On May 16th, it was exactly one hundred years ago that a British and a French diplomat drew the borders of the contemporary Middle East and, in doing so, were responsible for many of the conflicts of the past century. Bruno de Cordier and Tom Kenis weigh the importance of Sykes-Picot.
The Great Lakes region is rattled by yet another armed conflict. The fighting has stayed under the international radar, but could broaden and threathen whatever uneasy arrangements for peace or stability might be in place. Alex Ntung takes us up the High Plateaus in South Kivu and into the deep roots of recent violence there.
Since the start of the Syrian Revolution, Syrian activists, armed with camera’s, pencils and paper, count the death, map tortures and other human rights violations. Journalist Ignacio Delgado spoke with some of them, the so called dead counters.
Nusaybin is likely to be the next battlefield in the struggle between the Turkish army and Kurdish militants. In the border town, plenty of digging to erect new barricades is going on in the neighbourhoods that have declared themselves autonomous. Because with the beginning of military operations in the neighbouring town of Idil, a confrontation&nb ...
Since August last year, the violence in the Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey flared up again. Kurdish youth affiliated with the PKK engaged in battle with the state police and army. The fights struck Sur, the historic centre of Diyarbakir, under siege since December.
The award-winning Syrian journalist Rami Jarrah fled Syria four years ago, but over the last few months he has returned several times to report on the situation in his country. Last week he was arrested in Turkey but he has now been released. Pieter Stockmans interviewed him one week before he was arrested.
Over the past year thousands of Jezidi women were made a slave and raped by Islamic State (IS) fighters. Some of them got away. They returned to Northern Iraq: ill, broken and severely traumatised.
Over a thousand people attended a lecture organized by MO* earlier this month. Gie Goris, editor-in-chief, sat down with Robert Fisk beforehand and talked about Syria, the importance of history and the numerous contradictions in the Middle East. 'Unless we see Syria as a product of its past as well as its present, we will come up with crazed ideas ...
Twelve years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the curfew in Baghdad has been lifted. However, there is little reason to rejoice. In 2013, Barack Obama announced the end of a decade of American intervention in Iraq. Today, his nation is involved in yet another war in the area. As the International Coalition has resorted to targetting the Islamic Sta ...
Toby Matthiesen, an internationally renowned British academic at Cambridge University and expert on the Gulf countries, warns in an interview with MO* for what he calls ‘entrepreneurs in sectarian identity’: elites that are abusing and manipulating sectarian differences for political and economical purposes. He also sheds his light on t ...
As I sit here in my office cum bedroom in Gaza City, listening to the airstrikes and rocket fire, there is talk of how to bring the violence to an end. This is to be eminently desired, particularly for the civilian population in Gaza who have suffered the brunt of this escalation. But when I think of the 17,000 displaced people sheltered ...