Middle East and regional power politics
Ankara and Baku quarrelled over a school hijab ban, and reconciled in Shusha. The ban stayed, the Turkish adviser who opposed it went, and the oil kept flowing to Israel through Turkish soil...
Rain flooded 70,000 tents in Gaza. One year ago the tent camps flooded too, and the same official answer was given. Rain is news once. The second winter is a decision. The ceasefire has become a label...
US forces struck Qeshm on November 2, unannounced, on the eve of the vote, and again on November 6. The White House says the ceasefire holds. The war voters punished was the loud one. The quiet one goes on...
Online speculation counts down to war on Iran. It is wrong on carriers, oil, Israel, uranium and Congress, and every error points toward war. Fikr Institute checks each claim and sets out the real decision points...
A US missile killed at least 175 people, most of them children, at a girls school in Minab. Voters punished the war eight months later, for the price of fuel. The vote changed the managers. The money and the war stayed...
The vote produced two calendars: sixty days with a lame duck Congress and a president free of the ballot, then two years of divided government and the veto. The danger for Iran, the Gulf and Pakistan lies in the first...
Would a nuclear strike on Iran stay in Iran? US government scientists say an earth penetrator cannot contain the fallout, the only published model sends it into Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and winter winds over Iran blow eas…
Washington lost the image it lives on: that its threats are real. Restoring deterrence means a demonstration, and every stage on offer is Muslim ground, from Iran to the Arab soil under US bases. Three rungs, and who pays for eac…
An unverified claim says Trump may nuke an Iranian mountain site. He has ruled it out. But every line broken in this war, from nuclear sites to refineries to tankers, was crossed again. The last taboo would be too...
AP found Iranian strikes damaged 26 sites holding US equipment across seven Arab states. Now Washington moves assets out of the Gulf, sends new air defence to Israel and tells its hosts to brace. The bases are American. The groun…
A tanker was hit with limpet mines in Hormuz two months after Washington declared the lanes clear. Washington, Tehran and an unconfirmed Iran and Oman deal now draw three maps of one strait. In the Black Sea, Türkiye kept outside…
Taiz, a city of a million, is in famine, its governor says. A road blown up on October 18 cut its food, fuel and water. On October 26, the Muslim powers met in Tehran over missiles and Hormuz. The accounts published so far do not…
Twice in this war, talks were set for the days the bombs fell: June 2025 and February 2026. Now Vance proposes talks for the week the Gulf has been told to brace. And the same Iranian official got the letter one day before the Sa…
Two million Arab citizens are offered as proof Israel is no apartheid state. They voted in record numbers and won 19 seats. In government, those seats could win budgets, safety and fewer demolitions. They cannot change who the st…
Netanyahu lost his majority and blamed the Arab voter, speaking of a Zionist majority that subtracts a fifth of the citizens. Likud prepared fraud challenges before anyone voted. Trump, at 31 percent, has made the midterms condit…
An Israeli strategist said Sunni states would not unite without a Palestinian state. They did, after Gaza and the Israeli strike on Doha. Israel calls the pact a threat. It gains only if the pact is turned into a war on Iran. It …
Saudi, Pakistani and Turkish security chiefs met Iran in Tehran as Houthi missiles still fall on Riyadh. Netanyahu names a Shia axis and a Sunni axis as enemies. Both sat at one table, a day before Israel votes. Who loses if they…
The 2023 normalization between Tehran and Riyadh represents a structural realignment away from US-led security architectures.
