Summer 2013 was, on the whole, unkind to Qatar’s international influence and stature. The Gulf country had aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and with the Islamist Justice and Development party in Turkey. After the Brotherhood lost power, and alongside Turkey’s decline, Qatar saw its own position slip....

Iran executes more people annually than any country except for China. Since the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani Iran has maintained a pace of executions set to match last year’s total of roughly 500. A recent column in the Washington Post noted that while Rouhani was at the United...

A major Israeli Air Force exercise continued into its second week, refocusing attention on what the Washington Post last week called “an apparent message to Iran” that the Jewish state – which has committed to preventing the Islamic republic from succeeding in what is widely seen as a drive to...

At least 59 people were killed in what Reuters describes as a “spate of attacks” on mainly Shiite communities across Iraq on Thursday, the latest in a spike in violence driven both directly and indirectly by fighting in neighboring Syria. The conflict, which has gone on for more than two...

Turkish officials, including the country’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, deliberately burned “up to 10 Iranians who had been meeting inside Turkey with their [Israeli] Mossad case officers” by alerting Iran of their existence, according to an expose published late last night by the...

For a second day in a row, coverage of nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran emphasized expressions of optimism while noting that Iranian negotiators have not in fact offered anything substantively concrete or new. Officials quoted by Reuters yesterday described “no apparent narrowing of differences” and worried that what...

Syrian officials today announced that peace talks will take place – depending on the timing and source of the reports – either Nov. 23-24 or some time before the end of the year. Secretary of State Kerry pushed for the so-called Geneva II talks on Monday, stating that the purpose...

Hezbollah has for decades justified its military and political domination of Lebanon by insisting that it had to maintain its arsenal in order to defend Lebanese territory from Israel. That brand has been shattered, however, by the organization’s critical fighting in Syria on behalf of the Iran-allied Bashar al-Assad regime....

An annual European Union (EU) report dedicated to to assessing Turkey’s progress in ascending to the bloc has evaluated Turkey in light of the mass anti-government protests that rocked the country last May and June. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdo has violently cracked down on demonstrators, suppressed coverage of...

The IDF has announced the discovery and destruction of a second tunnel dug underneath Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, following one disclosed earlier this week that had been built to open up near a kindergarten which authorities believe Palestinian terrorists intended to target. The new tunnel stretched dozens of yards into Israel,...