Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by David Hearst
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Dahlan: Philanthropist or notorious fixer?
About two weeks after the abortive coup in Turkey in July 2016, I reported the allegation from a high-level Turkish security source that the United Arab Emirates had collaborated with the coup plotters, using the exiled Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan as a go-between. I reported the Turkish claim that Dahlan was…
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Why Russia and the West can’t win in Syria
Ever since the Soviet Union fell, Russia and the US have had an asymmetric relationship. In all its moods – the pendulum has swung from craven pro-Westernism to hostile nationalism – the Russian foreign policy elite has never stopped giving finger-wagging lectures to Western audiences. Russia’s sense of betrayal runs…
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Exodus and betrayal: How a Syrian Nakba was created
US Secretary of State John Kerry came close to revealing his true thoughts when he was accosted by two Syrian aid workers at a reception in London after the collapse of the Geneva talks last week. The Syrians accused him of doing nothing to protect civilians from the onslaught they…
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Putin’s war in Syria is Chechnya revisited
Nearly four months into its intervention, Russia is an active combatant in the Syrian civil war. This is not just an assertion. It is borne out by casualty figures and the refugee flows. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirm in their latest figures that Russian air strikes have killed…
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Syria: Where reason is crushed in the rush to war
The First World War started over less. Jets from Turkey, a member of NATO, shot down a Sukhoi 24 fighter from Russia, a state with around 7,700 nuclear warheads, over Turkey’s border with Syria. The circumstances and location of the shooting are, of course, in dispute. The Turks say it…
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Sisi Must Go, Before It Is Too Late
With each planeload evacuating Russian and British tourists, Sharm el-Sheikh can feel its life blood ebbing. Arthur, on a fixed salary of 2000 Egyptian pounds (500 more than the minimum wage) says: ” I don’t know what happened on that plane. I have a feeling we are being manipulated and…
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New Intifada for a New Generation
A few days before he stabbed and killed two ultra-orthodox Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem before being shot dead, Muhannad Halabi addressed himself on his Facebook wall to his president. Mahmoud Abbas had accused Israel in his UN speech of letting extremists into the Al-Aqsa compound. “Nice speech…
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Blair, Gaza and all that gas
Of all the bizarre encounters the Palestinian conflict has generated, Tony Blair’s four meetings in Doha with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal must surely rank as among the oddest. Here was the Quartet’s Middle East envoy breaking the Quartet’s own rules about not talking to Hamas until it recognises Israel – rules that…
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The Fatwa of Ayatollah el-Sisi
Sunday was a midsummer’s day, whose balmy warmth lulled Londoners like me into a false and strictly transient sense that all was right in the world. I logged onto my emails. First up was a complaint from a reader about the Middle East Eye’s coverage of the opening of the…
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Iran and the Sunni Dictators Are the Best Recruiters for Daesh
John Allen, the retired marine general charged by Obama to coordinate the campaign against Daesh is a man confident of his facts. Fresh from Turkey, which had just agreed to enter the air campaign against the militants, he told the Aspen Security Forum that Daesh are losing: I do believe…
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Sisi is Pushing Egypt to the Brink
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gave on Tuesday the clearest indication so far that he intends to hang the democratically elected president whose power he usurped. Railing against the inability of the state to deal with the militant insurgency he himself stoked, Sisi pledged legislation to allow his courts to dispense summary…
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Why Tony Blair is talking to Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal
News that Tony Blair and his officials are in active negotiation with Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas to bring about an end to the eight year siege of Gaza might come as a surprise to those acquainted with the record of the former Middle East envoy. Blair has provided…
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Al Jazeera’s Mansour 1: Sisi 0
In 2004, only one news organisation stayed in Fallujah to report one of the bloodiest battles the US fought in the Iraq War. It was only thanks to Al Jazeera’s reporter Ahmed Mansour and its cameramen Layth Mustaq, that the world knew what was going on in the city. Their…
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How Saleh Danced on the Head of the CIA
The claims that Hani Muhammad Mujahid makes cannot be verified. What he said about his time as a foot soldier for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Waziristan “tracks” with what a former director of counter-terrorism for the CIA knew at the time. But no one can confirm the claim itself. But…
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In Egypt, Thieves Fall Out
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has had two years of unlimited power and support to build a political base. During this time, he received $39.5 billion in cash, loans and petrol derivatives from three Gulf states up to January of last year. Since then, the figure may have risen closer to $50…
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Does Sisi retain the support of his top generals?
Follow the money. Actually, Deep Throat or W.Mark Felt Jr of the FBI, as he revealed himself to be, never uttered those words to the Washington Post reporter Carl Woodward. This has not stopped the best line from the Watergate scandal becoming a leitmotiv for political scandals since. If you…
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Salman’s Generational Change in Saudi Arabia
When the late King Abdullah appointed his half-brother, Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz, as deputy crown prince last year, he added an unusual rider. The decree stated: “Nobody can change this decision”. Well, his successor King Salman just has. I wrote at the time of the decree: ” There is nothing…
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Sisi’s Egypt Pushes Migrants Into the Sea
Europe wept crocodile tears over the mass grave that the Mediterranean has become. Reactions ranged from a begrudging acknowledgment from British officials that they got the consequences of Nato’s military intervention in Libya wrong, to calls for another one. Few have shown any sign that they will treat the mass…
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Stakes for Saudis are High in Yemen
Saudi Arabia a critical juncture in its air campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. There have been gains. The Houthis have been pushed back in Marib by tribal forces in the North and from areas of central Aden in the south. Their coalition with army units loyal to the ousted…
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Has Iran over reached itself in Yemen?
When the Saudi ambassador in Washington announced the launching of airstrikes and a military intervention in Yemen on Wednesday night, the kingdom surprised everyone – not least Iran. Conventional wisdom was that Riyadh had dithered and left it too late. The Houthis and elements of the army loyal to the…
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Bibi or Buji: no change either way
There are five states of Israel, only two of which are going to the polls today. There is the Jewish state which is a democracy for its Jewish citizens only. These voters are unsentimental about their political leaders and prepared to topple, or even jail them. There is the state…
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Sisi tapes are genuine, British forensic lab finds
On Sunday night Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi took to the air to proclaim his innocence. Stung by the publication of secretly recorded conversations in which the Egyptian president and his senior staff revealed their contempt for their Gulf donors, discussing how to tap them for billions more and how to divert…
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Frantic Intrigue of King Abdullah’s Last Hours
King Abdullah’s death was triggered by massive internal bleeding and not by pneumonia, informed Saudi sources have told me. The collapse in his health, which happened on December 31 last year, prevented the King from carrying out a plan to remove his half brother Salman from the position of crown…
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The many faces of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi
Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi is an actor of some talent. To the revolutionary leaders in Tahrir Square, and to the youth leaders he met, he was the general who told them the army was on their side. To Egypt’s first democratically elected president, he was the religiously observant officer, whose hands…