"This counter-terrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy [...] is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year: to use force against anyone who threatens America’s core interests, but …
Continue reading Turkey and IS: calculated ambivalence or uncontrollable fear?
Sometimes, it seems as though the only factors which contribute to sketch the future of the Middle East, most of them I laid out in this article, are out of the control of the citizens: sectarianism, repression, foreign intervention, coups (or non-coups)... However, and even though democracy may (still) not be seen as the key …
Continue reading Elections that may (re)shape the Middle East in 2014
It seems May is one good month for uprisings... Maybe it´s the hotter weather, maybe it´s the hormones in the Spring, maybe it´s the need to escape from study of many university-enrolled who prefer fighting for their country over revising for their last exams... It happened in Paris in 1968, it happened in Argentina in …
Continue reading Some notes on the so-called "Turkish Spring"
Anyone out there unaware of Assad's latest mischief? Really? Well, on the occasion of Syria's Independence Day, the country's stiff President gave an interview to the Syrian official television channel Al-Ikhbariya. The interview coincided with the country's Independence Day, and at one point of the ranting he linked his departure to a "decision of the …
On the occasion of the start of the Kurdish new year and before hundred of thousands of feverish supporters, imprisoned PKK (Kurdistan Worker Party, branded by many countries as terrorist organization) leader, Abdullah Ocalan, surprised many by announcing last week both a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all the group's forces (experts reckon they amount …
Continue reading Kurdistan: one people scattered throughout four countries
Discovering MENA and other thoughts 