding 20. The blast on Saturday ripped through a crowded market in Tal Abyad, a town recently occupied by Turkish-backed militant proxies. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast targeted pro-Turkey fighters and civilians were also among the dead. Even though the Turkish Defense Ministry promptly laid[Read More…]
Casting aspersions over the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Russia’s seasoned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed [1] while speaking to Rossiya 24 broadcaster that the Islamic State and its slain “caliph” were the spawns of the United States. Being a skilled diplomat having intimate knowledge of happenings on the ground in Syria, his statement merits serious consideration. It’s important to[Read More…]
Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria. After the drawdown of US troops at Erdogan’s insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria, the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and at al-Tanf military[Read More…]
Confirming the deaths of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State’s spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, who was killed in a US airstrike in northwest Syria a day after the killing of al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s al-Furqan media has announced Abu Ibrahim Hashemi al-Quraishi as the new caliph of the terrorist organization. Al-Quraishi is such an obscure jihadist that even national[Read More…]
Although President Trump claimed in his address to the American public after the killing of al-Baghdadi that he was a “bigger terrorist” than Osama bin Laden, fact of the matter is the Islamic State’s self-styled caliph was simply a nobody compared to Bin Laden. As a Saudi citizen and belonging to the powerful Saudi-Yemeni clan of Bin Ladens, which has[Read More…]
In the event of the death of the Islamic State’s self-styled caliph, Amaq, a news agency affiliated with the Islamic State, reported on 7 August 2019 that the terrorist organization’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had appointed Abdullah Qardash as his successor. Abdullah Qardash is from Tal Afar, a predominantly Sunni Muslim city in northwestern Iraq, and has served as an[Read More…]
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement on Thursday, February 21, “A small peace keeping group of about 200 US troops will remain in Syria for a period of time,” as reported by the CNN [1] on Friday. According to the report: “The 200 troops who will remain will be divided between al-Tanf, an area near[Read More…]
During Imran Khan’s four-month sit-in and political demonstrations in front of the parliament in Islamabad from August to December 2014, the allegations of election rigging and the demand for electoral reforms were simply a smokescreen. A question would naturally arise in the minds of curious observers of Pakistan’s politics that what prompted Imran Khan to make a sudden volte-face when[Read More…]
In a momentous decision on July 28, 2017, then Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif was disqualified from holding public office by the country’s apex court on the flimsy pretext of holding an “Iqama” (a work permit) for a Dubai-based company, and was subsequently given a ten-year imprisonment sentence, though the latter decision is subject to appeal. Subsequently, sham elections[Read More…]
In July 2003, Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons inspector who had disclosed to the media that Tony Blair’s government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “sexed up,” was found dead in a public park a mile away from his home. The inquiry into his death concluded that Kelly had committed suicide by slitting his left wrist but[Read More…]
At its peak in 2014, when the Islamic State declared its “caliphate” in Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State, according to the mainstream media’s count, used to have 70,000 jihadists. But now, only several hundred fighters seem to have been left within its ranks, who have been cornered in a holdout in Hajin in eastern Syria[Read More…]
Martin Chulov reported [1] for The Guardian yesterday, February 7, the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had survived a coup attempt last month by foreign fighters within the ranks of the terrorist organization in its holdout in Hajin in eastern Syria near the town of Al-Bukamal on the border between Syria and Iraq, and the Islamic State had reportedly[Read More…]
A question would naturally arise in the minds of curious observers of regional geopolitics that why did Pakistan choose to wage Washington’s proxy war against the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s? Was it to strengthen its defenses against India, the oft-quoted “strategic depth” military doctrine, or the fear that the former Soviet Union might make further advances[Read More…]
On Saturday, January 26, Reuters reported [1] that Taliban officials said the US negotiators agreed on a draft peace pact setting out the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan within 18 months, potentially ending the United States longest war. Confirming the news, New York Times reported [2] on Monday, January 28, that the US chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad stated the[Read More…]
In all, Prophet Mohammad married thirteen wives. But he married his first wife Khadija when he was 25 years old and she was 40. All other marriages were contracted after the death of Khadija when Mohammad was 50 years old. Mohammad was 40 years old when he received his first divine revelation and Khadija was the first person to convert[Read More…]
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered contradictory messages in a speech in Cairo on Thursday, January 18. On the one hand, he said Washington will withdraw American troops from Syria in line with Donald Trump’s momentous announcement on December 19, and on the other, he emphasized the US will continue fighting the Islamic State and will also contain[Read More…]
