... represented by Pyotr Kortunov, RIAC Program Coordinator, who made a report on the future of the JCPOA. A number of other issues related to security in the Middle East were touched upon during the conference: confrontation between the Gulf countries and Iran, prospects for resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict, potential escalation of regional conflicts, and other.
Moscow is ready to be involved and even play the role of mediator, but only if that is the desire of the parties to the conflict. In addition, Moscow does not see the need to be involved in this conflict of two powers
The escalation of tensions between Iran and the USA in January 2020 has once again raised the question of what positions will the influential actors take. Meanwhile, the international community perceives the US–Iran confrontation within the context of two key topics—the state of the ...
Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf would gain from taking control over their security interests
The beginning of 2020 was marked by yet another major crisis in the Middle East region. The crisis culminated with the US elimination of General Qasem ...
... responsibility to find immediate and long-term solutions to the wicked security dilemmas of that theatre to stanch the recurring cycle of violence and conflict.
Already tense and divided along countless fault-lines, West Asia—from the Levant to the Iranian plateau—has been on high alert following the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the influential Commander of Iran’s Quds Force and Major General of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps in Iraq.
Soleimani’s assassination was the latest ...
Time is working for Washington. Iran also has trump cards
Escalation of the US-Iranian conflict in early January 2020 led to yet another wave of American sanctions against Iran. Washington avoided a military response to Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on US military facilities ...
... impeachment process of US President Donald Trump and the US role in the MENA region would determine the future of conflicts in many countries starting from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and the future government in Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria, Turkey and Iran
“When I thought I had already reached the bottom,
they knocked from below.”
— Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
This quote of the polish aphorist and poet of the 20
th
century, Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, serves as a perfect epigraph to this in-depth 2020 forecast ...
Donald Trump put the US into the worst snare by jeopardizing US national security
Amidst an environment of a tense standoff between Iran and the US since the last couple of months, the United States assassinated high-ranking Iranian military and intelligence official Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on Friday morning along with several other Iran-backed ...
... Qasem Soleimani
. Was it the recent mob attack on the US Embassy in Bagdad? Was it the continuous pressure on the President by many US allies in the region – from Saudi Arabia to Israel – urging the White House to take more steps to stop the growing Iranian presence in the Middle East? Was it a flood of advice from self-proclaimed experts on Iran in Washington, who argued that elimination of Soleimani would shift the balance of powers in Tehran in favor of ‘reformers’ by depriving ‘hardliners’ ...
Origins of U.S. and Iranian Influence on the Iraqi Political Elite
Three major events transformed Iraq and the Middle East: the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988 and the Gulf War of 1991, the latter of which led to a change in the domestic ...
... which later merged to form ISIS.
Initially, the military and the police, which Iraq needed both to develop its statehood and to fight terrorism, were being built under the auspices of the United States. The process had essentially been a failure until Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) entered Iraq and took over. The IRGC succeeded in creating the combat-ready and highly motivated Shiite al-Hashd ash-Sha’bi (Popular Mobilization Forces, PMF). It was the PMF alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga ...