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So far, so good. Few would have expected the early months of Hassan Rouhani’s presidency to go so well. World powers including the United States have, at least for now, …

In mid-December, the United Nations made another international appeal for Syria, the sixth since the country’s three-year civil war began. The numbers were staggering – a total of $6.5 billion …

As 2013 opened, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was struggling to manage an unpredictable and often truculent president in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the end of 2013, Iran’s supreme leader oversees a …

Lebanon is no stranger to the horrors of violence, proxy wars, sectarian strife, stagnant reforms, economic woes and refugee crises. In 2013 all of these afflictions have pushed the country …

Iraqi Kurdistan was tense end-September with the announcement of somewhat contentious election results, and the staging of a rare terrorist attack. Inevitably, the overall effect was to dampen business confidence. …

Competition over energy resources has played a major role in the power struggles of the Middle East over the last half century. However, its importance in the Syrian conflict remains …

Earlier this year, I had long discussions with two former European ambassadors to Iran recalling the 2003-05 negotiations between the European Union and Iran over its nuclear program, the last …

In September, as I stood looking out across a valley in the Latakia countryside, I could hear mortar fire in the distance. There it was, the town of Salma, just …

  The quiet and largely peaceful Kurdish region of Iraq was last month thrust back into the spotlight by two events, firstly the somewhat contentious election results and secondly a …

The phone call between Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations, the first direct contact between presidents of Iran and the United States in three decades, signals the …