There are those who think that the region as a whole may be starting to go through something similar to what Europe went through in the early 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War, when Protestant and Catholic states battled it out. This is a conflict which is not only bigger than al-Qa’eda and similar groups, but far bigger than any of us. It is one which will re-align not only the Middle East, but the religion of Islam.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
7More
Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East's 30 year war » The Spectator - 0 views
www.spectator.co.uk/...armageddon-awaits
proxy wars leadership polarization US Saudi Iran the middle east war
shared by allieggg on 21 Nov 14
- No Cached
-
Either way there will be a need for a Treaty of Westphalia-style solution — a redrawing of boundaries in a region where boundaries have been bursting for decades.
-
But for the time being, a distinct and timeless stand-off between two regional powers, with religious excuses and religiously affiliated proxies will in all probability remain the main driver of this conflict.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
‘Saudi Arabia is the custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and the birthplace of Islam. As such, it is the eminent leader of the wider Muslim world. Iran portrays itself as the leader of not just the minority Shiite world, but of all Muslim revolutionaries interested in standing up to the West.’
-
‘Saudi Arabia will oppose any and all of Iran’s actions in other countries, because it is Saudi Arabia’s position that Iran has no right to meddle in other nations’ internal affairs, especially those of Arab states.’
-
Saudi officials more recently called for the Iranian leadership to be summoned to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes. Then, just the month before last, as the P5+1 countries eased sanctions on Iran after arriving at an interim deal in Geneva, Saudi saw its greatest fear — a nuclear Iran — grow more likely. And in the immediate aftermath of the Geneva deal, Saudi sources darkly warned of the country now taking Iranian matters ‘into their own hands’. There are rumours that the Saudis would buy nuclear bombs ‘off the shelf’ from their friends in Pakistan if Iran ever reaches anything like the nuclear threshold. In that case, this Westphalian solution could be prefaced with a mushroom cloud.
-
This article touches on an array of ideas but for the sake of my research I focused on the "Thirty Years War" section. Douglass Murray from The Spectator conveys the perspective that the Middle East is likely to be going through a similar 17th century European 30 years war, when Protestant and Catholics launched a full fledged war against one another. This means that religious war in the Middle East is so much bigger than just al-Qaeda and similar groups. The conflict will re-align the region, but also the entire religion of Islam. Douglass says the outcome would call for a Treaty of Westphalia-style solution, redrawing boundaries of a region where they've been bursting for decades. For the time being the drivers of the conflict is a standoff between the two regional powers and their affiliated proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
1More
Britain vows 'significant' support for Syrian opposition - 0 views
english.alarabiya.net/...rt-for-Syrian-opposition-.html
Britain Syria Revolution President Bashar al-Assad
shared by mpatel5 on 11 Nov 14
- No Cached
-
Britain will make "a significant contribution" to equip and train the moderate Syrian opposition to defeat both Islamic State extremists and the Damascus regime of President Bashar al-Assad, its foreign secretary said on Monday. Secretary of Foreign Affairs made a statement,"The UK is helping the opposition establish security and governance, and to deliver essential services. This includes life-saving search and rescue training, helping Syrians whose homes have been reduced to rubble by the regime's bombs."
US Department of State - 0 views
US Department of State - 0 views
8More
Is Libya on the brink of a new civil war? - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
-
In the past year alone, more than 80 people, many of them high-ranking military and police figures, have been killed in eastern Libya.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
The country's prime minister recently called on western powers to help him stop the spread of what he calls 'militancy' in his country.
-
There are more than 225,000 Libyans registered in militias. They receive state salaries but often act outisde of government control, taking orders from local or political commanders.
-
Groups in Libya's eastern Cyrenaica region and in the southern Fezzan region have called for independence
-
In Cyrenaica, former rebel leader Ibrahim al-Jathran and his 20,000 men strong militia say they now run local affairs, with Jathran and his men controlling facilities that account for 60 percent of Libya's oil wealth.
72More
Libya's civil war: That it should come to this | The Economist - 3 views
-
It is split between a government in Beida, in the east of the country, which is aligned with the military; and another in Tripoli, in the west, which is dominated by Islamists and militias from western coastal cities
- ...69 more annotations...
-
the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya
-
Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control
-
In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.
-
Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya
-
he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.
-
The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.
-
Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside
-
tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi
-
The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered
-
He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes
-
Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks
-
the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.
-
In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.
-
In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity
-
The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote
-
Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.
