Policy Analysis

Last summer, Hamas security forces raided a mosque affiliated with the Salafi-Jihadi group Jand Ansar Allah, killing 24 and wounding 130 in the ensuing firefight. This relatively recent episode highlights the presence in Gaza of Salafi-Jihadi groups inspired by but not yet formally affiliated with al-Qaeda. Unlike Hamas, which despite

In December, the Lebanese Web site Qifa Nabki featured a satirical "news story" discussing U.S. arms transfers to Lebanon. According to the article, the U.S. gifted "cutting edge" military material to the Lebanese Armed Forces that included camouflage-print bandages and, more menacingly, the USS Tadpole, a decommissioned World War II

Yemen's reemergence in the headlines as a crucial player in the fight against al-Qaeda raises questions about Washington's next steps. What sort of relationship will the Obama administration have with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime leader of what could be the world's next failed state? Saleh spoke with President

On January 2, 2010, President Barack Obama confirmed that he had "made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government -- training and equipping their security forces, sharing intelligence and working with them to strike al-Qaeda terrorists." Increasing military aid to Sana will involve a delicate balancing

Rising social violence between Kurds and non-Kurds in Turkey, with daily incidents occurring, is an unusual, and therefore alarming, phenomenon. This violence has been spurred as much by the recent Kurdish opening, which has created a backlash against Kurdish nationalism, as it has been by the closing of the Kurdish

Over the last two years, thousands of Iraqi detainees have been released from prisons in compliance with Iraq's 2008 general amnesty law and the U.S.-Iraq Security Agreement that was enforced in January 2009. Following the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities in June, and the upsurge in violence

On Saturday, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri traveled to Damascus for a meeting with Syrian president Bashar Asad, the man widely believed to have ordered the assassination of his father, former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri. The 2005 murder sparked the Cedar Revolution, a mass protest movement that resulted in the

A new opportunity is now emerging for the "Green Movement" in Iran to demonstrate opposition to the Islamic Republic and the manipulated presidential election results earlier this year. Friday, December 18, marks the beginning of the months of Muharram and Safar in the Islamic lunar calendar. For the regime in

New data from credible private polls of the Egyptian and the urban Saudi public show strikingly high levels of support -- especially among Saudis -- for tough action against Iran's nuclear program. At the same time, these findings demonstrate clearly that economic concerns, rather than foreign policy or domestic political

In a speech in Washington, DC in August 2008, Ted Gistaro, then the United States national intelligence officer for transnational threats, painted a picture of a resurgent Al-Qaeda core, with an increasingly secure safe-haven in Pakistan's tribal areas. Al-Qaeda had, in Gistaro's view, "maintained or strengthened key elements of its

Late on December 11, Crown Prince Sultan arrived home to Saudi Arabia after a year's absence that included medical treatment in the United States and a nine-month convalescence at his palace in Morocco. Although described as "enjoying full health" and looking animated, Sultan is believed to still be unwell. In

A different version of this column originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. What is an Islamist foreign policy, exactly? Is it identifying with Muslims and their suffering, or is it identifying with anti-Western regimes even at the cost of Muslims' best interests? Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and

FEATURING Dan Meridor, Ataollah Mohajerani, Aharon Farkash, Jackson Diehl, Michael Mandelbaum, Hossein Bastani, Khalil Shikaki, Mortimer Zuckerman, Ronald Neumann, Charles Wald, and many other distinguished speakers The Proceedings In June 2009, President Barack Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver a speech outlining what he hoped would mark a "new beginning"

On December 14, Lebanese president Michel Sulaiman is scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama at the White House. It is widely anticipated that during his visit, Sulaiman will request administration support for an increase in U.S. military assistance. Despite concerns that U.S. materiel will leak to Hizballah, Washington will

During the 1960s, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought an eight-year proxy war in Yemen so fierce that Egypt repeatedly deployed chemical weapons against its Saudi-backed adversaries, the Yemeni royalists. Fifty years on, the revolutionary ideology of Egypt's former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is a distant memory, and while Cairo and

On December 8, the United Nations Security Council will host its first-ever thematic debate on drug trafficking as a threat to international security. This focus is notable. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned with the evolving threat of drug trafficking, especially as terrorist organizations stake a bigger claim in this illegal

What is an Islamist foreign policy, exactly? Is it identifying with Muslims and their suffering, or is it identifying with anti-Western regimes even at the cost of Muslims' best interests? Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government demonstrates that far from protecting Muslims and their

On December 7, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with US President Barack Obama in Washington. The meeting follows Obama's April visit to Turkey when he reached out to the Turks to realign Ankara with the US after the tumultuous years of the Bush administration. Despite Obama's efforts

On December 3, 2009, Dana Moss and Ronald Bruce St. John addressed a special Policy Forum luncheon at The Washington Institute to assess whether Tripoli's economic and political resurgence has been matched by domestic and foreign policy transformation. Dana Moss, Next Generation fellow at The Washington Institute, is the author

This PolicyWatch revisits some key points in the author's 2007 Washington Institute Policy Focus, Secularism and Foreign Policy in Turkey: New Elections, Troubling Trends. For more on this topic, please visit our Turkish Research Program page. On December 7, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Washington to meet