On December 29, 2018, the head of the occupying government in Crimea, Sergey Aksenov, proposed to transport Ukrainian offshore oil and natural gas drilling rigs (“nationalized” by Russia after the Crimean annexation) from the Black Sea to the Syrian coastal shelf (UAWire, December 30, 2018).... MORE

Over the past year, there has been an increased awareness of, and attention to, the activities of Iran's intelligence services and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to target Iranian dissidents and leaders of diaspora movements that are based in Europe (The National [Abu Dhabi],... MORE

The Egyptian military dealt a serious blow to the Islamic State’s (IS) Egyptian province, Wilayat (province) Sinai, when an airstrike killed influential spokesman Muhammad Ahmad Ali al-Islawi, a.k.a Abu Osama al-Masri, last year. Al-Masri’s death was confirmed on November 5, 2018, when the North Sinai-based... MORE

Russian diplomacy is well known for its apparent readiness to engage with all parties to the multiple conflicts in the Middle East, and this characteristic has recently produced another awkward tangle of opportunistic intrigues. President Vladimir Putin fancies himself a master of communicating with difficult... MORE

Iraq: US-Iran Tensions Inflaming Divisions Already Being Exploited by Islamic State Brian M. Perkins Tensions between the United States and Iran have continued to escalate in recent weeks amid concerns regarding the persistence of Islamic State (IS) fighters in Iraq. IS cells had remained in... MORE

Introduction On  April 23, 37 individuals were killed in state-mandated executions across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, each accused of terror-related crimes; at least 33 of those killed were Shia Muslims (Arab News, April 23). The individual charges have not been released, with officials only... MORE

Until the Russian Federation launched a barrage of cruise missiles against Syria from ships in the Caspian Sea in October 2015 (see EDM, October 26, 2015), few people in the West devoted much attention to Russia’s Caspian Flotilla, viewing it, if at all, as a... MORE

Moscow has organized and deployed a large network of “government-organized non-governmental organizations” (GONGO) in both Russia itself and in Belarus. These entities were first elaborated prior to the 2014 Russian attack on Ukraine to promote the integration and absorption of Belarus into the Russian Federation.... MORE

May 21 is the most unhappy day of the year for the more than half a million Circassians still living in their ancestral homeland and the more than five million who live in forced exile. On that date, in 1864—after a war that lasted more... MORE

Since Moscow’s military intervention in Syria, expert attention has intermittently turned to the role played by Russian special forces in this theater of operations. On May 10, a number of photographs were published online showing Russian special forces operating in northwestern Syria (Almasdarnews.com, May 10).... MORE