Quoting Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was recently on a visit to Israel and told reporters in Jerusalem that American forces would remain in Syria until the last remnants of the Islamic State were defeated and Turkey provided guarantees that it would not strike Kurdish forces allied with the United States, fake news have been circulating on[Read More…]
The regions currently administered by the Kurds in Syria include the Kurdish-majority Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the Turkish border. The oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate in eastern Syria has been[Read More…]
The US commanders planning for the withdrawal of the American troops from Syria are recommending that the Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State be allowed to keep the US-supplied weapons, a move that would likely anger NATO-ally Turkey, according to an exclusive report [1] by Reuters. The report adds: “The proposal to leave the US-supplied weapons with the Kurdish YPG[Read More…]
The Syrian army said it entered Manbij on Friday for the first time in years, after the Syrian Kurds urged Damascus to protect the town from the threat of impending Turkish military offensive, though Turkish President Erdogan has termed the handover a “psyops” by the Kurds. If Turkey mounts an offensive in Manbij, it would be the third invasion by[Read More…]
After Donald Trump’s surprise announcement in a tweet on December 19 to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria after a telephonic conversation with the Turkish President Erdogan on December 14, the decision to scale back American presence in Afghanistan by 7000 troops has also reportedly been made and the announcement is imminent. It would be pertinent to note here that[Read More…]
Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was reportedly made during a telephonic conversation with the Turkish President Erdogan on December 14, before President Trump made the momentous announcement in a Tweet on Wednesday, December 19. The decision was so sudden that even the Turkish president was caught off-guard, according to a December 22 Associated Press report[Read More…]
In a momentous policy decision on Wednesday, the Trump administration has decided to pull out the US troops from Syria. Although the current redeployment of American troops will be limited only to northern Syria to appease the US-ally Turkey where it has been a longstanding demand of the Turkish President Erdogan that Turkey will not tolerate the presence of the[Read More…]
David Sanger and William Broad reported in The New York Times [1] on Thursday that before Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was implicated in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, American intelligence agencies were trying to solve a separate mystery: was the prince laying the groundwork for building an atomic bomb? According to the report, the Saudi heir apparent[Read More…]
On November 9, Russia hosted talks between Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, the members of the Taliban from its Doha, Qatar office and representatives from eleven regional states, including China, India, Iran and Pakistan. The meeting showcased Russia’s re-emergence as a proactive global power and its regional clout. At the same time when the conference was hosted in Moscow, however, the[Read More…]
Recently, the Trump administration has announced the most stringent set of sanctions against Iran to appease Benjamin Netanyahu. Donald Trump has repeatedly said during the last two years that the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration in 2015 was an “unfair deal” that gave concessions to Iran without giving anything in return to the US. Unfortunately, there is[Read More…]
On Friday evening, Maulana Sami-ul-Haq was found dead in his Rawalpindi residence. The assassination was as gruesome as the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He was stabbed multiple times in chest, stomach and forehead. Sami-ul-Haq was widely known as the “father of the Taliban” because he was a renowned religious cleric who used to administer[Read More…]
After seven years of utter devastation and bloodletting, a consensus has emerged among all the belligerents of the Syrian war to de-escalate the conflict, except Israel which wants to further escalate the conflict because it has been the only beneficiary of the carnage in Syria. Over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and material support to the[Read More…]
The Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region is essentially a political conflict between the Gulf Arab autocrats and Iran for regional dominance which is being presented to lay Muslims in the veneer of religiosity. Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for power as the leader of Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-led Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against[Read More…]
Historically speaking, from the massacres in Bangladesh in 1971 to the training and arming of Afghan jihadists during the Soviet-Afghan war throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and then launching ill-conceived military operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas under American pressure, leading to the displacement of millions of Pashtun tribesmen, the single biggest issue in Pakistan has been the interference of army[Read More…]
On April 11, one of the “smartest” US presidents ever tweeted: “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!” When Donald Trump’s advisers drew his attention to[Read More…]
In a momentous announcement at an event in Ohio on Thursday, Donald Trump said, “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” What lends credence to the statement that the Trump administration will soon be pulling 2,000 US troops out of Syria –[Read More…]
On March 4, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A week later, another Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov was found dead in his London home and police has launched a murder investigation into his death. Skripal was[Read More…]
