Manish Rai

The US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are gradually pushing ahead in an offensive towards Raqqa, the IS de facto capital in northern Syria. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have wrapped up the first phase of their operation against the IS, which is named ‘Euphrates Wrath” according to SDF military sources. The first phase of […]

There have been multiple diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict since it erupted in 2011, but all have ended in vain. Even recently, no agreement was reached or set out in a final document at the ministerial meeting on Syria held in the Swiss lakeside city of Lausanne. It proved to be a futile […]

The Kurds as we know, thanks to the Sykes-Picot order that drafted the modern day map of the Middle East after World War I, are the largest stateless people in the world. The Kurds are spread between four nations in the region — Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey — along with a wider Kurdish diaspora […]

Aleppo, Syria’s pre-war industrial and economic hub, has emerged as the civil war, high-stake battlefield, as warring parties pour in all of their military might in an effort to strike a definitive blow against their opponents. In the first year of the revolution Aleppo saw neither large-scale protests nor the deadly violence that shook other […]

Jabhat-Al-Nusra Front, once al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, has cut ties with the parent organisation with the approval of al-Qaeda central leadership. Al-Nusra Front is one of the largest and most effective rebel groups in Syria. It controls territory in the north, west and south of the country, and commands approximately 6,000-7,000 battle-hardened fighters. Originally […]

After the Arab Spring started in the Middle East in 2011, Turkey was seen as an inspiration for aspiring democracies in the region. And that is because in Turkey there is a democratic government that has a tilt towards political Islam but did so in a seemingly moderate way, is a member of NATO, a […]

After the Arab Spring started in the Middle East in 2011, Turkey was seen as an inspiration for aspiring democracies in the region. Because in Turkey there was a democratic government that had leanings towards political Islam, but did so in a seemingly moderate way. Moreover, it is a member of NATO, a growing economic […]

The Islamic State (IS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) stormed Iraq in 2014 with its takeover of major Iraqi and Syrian cities by exploiting Sunni Arab grievances in Iraq and chaos in the neighbouring Syria. But the militant group is steadily losing ground in both the countries. The so-called caliphate […]

Syrian peace talks are heading in direction of another failed process, or have already failed depending on how grim a view we take of the events unfolding in Geneva. The Syrian opposition has called a ‘pause’ to negotiations, which we can conclude as an equivalent to a walkout from the talks. Even UN’s Syria envoy […]

Muqtada al-Sadr has been considered since long as a heavyweight in the shaky Iraqi politics. When the firebrand Shiite cleric directed his Mahdi militia to attack US forces in 2004 it posed greatest challenge to the United States after the toppling of Saddam Hussein regime. Now after more than a decade the volatile leader has […]