Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared today that renewed Turkish-Iranian ties will “become the backbone of regional stability” in the Middle East. “In my point of view, when Turkey and Iran join hands, this will not only benefit both countries, but also become the backbone of regional stability,” Davutoğlu said, pointing to...

• Kindle

A massive car bomb detonated yesterday in the Sinai Peninsula killed at least eleven Egyptian military personnel and injured dozens more, amid a months-long effort by the Egyptian army to uproot jihadist infrastructure and fighters from the increasingly anarchic territory: It was the deadliest attack against security forces since August and...

• Kindle

The Associated Press describes a burgeoning “strange alliance” between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the latest development in what has become a cascade of regional adjustments by traditional U.S. allies concerned that Washington is ceding its traditional role as a regional power: In one of the region’s oddest pairings, Israel and the Gulf...

• Kindle

The U.S. has in the past few decades enjoyed enormous benefits from close military-to-military ties with Cairo. Among other advantages, U.S. forces received preferential overflight rights and preferential access to the Suez Canal, both critical to U.S. efforts to move assets throughout the region. More broadly, ties between the U.S. and Egypt...

• Kindle

The Christian Science Monitor reports on efforts being made across the Middle East in general – and Egypt in particular – to push back against Islamist violence targeting them and their communities. A recent massacre during a Coptic wedding refocused attention on the subject, but southern Egypt had in fact...

• Kindle

Reuters today evaluated the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry to dampen an increasingly public spat between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia over a range of issues. The wire noted that strain has emerged “particularly on Syria’s civil war and the nuclear dispute with Iran.” It also assessed that,...

• Kindle

Secretary of State John Kerry sought this weekend and today to downplay spiking tensions between Washington and its traditional Arab allies, traveling to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to address sharp and increasingly public differences with those countries on a range of issues including the political situation in Egypt, the U.S’s...

• Kindle

New details are emerging about the extent of violent Islamist activity in the Egyptian-controlled Sinai Peninsula, which reports citing German intelligence last June had already identified as the world’s main jihadist training ground. Pitched battles in the territory – including preemptive strikes described by Arabic language media – have expanded...

• Kindle

Hamas has for the better part of a decade been regularly blasted for manufacturing humanitarian crises by shutting down the single power plant in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. In 2008 the terror group plunged Gaza into darkness and claimed that Israel was preventing sufficient fuel from reaching the territory. Israeli...

• Kindle

Analysts have been issuing increasingly pointed warning that Hamas is seeking to stage large-scale attacks in an effort to restore the terror group’s crumbling credibility, the result of a series of failed diplomatic gambles that saw the Palestinian faction align itself with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey. Cairo’s post-Brotherhood government...

• Kindle