In June last year, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that according to information, the leader of the Islamic State Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi had reportedly been killed as a result of airstrikes conducted by the Russian aircrafts on a southern suburb of Raqqa on May 28. According to Russian claims, the airstrikes targeted a meeting of high-ranking Islamic State leaders where[Read More…]
In July 2003, Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons inspector who disclosed to the media that Tony Blair’s government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “sexed up,” was found dead in a public park a mile away from his home. The inquiry into his death concluded Kelly had committed suicide by slitting his left wrist but the mystery[Read More…]
In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception. Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in[Read More…]
Recently, General Joseph Votel, the head of US Central Command, accused Kremlin of playing as both arsonist and firefighter in Syria. This projection is farthest from truth because in fact it’s Washington which kindled the fires of militancy in Syria and now it appears desperate to douse those fires. First, Washington nurtured militants against the Syrian government for the first[Read More…]
On February 7, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor that reportedly killed and wounded dozens of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner group. In order to understand the reason why the US brazenly attacked the Russian contractors, we need to[Read More…]
In June last year, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that according to information, the leader of the Islamic State Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi had reportedly been killed as a result of airstrikes conducted by the Russian aircrafts on a southern suburb of Raqqa on May 28. Similarly, Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) told Reuters [1][Read More…]
Is it not ironic that two very similar insurgencies have simultaneously been going on in Pakistan for the last several years: the Baloch insurgency in the Balochistan province and the insurgency of the Pashtun tribesmen in the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering the US-occupied Afghanistan. While the Pakistani neoliberal elites fully sympathize with the oppressed Baloch nationalists, when[Read More…]
During the last 24 hours, 72 Turkish jets have reportedly struck 150 targets inside the Kurdish-controlled Afrin district in north-western Syria in which six civilians and three Kurdish militiamen have lost their lives. And today, Turkish ground troops in armoured vehicles have intruded five kilometres inside Afrin from Syria’s northern border with Turkey. In addition, Turkey has also mobilised the[Read More…]
Inquisitive observers of the Middle Eastern politics would naturally wonder why do Western powers prop up the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, knowing fully well that they are the ones responsible for nurturing Islamic extremism? Does this not run counter to their professed goal of eliminating Islamic radicalism and terrorism? Seemingly, the Western powers support the Gulf’s autocrats because it has been a[Read More…]
During the last week, a report by the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) on the Islamic State’s weapons found in Iraq and Syria has been doing the rounds on the media. Before the story was picked up by the mainstream media, it was first published [1] in the Wired on December 12, which has a history of spreading dubious stories and[Read More…]
On the campaign trail, in his speeches as well as on TV debates with other presidential contenders, Donald Trump repeatedly mentioned that he has a ‘secret plan’ for defeating the Islamic State without elaborating what the plan is? To the careful observers of the US-led war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, however, the outlines of Trump’s ‘secret[Read More…]
In Pakistan, there are three distinct categories of militants: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign terrorists including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Uighur rebels of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The foreign, transnational terrorists number only in a few hundreds and are hence inconsequential.[Read More…]
Since the time immemorial, it has been an article of faith of every Muslim that suicide is ‘Haram’ (prohibited) in Islam. There is a well-known Islamic precept that whoever commits suicide will go straight to hell. But the Takfirists (those who declare others as heretics) have invented a new interpretation of Islam in which suicide is glorified as ‘martyrdom’ and[Read More…]
In a momentous decision on 28 July, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified from holding public office by the country’s Supreme Court on the flimsy pretext of holding an ‘Iqama’ (a work permit) for a Dubai-based company. Although it is generally assumed the revelations in the Panama Papers, that Nawaz Sharif and his family members own offshore companies, led[Read More…]
The predicament of Imran Khan’s fanboys has been somewhat like the pubescent girl who falls head over heels in love with a promiscuous playboy; and when her family and friends try to knock some sense into her by telling her that your sweetheart is cheating on you, instead of heeding to their well-meaning advice, she thinks they are jealous of[Read More…]
Is this not one of international politics most significant ‘coincidences’ that the Balfour declaration for the creation of Israel was adopted in the same fateful year, November 1917, in which the February and October 1917 communist revolutions were taking place in Russia? No informed person can deny the importance of energy for industrial economies, but it is generally assumed in[Read More…]
Eight people have been killed and more than a dozen injured after a truck mowed down people on a bike path in Lower Manhattan. FBI is treating the incident as an act of terrorism and the driver of the vehicle has been shot by the NYPD and taken into custody alive. The suspect has been identified as a 29-year-old Uzbek[Read More…]