-
Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before
-
Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east
-
Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government
-
So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.
-
The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.
-
General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry
-
the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam
-
Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers
-
Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists
-
threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.
-
The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset
-
And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies
-
ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.
-
On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint
-
have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines
-
Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms
-
If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table
-
Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west
-
the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army
-
July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.
-
In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support
-
Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world
-
opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council
-
Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
-
In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.
4More
Saudi Arabia's education system in the spotlight again - Al Arabiya English - 0 views
-
Education in Saudi Arabia is in the spotlight again with the appointment of a new minister for this famously problematic ministry. In fact, education has always been a main concern for Saudi officials involved in public affairs and they were about to lose hope that the ministry, and the education sector as a whole, could be fixed. Whenever unemployment, labor and terrorism issues are brought up, education becomes the main concern of parliament and the media.
-
The report only covers 13 Arab countries where statistical information was available. Among those countries is Saudi Arabia whose statistics reveal that about half of the male students did not succeed in acquiring basic education after four years of primary school. Girls, however, were better because one third were able to acquire the basic requirements in education and thus they recorded the highest difference between boys and girls in the Arab world.
-
. This is the crisis tackled by the Brookings report, a crisis manifested through protests and anger in the streets of the Arab Spring countries.
Demystifying the Arab Spring | Foreign Affairs - 0 views
3More
Human Trafficking In The Middle East: Manola�s Story - 0 views
-
a military coup in Madagascar saw the percentage of poor people (those living on less than $1 a day) rise from 67% to 76%
1More
Sex, lies, and debt potentially exposed by the latest hack of US data from China - 0 views
11More
What is the Muslim Brotherhood? - CNN.com - 1 views
-
is a religious and political group founded on the belief that Islam is not simply a religion, but a way of life
-
advocates a move away from secularism, and a return to the rules of the Quran as a basis for healthy families, communities, and states.
-
slamic Sharia (way of life or principles) as the basis controlling the affairs of state and society and working "to achieve unification
- ...2 more annotations...
-
is government failed to keep order as the economy tanked and crime soared, including open sexual assaults on women in Egypt's streets. The chaos drove away many tourists and investors.
-
The issues surrounding the brotherhood and the fear surrounding the idea that all of Egypt would be expected to become part of the brotherhood are discussed on this page. The original foundation of the brotherhood was based on the idea of "liberating them from foreign imperialism" as well as forming "unification" as a nation. Issues presented with the brotherhood include: a "poor economic stability or growth, increased crime, and assaults on women."
- ...1 more comment...
-
The issues surrounding the brotherhood and the fear surrounding the idea that all of Egypt would be expected to become part of the brotherhood are discussed on this page. The original foundation of the brotherhood was based on the idea of "liberating them from foreign imperialism" as well as forming "unification" as a nation. Issues presented with the brotherhood include: a "poor economic stability or growth, increased crime, and assaults on women."
-
The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest and largest opposition group group in Egypt. It's members control many of the country's professional organizations.
-
This article gives background information regarding who and what the Muslim Brotherhood is. It provides historical significance of the group as well as give suggestions as to why there is interest in learning about the group and their ideals.
1More
Egypt's New Terrorism Law - 0 views
-
The Atlantic Council promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs based on the central role of the Atlantic Community in meeting global challenges. Founded in 1961, the Council provides an essential forum for navigating the dramatic shifts in economic and political influence that are shaping the twenty-first century by educating and galvanizing its uniquely influential, nonpartisan network of international political, business, and intellectual leaders.
1More
Israeli soldiers assault Palestinian detainees - 0 views
-
Four Palestinians arrested this week for Facebook posts have spoken of physical assaults they endured during their detention and interrogation. The testimonies were collected by the Palestinian Committee for Prisoners' Affairs and relate to four Palestinian youths, including at least two teenagers detained.
1More
Shoukry urges Libyan parliament to authenticate newly formed government - 1 views
-
Egypt's Foreign minister is urging the Libyan parliament, the only body Egypt recognizes as a legitimate authority in Libya, to authenticate Libya's newly formed unity government. Egypt believes that Libyan authentication and control of it's own affairs, is the only way forward for Libya to achieve stability.
1More
Who is the Muslim Brotherhood and their role after Mubarak - 0 views
1More
Why Hezbollah Might be the Iran Deal's Biggest Loser | Foreign Affairs - 0 views
‹ Previous
21 - 38 of 38