World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The war between Iran and Israel, and behind it the United States, is another armed conflict in the Middle East. At its core, this crisis reflects a series of straits the region is traversing: straits of geography, the straits of ideology, and the straits of international law. If the Strait of…

Merchants of rumors and conspiracy theorists, much like merchants of war, feed off people’s fears and anxieties. With the first shot fired in the conflict, a wave of theories emerged. The most prominent being that the war is nothing more than a US strategic plan against China, aimed at…

Last week, my esteemed colleague Hiba Nasr and Asharq News correspondent in Washington, wrote a post that reflected palpable anguish, on her account on "X,” about the receding shadow of the Lebanese state in her village in southern Lebanon after the army's withdrawal in the face of a new Israeli…

Date: January 9, 1991 Location: The Intercontinental Hotel, Geneva The world fixed its eyes on the venue. Journalists landed from near and far. The Security Council resolution was unambiguous, demanding Iraq's immediate and complete withdrawal from Kuwait, which it had overrun. The deadline…

For its first retaliation to the American–Israeli attack of February 28, Iran struck several Arab capitals with ballistic missiles, and Tehran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to maritime navigation, leading to a highly predictable spike in oil prices. When President Donald Trump…

The bangs of Israeli airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburb interrupted an evening discussion about the future of our country after the war. Even so, the barrage of updates about strikes in the south, and the mass evacuation orders that have nearly emptied out the region south of the Litani River,…

“He is injured but alive!” That is the message that Islamic Republic authorities passed on about the newly anointed “Supreme Guide” Mojtaba Khamenei who survived an Israeli air attack that claimed the lives of his parents and his wife at the start of the current war. Speculation about Mojtaba…

Talk of restoring the shah’s monarchy has surged since the start of the current war, more than at any time since the fall of the Pahlavi regime in the late 1970s. Support for the return of Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s son, has been estimated at around one third of Iranians, though such figures are…

Benjamin Netanyahu’s persona bears an uncanny resemblance to Pahom, the protagonist of a short story by Leo Tolstoy set in Tsarist Russia. Like Tolstoy’s other works, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is a timeless masterpiece that offers insights into human life even today. Consumed by greed,…

Trying to wrap your head around the statements of US President Donald Trump and members of his administration leaves you dizzy. Contradictory statements about the causes of the war, its objectives, and how it might end have made it impossible to understand Washington’s thinking. On two separate…

Rarely have things been like this; there are few instances in history where any party felt that confronting the entire world was a condition for its survival and victory. The strikes of Iran, with almost no interval between one strike and the next, have hit Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab…

Iraq has been dealing with the repercussions of the 2010 parliamentary elections since its political process took a perilous turning point. To understand why, one must revisit the events and developments that preceded those elections. After 2003, Iraq witnessed a wave of sectarianism, violence,…