Middle East Politics

2cents said:
This legit?

Muqtada al-Sadr gives Qasem Soleimani 48 hours to leave Iraq and promises his forces to collapse in Syria

The leader of the Sadrist movement, Moqtada al-Sadr, attacked the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guardsthe-led Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, and promised that his militias would soon collapse in Syria and Iraq.

"The time of the Wilayat al-Faqih is dying in Iraq, and the coming months will witness the degradation of the Iranian mercenaries in Syria and Yemen," Sadr addressed Sulaimani in a press statement.

http://nedaa-sy.com/en/news/6242
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Lol he’s on a mad one.

I’m all for telling the Iranians to feck off out of Iraq but he’s got to pick his battles more smartly. Pissing off Soleimani who happens to garner the loyalty of the most well armed and mobilised militant factions in Iraq is suicidal. No idea why he’s getting involved in Syrian affairs too.
 
2cents said:
This legit?

Muqtada al-Sadr gives Qasem Soleimani 48 hours to leave Iraq and promises his forces to collapse in Syria

The leader of the Sadrist movement, Moqtada al-Sadr, attacked the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guardsthe-led Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, and promised that his militias would soon collapse in Syria and Iraq.

"The time of the Wilayat al-Faqih is dying in Iraq, and the coming months will witness the degradation of the Iranian mercenaries in Syria and Yemen," Sadr addressed Sulaimani in a press statement.

http://nedaa-sy.com/en/news/6242
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All signs suggest it is legit and I suspect this is the next big battle we are going to see - Muqtada's desire to consolidate his power within the domestic Shi'a power structure v Khamenai's (through Suleimani) desperation to not lose Velayat al-Fakih influence in Baghdad and Najaf. If Khamenai loses his leverage within Iraq then his entire expansionist program across the region loses legitimacy.
 
Raoul said:
All signs suggest it is legit and I suspect this is the next big battle we are going to see - Muqtada's desire to consolidate his power within the domestic Shi'a power structure v Khamenai's (through Suleimani) desperation to not lose Velayat al-Fakih influence in Baghdad and Najaf. If Khamenai loses his leverage within Iraq then his entire expansionist program across the region loses legitimacy.
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Interesting stuff, I was expecting a major regional push-back against Iran this year, but never considered Muqtada would be one of the channels for it.
 
2cents said:
Interesting stuff, I was expecting a major regional push-back against Iran this year, but never considered Muqtada would be one of the channels for it.
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I think outsiders understate how much Iran’s excessive influence is resented amongst Iraqis, even amongst the Shi’a core. For starters a lot of the rampant corruption is attested to them.

The generalisation seems to be that Iraqis welcome the Iranians with open arms because of its largely Shi’a demographic, and that may have been the case a decade ago since the wounds of Ba’athi oppression were still fresh, but the reality is very different today. They’ve realised that Iranian stooges like Maliki have been nothing but self serving harbingers of corruption and cronyism.

Not entirely surprised with Moqtada being the flag bearer for it. He’s always been at odds with the Iranian backed militias and his stance on Iran has been consistent with that of his father’s legacy.
 
Kaos said:
The generalisation seems to be that Iraqis welcome the Iranians with open arms because of its largely Shi’a demographic
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Yeah, I know enough about the Iraqi Shi'a to understand that this is mostly a myth. Their modern history is the story of a struggle for political representation and influence within Iraq in proportion with their numbers, not a bid for union with Iran.
 
Syria’s Yarmouk camp “lies today in ruins with hardly a single building that has not been destroyed or damaged,” the United Nations stated this week.

The Syrian military announced in recent days that it had taken full control of Yarmouk camp and surrounding areas on Monday following a month-long operation aimed at routing armed insurgents from southern Damascus.

Fighters with the Islamic State group evacuated the camp by bus and were said to have retreated to the north of the country.

The entirety of the Syrian capital and it suburbs were once again under full government control for the first time since the 2011 popular protests and subsequent civil war.

While the Syrian government declared victory, Yarmouk camp, formerly the heart of the country’s Palestinian refugee community, has been reduced to rubble.

“Yarmouk was once the thriving home of 160,000 Palestinians. Today it lies in ruins, with hardly a house untouched by the conflict,” Chris Gunness, spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, told Agence France Presse.
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Chairman Woodie said:
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I never get the feeling that Lewis’s fiercest critics have read much of his work beyond a couple of articles (“Return of Islam” and “Roots of Muslim Rage”) or at most one of What Went Wrong? or Crisis of Islam. Most I think have just read Said’s famous critique (itself based only on “Return of Islam” and an earlier article). There is obviously IMO still much to criticize (especially from the 90s onward), but that goes for everybody. Reading the vitriol directed toward him now, it’s aimed at a scholar that is unrecognizable from the author of pretty much all his substantial works.
 


Amir Taheri said:
Lewis has always been mercifully free of (as I would call it) the imperialism of Western guilt, according to which non-Western peoples are seen as too inept even to make their own mistakes, let alone pay for them.
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One quality exhibited by Bernard Lewis that I greatly admired, and will miss. Too many suffer from the "imperialism of Western guilt".
 
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2cents said:
It doesn't say they're building 2000 new settlements, it says nearly 2,000 new units (i.e. houses or apartments), presumably in already existing settlements (very few if any new settlements have been founded in ages).
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Yep, still a war crime
 
Super Hans said:
Yep, still a war crime
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Kaos said:
Building one unit in an illegal settlement is a crime, never mind two bloody thousand of them.
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Well, yes. I'm not in favour of the settlement project, although I don't see them as the be all and end all issue of the conflict like others seem to.

In practical terms though, there's quite a massive difference between "2,000 new settlements" and "2,000 new units in already existing settlements" that's worth pointing out, no?
 
2cents said:
Well, yes. I'm not in favour of the settlement project, although I don't see them as the be all and end all issue of the conflict like others seem to.

In practical terms though, there's quite a massive difference between "2,000 new settlements" and "2,000 new units in already existing settlements" that's worth pointing out, no?
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No
 
Protests in Jordan the last few days:

 
The United Nations aid chief urged the Saudi-led military coalition that controls Yemen’s ports to expedite imports of vital food and fuel supplies, warning that a further 10 million Yemenis could face starvation by year-end.

After three years of conflict in which the Yemeni government, backed by Riyadh’s coalition, has fought against Iran-aligned Houthi fighters, Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with some 8.4 million people severely short of food and at risk of starvation.

“I am particularly concerned about the recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports,” Mark Lowcock, UN emergency relief co-ordinator, said in a statement read out to a Geneva briefing on Friday.
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One of the better journalists on the Middle East, Nir Rosen, talking about Iraq and Syria a couple of months ago:



(Edit): also this is worth watching on the Syrian Kurds, from back in February:

 
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