Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen
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Wayne White was a long-time MEI scholar and a policy expert with Washington’s Middle East Policy Council. He was formerly the deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (INR/NESA) and senior regional analyst. He also served as principal Iraq analyst and head of INR/NESA’s Iraq team.
White was chief of INR’s Maghreb, Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Iraq division and State Department representative to NATO Middle East working groups. He served as the State Department’s intelligence briefer on Iran and Iraq for the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) and Jordanian cabinet-level officials, and on Iraq, Iran, and Syria for senior Israeli defense and military officials. He was a Political Officer at the US Interests Section in Baghdad, US Sinai Field Mission peacekeeper, and in various capacities as an Embassy Officer in Niger during the Sahel Drought Emergency.
There is a debate within U.S. policy circles about Russian president Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Syria. While all agree that Putin intervened to shore up the faltering regime of Bashar al-Assad, there are at least two interpretations of what Putin’s ultimate objective is.
“Crises left to fester sometimes find their own way to the front burner.” Written on January 5, 2015, this sentence reflected my fear that starving Libya of high-profile international attention was increasingly risky. The beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya by Islamic State (ISIS) extremists this week appears to have placed the situation in Libya front and center.
Excerpted from article first published on LobeLog.
Libya remains broken and violent. Secular forces made gains against Muslim extremists in Benghazi recently, but the advantage has shifted from side to side since early this year. And two rival governments vying for power amidst a near lawless country with open borders is an ideal setting for the outflow of everything from heightened concerns to munitions and fighters. Yet Libya keeps boiling away on the global back burner.
This article was first published on LobeLog.
Alongside the wave of Syrian Kurdish refugees into Turkey this month is an equally unsettling story: alarming gains by the Islamic State in an offensive against a potential ally. Syria’s Kurds carved out their own regional bastion extending west from their main base in the extreme northeast corner of Syria. For two years they have fiercely defended their lands against the Islamic State and other extremists, employing many thousands of veteran Kurdish fighters.
Bashar al-Assad and his top regime cronies appear to be operating under a deeply flawed assumption: the relatively broad-based opposition it now faces is similar to the narrower Muslim Brotherhood challenge it defeated back in 1982 by killing more than 10,000 Syrians in Hama. Much the same way it did 30 years ago, the regime keeps pounding away at the resistance. But unlike the Hama massacre, a few severe blows will not put an end to this latest uprising. Instead, Assad’s brutish tactics will only escalate the bloodshed and resistance.
