Arab & Islamic Politics

This past Monday, a Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) transport was targeted by a car bomb that killed five soldiers and wounded twenty-five others. The strike was the third on the LAF since June and occurred in increasingly violent northern Lebanon. In fact, violence in and around Tripoli, the largest city

Conventional wisdom holds that when Iran's supreme leader says, "Jump," millions of Shiites, from the Beirut slums to the Saudi oilfields, ask, "How high?" But a recent meeting in Baghdad between a wealthy Lebanese Sunni politician and an ascetic Shiite theologian twice his age suggests that there is a move

Download the complete proceedings. On September 20, 2008, J. Scott Carpenter, Mohamed Abdelbaky, Oussama Safa, Engi El-Haddad, and Nader Said addressed The Washington Institute's annual Weinberg Founders Conference. Mr. Carpenter is a Keston Family fellow at the Institute and director of its Project Fikra. Mr. Abdelbaky is foreign affairs editor

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Libya last week represents the final step in a decades-long U.S. effort to reform and rehabilitate the rogue state. A charter member of the U.S. Department of State's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, after its nuclear program was disclosed in 2003, Tripoli

This PolicyWatch is the first part of a two-part series on Hamas. Read part two. Last week, Jordan's minister of information publicly confirmed that senior Jordanian officials have been meeting with Hamas in an effort to "solve pending security issues." These talks represent a significant shift for Amman, since relations

On August 7, the Iraqi parliament went on summer recess after failing to pass a critical election law, delaying the country's provincial elections until sometime next year. The failure comes after the parliament successfully passed the law on July 22, only to be vetoed by the Iraqi Presidency Council in

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayad recently appealed to the World Bank in an effort to bridge the current budget gap preventing the Palestinian Authority (PA) from paying government salaries this month. Despite a three-year $7.5 billion assistance pledge from the 2007 Paris donor conference, the PA remains in a financial

Today Syria is held out as Iran's "Airstrip One" in the Arab world -- an Orwellian island Tehran uses to project its power to Israel's borders and the shores of the Mediterranean. Indeed, Iranian-Syrian relations seem closer than ever -- including a newly signed military cooperation agreement. Ties between Damascus

On July 11, 2008, Maajid Nawaz addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Mr. Nawaz was a longtime member of the British leadership committee of Hizb al-Tahrir (HT), an international Islamist movement. In 2002, while studying in Egypt, he was arrested for his membership in the group and was