All Policy Analysis by Barak Barfi

The resilient Muslim Brotherhood is only feeding off Cairo’s repression campaign, which cannot ensure stability indefinitely given the government’s failures on other fronts.

Cairo has made progress on returning to its pre-revolution economic levels, but censorship, surveillance, and other humanitarian abuses continue to accelerate.

Two experts discuss how Washington can balance its sometimes conflicting interests in Egyptian security and human rights.

When Abdul Fattah al-Sisi became president in 2014, Egyptians were clamoring for stability after the chaos of the post–Arab Spring years and the failed leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood government. Emblematic of this stability, Sisi was at one point so highly regarded that his face adorned chocolate bars. Although he

Cairo needs Washington's help to avoid a drastic, potentially destabilizing water shortage while advancing the negotiations with Ethiopia.

Given the continued Islamic State threat in Syria, Washington cannot afford what is shaping up to be a bloody conflagration between allies it needs to eradicate the group.

As rebel forces race the regime for control of the hydrocarbon-rich Deir al-Zour province, Washington needs to ensure that its proxies do not instigate new conflicts in liberated areas.

Escalating hostilities between regime forces and Syrian Kurds in Hasaka will likely complicate Washington's campaign against the Islamic State, in which the Kurds and their Arab allies have been its most effective partners.

In this well-documented Research Note, Barak Barfi explores the evolution of the PYD -- the preeminent Kurdish faction in the Syrian conflict -- and its relationship to U.S. objectives.

The Kurdish forces fielded by the YPG remain at the vanguard of the anti-ISIS fight in Syria, so providing them with GPS technology, faster airstrike coordination, and other assistance would greatly further U.S. interests.

As a leading Libyan military figure carries out a comprehensive campaign to uproot extremism in his country, Washington and its allies will have to find a way to balance his efforts against the need to curb growing violence and nurture a pluralistic state.

The dominant power in Syria's Kurdish regions, the PYD, is deeply problematic but shares some common interests with the United States.

Any effort to counter the jihadists' growing hearts-and-minds campaign in Syria will require significant U.S. support for mainstream rebel forces.

The impressive electoral performance of nominally liberal parties in Libya is being widely portrayed as a setback to Islamist political momentum in North Africa, but the reality is more complicated.

During the 2011 uprisings in Libya, rebel militias emerged throughout regime-held territory, fighting Qadhafi's forces despite being largely cut off from coordination with the center of opposition power. By revolution's end, these peripheral militias were stronger than the interim government's forces and had resorted to jockeying for power against each

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited Washington last week to garner support for a Middle East cease-fire that includes dismantling Palestinian terrorist groups in the West Bank and Gaza. With the focus on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), however, one terror organization has been largely ignored: the Al-Aqsa Martyrs