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Conflict broke out in the Libyan capital Tripoli forcing Mitiga airport, primary airport since Tripoli International was closed due to damages, to close down worsening the bloody proxy war thus escalating the crisis. Egypt and UAE have been aiding the Islamic opposition, helping to fight against the Islamic militants backed by Turkey and Qatar. Apparently Qatar's involvement in Libya goes back to the revolution that ousted Gaddafi, contributing $2 billion in support of the Islamic movements as a part of its vision to establish an Arab regime ruling through Sharia Law. As of now, no players are willing to compromise in this "state of war." 

This piece is about the education reform K-12 in Qatar. The program has started to use local education supplies to create a better community attitude toward education. Their have been efforts to create a universal curriculum and higher evaluation and testing. 

As part of a 2013 agreement signed in the Saudi Arabian capitol of Riyadh, Qatar has agreed to expel exiled leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that have taken up residence in the country that has traditionally supported them. The Muslim Brotherhood is seen as an extremist organization by many Arab states and the West but Qatar and Turkey are still supporters of them however pressures from the threat of ISIS finally coerced Qatar to honor the 2013 agreement. The exiled leaders have already been welcomed into Turkey however.

This article discusses Qatar's agreement to expel any exiled leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is just one of the many agreements that Qatar is forced to abide by under Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This decision was made as a way of shifting political alignments.

Qatar, whose former emir was quite close with Assad, not slowly draws from the civil war. A source who wishes to remain anonymous tells that Qatar still supports Syrians, but does not want to fuel the new religious conflict, rather wishes to be useful in finding a peaceful end.

This article basically states that since the US's withdrawal from Middle Eastern affairs, regional actors were left to fight over who will lead the region's future. The fight is baiscally a run off between Turkey, Qatar, Saudi, and the UAE, each country doing their part intervening in conflicts aiding their supported side. Rather than achieving goals, these proxy wars have fueled the violence, chaos, and polarization deepening the problems they originally sought to mend. While the US has succeeded in abstaining from Mid East affairs, the question now is whether or not they should continue this resignation or step in to urge for order and peace. 

This article discusses Qatar's reasons for asking the Muslim Brotherhood to leave the country. According to this article, many leaders of the Brotherhood have agreed to leave the Gulf state for the time being.

That is a huge surprise, as Qatar become something like a foreign sponsor for Morsi's presidency and floated a lot of loan offers to Egypt to ensure the success of his administration. (It didn't work, but that's another story.)

After the fall of Gaddafi a power vacuum allowed rival militias to thrive. Now, Libya has become a proxy war for other Arab nations. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Algeria on one side and Qatar and Turkey on the other. 

This article accentuates the "Age of Proxy Wars" in the Middle East. While Syria and Libya are the 2 most known proxy situations, the article illuminates other states involved as well. We know already about UAE, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, which this article also brings up, but new information suggests that Bahrain and Kuwait are supporting sides of the regional war as well. While these nations think they're doing their part to support their values, these proxy wars are actually fostering further extremism since people supporting each side do not directly suffer the consequences. The article states that the metastasizing of these jihadist groups is grave threat to US national security, and the US must intervene in order to solve this crisis. The author says the US needs to improve their performance in donor cordination, funding the right groups, as well as be more aggressive in working directly with elections, uncovering networks of money and influence. He says rather than the conduction of elections, we must focus on the nature of politics in general, curbing corruption and embedding sectarian democratic values in their political sphere.

I spent part of last week in Qatar with a brilliant group of scholars, discussing digital media in the Middle East. The article discusses primary work in Egypt focused on the ways children grew up constructing identities in which they could be at once Egyptian and Arab and at the same time modern and global

The UN is pushing for sanctions to put pressure on Libyan factions and militias to take part in political negotiations. These sanctions would target individual groups rather than the foreign backers involved in the proxy war and would freeze their assets and impose travel bans. US officials have introduced the possibility of using their own sanctions separate from the UN for a few reasons: UN sanctions move slowly if not at all, Washington could impose them whenever they wish. The US places more emphasis on the importance on external actors in the conflict than domestic groups, explaining that these countries are actually intensifying the conflict. 

This article is about how the Islamic State is being funded by wealthy gulf. These investor are described to be like "angle investors".The money that they receive from these investors is just a jumping off point, then the group finds other ways to get money like "kidnapping, oil smuggling, selling women into slavery."