Mustafa Fahs

In the 22 years that passed between September 11, 2001, and October 7, 2023, many things changed and much remained the same in Iraq. It continued to occupy a crucial geopolitical position, and the nature of its politics changed. After 9/11, Iraq became the arena for a globalization of regional…

Lebanese equivocation is a chronic existential threat engendered by successive periods of subjugation and occupation. These factors have generated two discourses: both considered “patriotic” by those who espouse them but irreconcilable. Together they encapsulate Lebanon’s divisions over major and…

The reformist and conservative wings of Iran’s political elite and ruling class converge around former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Driven by imperial aspirations to retrieve Iran’s historical strategic orbit, the 1979 regime developed its geopolitical narrative by fusing imperial and…

Lebanese people - especially southerners - tied their anxiety about the possibility of war to the period following the visit of Pope Leo XIV, assuming that the countdown would begin once he departed. Some residents of the South and the southern suburbs began preparing to relocate beyond what was…

The advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader, Dr. Ali Velayati, went to extreme lengths in trivializing the lives of Lebanese people. He borrowed from religious text books to narrowly tailor his conception of the situation to his ideological priorities, disregarding the lived experience of the…

Armies exist to defend national borders and prevent adversaries from occupying their country. The Lebanese Army is no different; it has the same duties as all other armies. Lebanon is currently being subjected to daily Israeli strikes, and these cannot be called anything but assaults. Whatever the…

The Iranian citizen Ahmad al-Baldi and Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi share many commonalities that neither the vast distance, nor the complex differences of the two countries’ political dynamics, nor borders, nor their ideological, ethnic, or linguistic differences can erase. The two young men,…

Forty years separate February 16, 1985, the day in which Hezbollah issued its founding statement, and November 6, 2025, the day it issued its “re-founding” yesterday. Forty, here, is not just a random number. In the view of the Sufis, it signifies passage from the outward to the inward, from…

A country that once took pride in its distinct sectarian diversity, Lebanon now finds itself overwhelmed by an excess of plurality, leading to the conflation of plurality and arithmetic being added to the longstanding conflation of sects and sectarianism. The late Imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine…

This is nothing new; Iran is structurally split into “identity and politics.” This complex dynamic branches out of this binary into several social and cultural forces and groups, majorities and minorities, center and periphery, reformist and conservative, conservative and neo-conservative... a…