Manish Rai

Israeli Prime Minister (PM) Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to set up a joint team of both the countries as Moscow ramps up its military support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is losing ground to Islamist militants in his country’s bloody civil war. Israel has set up a joint mechanism with […]

Now, after more than four years since it began, the full-blown civil war that developed in Syria has killed over 250,000 people, half of them civilians. In addition, the UN estimates that nearly eight million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. When the additional four million Syrians who have fled into neighbouring countries are […]

The recent diplomatic activity on Syria is intriguing. Russia, Mr Assad’s most powerful supporter, has forged new ties with Saudi Arabia, his bitter foe and a major funder of Syrian rebel groups, and has brokered a meeting between Syrian and Saudi intelligence officials. Even amid high tensions over Ukraine, there was recent diplomatic engagement between […]

The Taliban have carried out many remarkably vicious attacks in Kabul in recent days, claiming many innocent lives. These attacks may be an apparent attempt by Taliban leaders to portray unity, boost the morale of cadres and to show that the jihad against government forces and their foreign backers continues despite internal chaos. The Taliban […]

Israeli Prime Minister (PM) Benjamin Netanyahu immediately after the signing of the Iran and P5+1 nuclear agreement declared it a “stunning historical mistake”. Israelis have gone one step further by pressing US lawmakers in Congress to block the deal, with the Israeli ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, meeting privately with a group of about […]

The Afghan government and the Taliban held their first official meeting in the Pakistan hill station of Murree, a significant step beyond an informal gathering that took place in May. The most important thing about the two-day meeting is that the delegations agreed to convene again in several weeks to discuss the possibility of formal […]

Nearly a century after failing to achieve nationhood in the post-Versailles period, the Kurds are now on the move. A greater Kurdistan nation state taken from the four countries where Kurds are minorities is improbable, although greater autonomy is growing within Turkey and Syria if not Iran, and an independent Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming more […]

Weakened by years of war, Syria’s government appears ready for the country’s de facto partition, defending strategically important areas and leaving much of the country to rebels and jihadists. The strategy was in evidence recently with the Syrian army’s retreat from the ancient central city of Palmyra after an advance by Islamic State (IS). It […]

A UN sponsored Yemen Peace Conference that was to start in Geneva has been indefinitely postponed. The talks were meant to end weeks of heavy fighting and the Saudi-led air campaign against Houthi rebels amid a humanitarian crisis that has left millions in the Arab world’s poorest country short of every necessity of life, especially […]

The Pakistan army launched Operation Khyber-2 in the tribal region as part of its stepped-up efforts since a militant attack in December 2014 killed 150 people, mostly children, in Peshawar’s Army Public School. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is being squeezed out of their former tribal strongholds. Since the beginning of Operation Zarb-e-Azb after the Karachi […]