Russia’s footing in the eastern Mediterranean has given Moscow significant leverage in regional conflicts stretching from Iraq and deep into sub-Saharan Africa.
Ukraine dismantled the nuclear weapons that it inherited from the USSR’s breakup, and participated in NATO-led operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Indian Ocean.
“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades”, Charles D'Agata CBS news senior reporter noted on Friday, for which he subsequently apologized.
“Through the utilization of geoeconomics and geopolitics, Cairo emerges as a rising power on multiple strategic fronts—Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Sahel, East Africa, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine.
New-generation leaders of both social democrats and center right-wing moderates have confronted such problems as the West continued to make geopolitical and military mistakes in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean and the Near East.
Erlou, who was smuggled into Yemen in 2020, was likely evacuated on an Iraqi plane from Yemen to Iraq, before flying home to Iran where he died from COVID19 on December 18, 2021.
While Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar have always cultivated significant relations with Iran, Saudi and Emirati decision-makers have viewed Iranian regional activities and proxy wars as working against the domestic security of regional states such as Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iraq.
It has been claimed that a private intelligence and security company such as Blackwater had close commercial ties with the CIA including carrying out assassinations, interrogation activities, kidnappings, and other technical and physical pursuits in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to combat radical terrorist elements.
As a result, in the last few months, nearly 2,000 refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, have been trapped between Belarus and Poland.
It quickly became obvious, however, that the post-Soviet global paradigm was unsustainable, as Europe’s economic influence was rapidly shrinking and Washington’s desperate attempt at policing the world was failing due, in part, to its own miscalculations but also to the stiff resistance it faced in its new colonial domains, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read: Muslim American Votes Were More Anti-Trump than Pro-BidenFrom the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus structured by the Patriot Act to the gruesome wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that took the lives of millions, the common denominator was the use of Muslims as political collateral.
Despite the regional de-escalations and the relative improvement of the Saudi-Iran relations in the wake of Iraq's initiative to host talks between the two rivals, Riyadh remains skeptical about the prospects of its negotiations with Iran.
The developments in Iraq and Lebanon over the past two years – since the uprisings of October 2019 broke out in both countries – and the growing anti-Iranian sentiments in both countries, reinvigorated the Saudi drive to try and instrumentalize the new dynamics in order to attempt to roll back Iranian influence in the region.
In the western context, terrorism is the use of violence for a political or ideological goal and of course we can see that translates in some places to people that the government is not happy with and in other places where the government itself would fit that definition, but it’s involved in the use of violence for political aims, for example in Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth.