Conflicts Forum

By Alastair Crooke, The Guardian, June 1, 2008
Sir Hugh Orde speaks rarely heard truth when he says that he has never heard of a terrorist campaign that was “policed out”, adding that he could not think of one that had not ended through negotiation.
There has been an unshakeable faith in Europe that western law-enforcement officers […]

A Conflicts Forum Monograph, by Khalid Amayreh, October, 2007
The rise of the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas — in the Palestinian Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza provided a challenge for Israel and the West. Israel, the United States and the European Union have responded to this challenge by failing to differentiate Hamas […]

By Sukant Chandan, Conflicts Forum, October 7, 2007
Secularism in the political leadership in the Arab world has had a very short life-span if put into historical context. It became a dominant political current for a few decades in the latter half of the twentieth century, and today is seeing a near complete collapse in political […]

By Alastair Crooke, BBC Radio 4, July 15, 2007
At the beginning of the decade I spent a few years in the Middle East, both as an advisor to Javier Solana — the EU’s High Representative for Foreign & Security Policy — and on the staff of the commission set up by former senator George Mitchell […]

From our Baghdad correspondent, July 23, 2007
One of the more interesting — and quiet — visits to Washington was made recently by Sunni parliamentary leader Mohammed al-Dayni, who visited Capitol Hill during May to meet with Congressional leaders and administration officials. A Sunni member of the Iraqi parliament and head of the Sunni Iraqi National […]

From our Baghdad correspondent, May 8, 2007
The establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq — an al-Qaeda inspired organization that threatened to split the Sunni resistance and sparked high-profile attacks against American and Iraqi targets in Baghdad — has had the unintended consequence of uniting non-al-Qaeda Sunni resistance movements into a new umbrella organization, the […]