President Trump’s decision last month to assassinate Iran’s top military general on Iraqi soil – over the objection of the Iraqi government – has damaged the U.S. relationship with its “ally” Iraq and set the region on the brink of war. Iran’s measured response – a few missiles fired on an Iraqi base after advance warning was given – is the only reason the U.S. is not mired in another Middle East war. Trump said his decision to assassinate Gen. Qassim Soleimani was intended to prevent a war, not start a war. But no one in his right mind would…

Palestine’s Christian population is dwindling at an alarming rate. The world’s most ancient Christian community is moving elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel. Christian leaders from Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on October 15. Their gathering was titled: “The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective”. One major issue that highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of Palestinian Christians in Palestine. There are varied estimates on how many Palestinian Christians are still living in Palestine today, compared with the period before 1948 when the state of Israel was…

A series of setbacks for counter-terrorism operations by the G5 Sahel states – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger – has exacerbated spiralling insecurity in the Sahel since early 2019. This will have severe stability impacts for Mali and Burkina Faso in particular.  Three key risk points: 1. The latest cycle of violence has sparked rising levels of civil unrest and military discontent, putting upward pressure on political stability risks in the Sahel in the coming months. 2. Cracks in the military response will push G5 Sahel leaders to form new non-military alliances or seek unconventional solutions. Nonetheless, Western allies will…

The hashtag #PresidentWarren was trending on Twitter in the United States on Tuesday morning as supporters of Elizabeth Warren flooded social media with the phrase amid the primary candidate's polling decline. As the Massachusetts senator was on the campaign stump in Nevada ahead of the state's Democratic caucus on Saturday, the candidate's backers buoyed her by getting #PresidentWarren to sixth place in the U.S. Twitter trending charts. At the time of writing, the social media platform records that 137,000 tweets have used the hashtag declaring support for the former Democratic primary frontrunner. Using the hashtag, New Mexico Rep. Debra Haaland…

The world is waiting anxiously to see whether the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban will agree to a one-week truce that could set the stage for a “permanent and comprehensive” ceasefire and a withdrawal of US and other foreign occupation forces from Afghanistan. Could the talks be for real this time, or will they turn out to be just another smokescreen for President Trump’s addiction to mass murder and celebrity whack-a-mole? If the ceasefire really happens, nobody will be happier than the Afghans fighting and dying on the front lines of a war that one described to a BBC reporter as “not really our fight.”…