A raid on a Baghdad government building killed at least 18 people today, bringing the country’s death toll this month to to over 900 and putting Iraq on pace to exceed 2013’s death tool. Nearly 8,000 lives were claimed last year by spiraling, largely sectarian violence in Iraq. The large-scale...

• Kindle

Geneva II peace talks continue between the Bashar al-Assad regime, which has made Assad’s continued rule a red line, and opposition elements, who have all but conditioned the talks’ success on his removal. There are also global powers involved who are to greater and lesser extents aligned with one of...

• Kindle

Syria retains the vast majority of its chemical arsenal, can likely weaponize biological agents, and has restored the pace of its missile production to pre-war levels, according to a stream of analysis and reporting published on Tuesday and Wednesday. A written statement by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, disclosed that U.S. intelligence...

• Kindle

An overnight explosion reported in Syria’s Mediterranean port city of Latakia, which Syrian opposition sources linked to action by the Israeli Air Force (IAF), has refocused attention not just on Jerusalem’s oft-reiterated commitment to stem the flow of advanced weapons through Syria but on Russia’s increasingly open efforts to arm the Bashar al-Assad regime....

• Kindle

The Daily Beast this morning published an extensive investigation, written by the outlet’s Eli Lake, describing the Obama administration’s efforts to lobby inside Israel on behalf of specific conditions outlined by a U.S.-backed peace deal. Special administration envoy Martin Indyk has been “quietly been meeting with Israeli reservist generals and...

• Kindle

Counterterrorism officials are continuing to unpack the significance of Wednesday’s announcement by Israel’s Shin Bet security service that Israeli officials had captured three Al Qaeda-linked Palestinians plotting mass-casualty terror attacks in Israel, with Israeli CT expert Aviv Oreg telling USA Today that the plot indicated “that hard-core al-Qaeda elements are involved within Israel” for...

• Kindle

The rollout to the Geneva 2 conference stumbled over the weekend and into yesterday, marked by a series of diplomatic missteps regarding the conference’s composition and violence in Lebanon that underscored the degree to which instability in the region may deepen regardless of the talks’ outcome. A car bomb detonated...

• Kindle

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that images smuggled out of a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria show “disturbing images of emaciated children and elderly people” and indicate that there are thousands of residents in the Yarmouk camp at risk of starvation, the result of a siege being maintained by Syria’s...

• Kindle

The erosion of American influence in the Middle East has created power vacuums which are being filled by geopolitical rivals from across the region, forcing Washington’s allies to “take matters into their own hands,” according to analysis published Wednesday in the New York Times. Michael Doran and Max Boot – senior fellows...

• Kindle

The United Nations announced Tuesday that it was ceasing to update the death toll in Syria’s nearly three-year war because it can no longer reliably keep track of those killed by the conflict. The Associated Press noted that the last official figures, which were current as of July 2013, estimated that at...

• Kindle