Iraq

Iraq has taken the first steps toward forming a new government, but whether it can achieve lasting peace in the country remains questionable. Mohammed Shia’ Sabbar Al-Sudani, a former minister who has unexpectedly emerged as the new leader of the Shiites, is poised to take power as prime minister  after forming a new coalition government with Kurdish and Sunni…

Due to the US administration’s policy of continuous borrowing, including to finance the armed conflict in Ukraine, amid record inflation and fears of an impending recession, public debt exceeded $31 trillion for the first time. The Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, but tighter lending policies are causing the federal government to spend $500 billion on servicing…

Almost a year after Iraq’s last parliamentary elections in October 2021, no government has yet been formed. There is a fierce power struggle to form a government between the Sadrist movement, led by populist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Coordination Framework (CF) alliance, which includes a number of Shiite parties largely united in their…

Ayed al-Hilali, one of the leaders of the Coordination Framework Alliance (CFA), in an interview with Shafak News, said his supporters were determined to form a new government in Iraq. He categorically rejected Imam Muqtada al-Sadr’s call for the current Prime Minister Mustafa al-Qazimi and his cabinet to retain the authority to oversee new parliamentary elections…

For the past month, there have been bitter political disputes in Iraq that have divided and polarized different communities, making it impossible to elect representatives to the country’s highest bodies. These divisions have deeply engrained themselves into the different strata of the society through social media, creating disputes and barriers not only between communities …

Regrettably, Iraq is going through one of the most serious political crises since the unjustified aggression of the United States, which deliberately destroyed the state mechanism of the Arab country. Nine months after the last parliamentary elections, Iraqi politicians still have not agreed on candidates for the posts of president and prime minister. Inevitably, disagreements…

Since July 20, Iraq has been swept by a spontaneous wave of anti-Turkish actions after the night missile strike of the Barakh resort zone in the Zakhu district of the Northern Iraq province of Duhok, a city at the border of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Turkey. According to the information available, eight tourists were killed…

Last month, Shiite populist leader Muqtada al-Sadr called for his supporters to resign from the Iraqi parliament. Out of 73 deputies, 64 members bound by party discipline resigned immediately and were quickly replaced by others from other parties. The unprecedented for Iraq, but quick move could turn the entire electoral map over in favor of Sadr’s rival, the Coordination…

For the past two years, the US has been actively trying to rally the Arab world around Israel, to solve the “Palestinian issue” in American terms and to force Palestine to resolve the conflict with Israel through Donald Trump’s “deal of the century,” which has a clear bias in favor of the Jewish state. Washington does not support the Palestinian…

Reaching a quorum in Iraq’s presidential election remains an insurmountable obstacle so far for Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr and his tripartite parliamentary alliance.  The last round of voting for the president, which went nowhere, showed this quite clearly. Negotiators and political leaders believe, local media reported, that the influential Shiite cleric and his political allies…

Since Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr won Iraq’s widely boycotted elections last October, there has been a steady stream of news reports, forecasts and analyses claiming that this could be the beginning of the end of Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs. While such estimates are certainly optimistic, they are perhaps somewhat naive and misguided. Iran remains the most…

Even though the US has been seeking to withdraw from the Middle East to relocate its sources to the Indo-Pacific region to tackle China’s growing influence in Southeast Asia, extricating itself from a region the US has been dominating since the end of the Second World War has proved to be a lot harder than the US policy makers might have expected when they decided to revive…