Recently, Pravda newspaper of Russia has reported [1] that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been suffering from serious sleep deprivation and that he was yawning and dozed off during a press conference with the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko while he was on a state visit to Kiev, and the video of the incident has been going viral over[Read More…]
On Tuesday, the Iraqi government troops have retaken the oil-rich northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk from the Kurds who had controlled the province since June 2014 when the Islamic State overran Mosul. What exactly transpired is still unclear but the two Iraqi factions of the Kurds, the Erbil-based KDP Kurds and the Suleimaniyah-based PUK Kurds, are accusing each other of[Read More…]
In order to simplify the Syrian theater of proxy wars, it can be divided into three separate and distinct zones of influence: that are, the Syrian government-controlled areas, the regions administered by the Syrian Kurds and the areas occupied by the Syrian opposition. Excluding Idlib in northwestern Syria, which has been occupied by the Syrian opposition, all the major population[Read More…]
Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Russia in Syria against Washington’s interests since last year and has recently placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system. Similarly, the Saudi King Salman, who is on a landmark state visit to Moscow, has signed several cooperation agreements with Kremlin and has also expressed his[Read More…]
Recently, the Islamic State’s purported “terror franchises” in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shi’a and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria[Read More…]
Although people often conflate democracy and liberalism but there is a fine distinction between politics and culture; a democratic system of governance falls in the category of politics, while liberalism, as a value system, falls under the rubric of culture. When we say that Islam and democracy are inconsistent, we make a category mistake as serious as the Islamists’ misconception[Read More…]
Washington’s interest in the Syrian civil war is partly about ensuring Israel’s regional security and partly it is about doing the bidding of America’s regional Sunni allies: Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States. Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for power as the leader of the Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-dominated Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against[Read More…]
Six weeks before the killing of Osama Bin Laden, on 16 March 2011, a CIA’s private contractor Raymond Davis, who had previously worked for Erik Prince’s infamous Blackwater security firm, was released from a prison in Lahore and was secretly flown to the US. On 27 January 2011, Raymond Davis had killed two armed men on a busy street in[Read More…]
It is an indisputable fact that the British colonizers built roads and railways in India, they established missionary schools, colleges and universities, they enforced English common law and the goal of exploiting the natural resources and the four hundred million strong Indian manpower at the time of independence in 1947, and trading raw materials for pennies and exporting finished goods[Read More…]
We commit a big fallacy when we assume that our educational accomplishments are our individual achievements. We like to believe that we were born with a certain innate talent which makes us intellectually superior to all the rest. But the fact of the matter is that our innate talents aren’t all that different. Some people are born with genes that[Read More…]
Peaceful, or not, Islam is only a religion just like any other cosmopolitan religion whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead of taking an essentialist approach, which lays emphasis on essences, we need to look at the evolution of social phenomena in its proper historical context. For instance: to assert that human beings are evil by nature is an essentialist[Read More…]
According to a recent infographic [1] by New York Times, 79,000 US troops have currently been deployed in Europe out of 210,000 total US troops stationed all over the world, including 47,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 17,000 in the rest of Europe. By comparison, the number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan is only 8,400 which is regarded[Read More…]
Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to April 2013, the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front were a single organization that chose the banner of “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani but he was appointed [1] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader[Read More…]
The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed [1] that according to information, which is being checked through various channels, the Islamic State’s leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi had reportedly been killed as a result of airstrikes conducted by the Russian aircrafts near Raqqa on May 28. The strikes targeted a meeting of high-ranking Islamic State leaders where al- Baghdadi had reportedly been[Read More…]
According to a recent report [1] by CBC Canada, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, which was formerly known as al-Nusra Front and then Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) since July 2016, has been removed from the terror watch-lists of the US and Canada after it merged with fighters from Zenki Brigade and hardline jihadists from Ahrar al-Sham and rebranded itself as Hayat[Read More…]
In order to simplify the Syrian theater of proxy wars, it can be divided into three separate and distinct zones: that are, the Syrian government-controlled areas, the regions administered by the Syrian Kurds and the areas that have been occupied by the Syrian opposition. Excluding Idlib Governorate which has been occupied by the Syrian opposition, all the major population centers[Read More…]
