Middle East Near You

“There is no national feeling. Between town and town, village and village, family and family, creed and creed, exist intimate jealousies… to render a spontaneous union impossible. The largest...

When Boris Johnson was voted in as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom by default last month, there was a lot of speculation...

Imagine an Atlantic region where Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela teamed up to sign a new landmark NAFTA-like agreement, distributing amongst themselves the oil and natural gas reserves off...

Gaza. The very name evokes images of Israeli bombardment, crumbling infrastructure, keffiyeh-clad protestors standing defiantly with Palestinian flags and slingshots, and screaming children shot by snipers in a fog...

A plethora of unflattering phrases litters the discourse surrounding relations between Turkey and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), including “strategic liability”, “loose cannon”, “reckless, aggressive ally” and “fifth...

On this day in 1978, Israeli military forces finally withdrew from Lebanon three months after their invasion of southern Lebanon in an effort to hunt down and eliminate the...

When a ceasefire was negotiated in September last year between Russia and Turkey for the purpose of setting up a buffer zone in Idlib province – the last opposition-held...

Imagine your home being raided at pre-dawn hours by gun-wielding soldiers, your laptop and devices which connect you to the world being confiscated, your dignity stripped from you as...

The infamous Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq was revealed to be the centre of an extensive network run by the US military after the coalition’s invasion of the...

Between 16 and 20 March, the debating team of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University was at the forefront of the 5th International Universities’ Debating Championship held in Qatar. The team, made...

To make a resolution for self-development and personal aims at the start of the New Year is a natural thing. Those resolutions, however, usually range from going to the...

Imagine that you were a state in which the unruly masses of an ethnic minority rebelled in one of your provinces. Would you crush it with your own security...

Throughout the last month the world has been gripped by the murder of the acclaimed Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. After his disappearance on...

As the call to prayer echoed throughout the vast valley that encompasses the city of Bolu, I thought to myself how 1,000 people from all around the world being...

Turkey has thought long and hard about intervention in neighbouring countries. Throughout the first five years of the conflict on its southern border in Syria, for example, it was...

Gone are the days when an innocent little cluster of Emirates lay on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula with a flourishing economy, an open-for-business attitude and the...

A century after the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic, the country is looking to celebrate its hundredth birthday in a way that has become popular throughout the Middle...

Live from #PBA17 - 6.30pm on Thursday, 23rd November

“We flew over the making of a new country which one day, if the Kurds weren’t betrayed again – as I rather thought they might be – would be...

As the pick-up trucks and black-clad soldiers of Daesh overran the city of Raqqa in northern Syria and declared the establishment of a new ‘Caliphate’ in 2014, the world...

Not all incidents in international relations are cataclysmic or game-changing; most are simply another thread woven into the web of history. The blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia...

Iran: The great Islamic Republic, a state that has defied the West, the guardian of the Islamic world, the helper of the Arab world, and the saviour of Palestine....

Put yourself in the shoes of a country, economically rich, culturally diverse, and relatively stable in terms of government. Now imagine that a senior diplomat of a foreign country...

The Republic of Turkey has for over half a century been enduring a crisis of identities and a struggle of political association between Asia and Europe, the two continents...