During the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected as the president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the “just war” in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. In accordance with the flawed distinction, he pledged that he would withdraw American troops stationed in Iraq. The unilateral intervention in Iraq by the Bush Administration was highly unpopular[Read More…]
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to June 2014 when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional allies and the Sunni Arab militants of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis comprised of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.[Read More…]
Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to April 2013, Islamic State and al-Nusra Front (currently Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, JFS) were a single organization that chose the banner of “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Although the current al-Nusra Front is led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani but he was appointed as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi,[Read More…]
Lately, it has become a habit of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region in order to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have reignited the flames of the internecine conflict in the Islamic World. Some self-anointed “Arabists” posit that[Read More…]
The definition of the term “terrorism” has been deliberately left undefined by the Western powers to use it as a catch-all pretext to justify their interventionist policy in the energy-rich Islamic countries. Depending on context, “terrorism” can mean two markedly distinct phenomena: that are, religious extremism or militancy. If terrorism is understood as religious extremism, then that is a cultural[Read More…]
On a positive note, it has been a good development that the Trump administration has owned the “regime change” policy of the Obama administration in Syria by launching cruise missiles strike against the Syrian air force in al-Shayrat air base. Because over the decades, it has been a convenient stratagem of the Western powers with two-party political systems, particularly the[Read More…]
The editor-in-chief of Lebanon’s prestigious al-Akhbar newspaper, Ibrahim al-Amin, has revealed in his recent editorial [1] that Tulsi Gabbard, the United States Representative for Hawaii whose trip to Syria in January and meeting with Bashar al-Assad was widely reported in media, had conveyed President Trump’s offer of cooperation to Assad during the meeting. The editorial in Arabic is full[Read More…]
Islamic State’s second-in-command, Ayad al-Jumaili, has been killed in an airstrike in al-Qaim region on Iraq’s border with Syria. The most important fact to note in al-Jumaili’s biography is that was the head of the terror group’s internal security unit and that he had previously served as an intelligence officer in Iraq’s Baathist army until 2003. Excluding al-Baghdadi who was[Read More…]
In the wake of Arab Spring uprisings in March 2011, protests began in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad. In the following months, violence between demonstrators and security forces led to a gradual militarization of conflict. Moreover, the withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq was completed in December 2011. Thus, during the initial few months of the Syrian[Read More…]
The biggest fault in democracy, as it is practiced all over the world, is the election campaign funding part, because the individuals and corporations that finance an election campaign always have ulterior motives: that is, they treat political funding as investment from which they intend to make profits by influencing executive policy and legislation. In Pakistan’s political system, there are[Read More…]
If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Similarly, the training camps located in the[Read More…]
Last month, the Islamic State recaptured Palmyra from where it was evicted by the Syrian army only in March; and this week, the Islamic State has launched a fierce assault in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, near Syria’s border with Iraq, and has successfully managed to surround the military airport, thus cutting off food supplies to the besieged city.[Read More…]
Since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of the master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla[Read More…]
George Santayana presciently said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The only difference between the Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s, that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an[Read More…]
During the last couple of months, two very similar military campaigns have simultaneously been going on in Syria and Iraq, while the Syrian offensive with Russian air support against the militants in east Aleppo has been reviled as an assault against humanity, the military campaign in Mosul by the Iraqi armed forces and Shi’a militias with American air support has[Read More…]
What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the[Read More…]
In order to understand the hype surrounding the phenomena of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, we need to understand the prevailing global economic order and its prognosis. What the pragmatic economists forecasted about the free market capitalism has turned out to be true; whether we like it or not. A kind of global economic entropy has set into motion. The money[Read More…]
The sudden thaw in Turkey’s relations with Russia and latent hostility towards America is partly due to the fact that Erdogan holds the US-based preacher, Fethullah Gulen, responsible for the July coup plot and suspects that the latter had received tacit support from certain quarters in the US; but more importantly Turkey also feels betrayed by the duplicitous American policy[Read More…]
Is it not ironic that two very similar insurgencies have simultaneously been going on in Pakistan for the last several years: the Baloch insurgency in the Balochistan province and the insurgency of the Pashtun tribesmen in the tribal areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province bordering the United States-occupied Afghanistan. The Pakistani neoliberals fully sympathize with the oppressed Baloch nationalists but when it[Read More…]
It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors the militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of Geneva Accords and the consequent withdrawal[Read More…]
In order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on the present, however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside. In the case of the creation of Islamic State, for instance,[Read More…]
Let me take this opportunity to make it clear that I am in no way sympathetic towards the unrepresentative Middle Eastern dictators in general and Bashar al-Assad in particular, but in order to assign blame for the wrongdoing in Syria, we need to remind ourselves of the elementary distinction between the constant and variable factors. Bear in mind that Bashar[Read More…]
Although, I admit that Donald Trump’s recent remarks that Obama Administration willfullycreated the Islamic State were a bit facile, but it is an irrefutable fact that Obama Administration’s policy of nurturing the Syrian militants against the Assad regime from August 2011 to August 2014 created the ideal circumstances which led to the creation of not just Islamic State but myriads[Read More…]
Some people are under the impression that democracy and Islam are incompatible. But I don’t see any contradiction between democracy and Islam, as such. Though, I admit, that there is some friction between Islam and liberalism. When we say that there is a contradiction between Islam and democracy, we make a category mistake which is a serious logical fallacy. There[Read More…]
Before the signing of the Iran nuclear deal last year, BBC’s defense correspondent, Mark Urban, alleged in a report [1] that Pakistan’s military has made a clandestine deal with Saudi Arabia that in the event of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, Pakistan would provide ready-made nuclear warheads along with delivery systems to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it should be remembered that[Read More…]
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, in August 2011, to April 2013, Islamic State and al-Nusra Front were a single organization that chose the banner of “Jabhat al Nusra.” Although, the current al-Nusra Front is led by Abu Mohammad al Jolani but he was appointed as the Emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader[Read More…]
It is an indisputable fact that morale and ideology plays an important role in the battle; moreover, we also know that the Takfiri brand of most jihadists, these days, has directly been inspired by the puritanical Wahhabi-Salafi ideology of Saudi Arabia, but ideology alone is not sufficient to succeed in the battle. Looking at Islamic State’s spectacular gains in Syria[Read More…]
The predicament of Imran Khan’s fanboys has been somewhat like the pubescent girl who falls head over heels in love with a promiscuous playboy; and when her friends try to knock some sense into her by telling her that your sweetheart is cheating on you, instead of opening her eyes up, she thinks that her friends are jealous of her[Read More…]
The policy makers of the developing countries must not fall prey to such deceptive arguments, instead, they must formulate policies which suit the interests of their working classes. The only trouble is that the governments of the Third World are dependent on foreign investment and the global loan sharks, that’s why, they cannot adopt an independent economic and trade policy.
Appeal to withdraw the notification for the public hearing for the proposed Sijimali Bauxite Mining Project 
“Making a thriller from grain” 
Key Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) Likely To Collapse In 2025-2095 
Global Biofuel Alliance at G20: Land vs Water vs Food Security- Has the government addressed the trade-offs? 
The Nijjar Murder and Indian Government’s alleged “involvement”: Reactions and Reflections 
France Will Pull Out Its Diplomats And Military From Niger, Says Macron 
Imperial Footprints in Africa: The Dismal Role of AFRICOM 
Hunger in Africa has its roots in a History of Colonialism and Neo-colonialism 
The Climate March: Magnificent and Misdirected 
Imagining a Progressive Pentagon 
“Lost Voices of Fentanyl” Rally at the White House 
Indian Government Must First Evict Dalai Lama & his Followers before Admonishing Canada for Separatist Activities 
Peasant-rebels: lineages of insurgency 
Mission to Free Assange: Australian Parliamentarians in Washington 
Bayer-ICAR Collaboration Raises Serious Concerns Regarding Indian Farm Policy 
Place of Minorities as Allotted by Savarkar, Golwalkar and Upadhyaya 
What is in the name? Attempt to stop the usage of ‘India’ by the Government 
Poona Pact: A Reappraisal 
Hate Speech Inside Parliament: Reaching a New Low 
Criminal Justice And Freedom of Speech 
75,000 Climate Protesters Marched In New York With Demand To End Fossil Fuels 
On the Dark Side of the Moon.. 
Avoiding the War on Terror would have saved over 10 million lives at home and abroad 
The Angertainer Steps Down: Rupert Murdoch’s Non-Retirement 
Climate Emergency Update, September 2023 
My appeal to Meta’s Oversight Board: Palestinian political and resistance organizations & individuals are not “terrorists” as classified by Israel 
Artificial Intelligence: Profit Versus Freedom 
How Can We Understand the Passage of Time? 
Pre- and Post-Soviet Language Policy in the East-Baltic States 
Breadcrumb 
Three Indian Movies win TIFF 2023 Awards 
Ukrainian president holds crisis talks in Washington amid failure of “spring offensive” 
Zelensky Faces Difficult Time In Washington D.C. 
Stumbling Towards Old Age And Looking for Someone to Lean On 
Tolstoy’s Dilemma 
Ukraine Peace Activists Protest During Zelensky White House Visit 
“Our world is becoming unhinged”: Antonio Guterres 
How Chances of Direct War between the USA and Russia Are Increasing G20 Biofuel Alliance threatens Food security 
Thousands Of Auto Workers Strike In Three U.S. Plants, Face Financial Hardship 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
