Tag: iran

Right out of the gate, let’s get one thing straight: Iran is our enemy.

Can a nation be both a friend and a foe to the United States at the same time? Today we have a situation in which Iran is a de facto ally of ours in the fight against ISIS, but also a country we’re actively trying to subvert in places like Yemen. While arrangements like this leave […]

Following the fall of Sana’a to the Houthis, President Hadi relocated to Aden, the southern port city of Yemen and the center of the Southern Mobility Movement. Deciding that, since part of the agreement with the Houthis that led to Hadi’s abdication as president (followed by his entire cabinet) had been violated, the entire agreement […]

Will diplomacy succeed where coercion failed, or will it all literally blow up in our face?

So it seems that yet another politician is being brought up on charges of corruption.  No surprise to anyone and the fact that the politician in question is none other than Senator Robert Menendez (D – NJ), whose 40 year political career has been littered with allegations of corruption, is likely no surprise either, especially […]

On Saturday, Will Rodriguez published a piece here at SOFREP that laid bare an apparent use of American-made weaponry by Iran in Iraq. My article is not a point-by-point engagement of Mr. Rodriguez’s piece. Rather, it is simply a response that highlights some potential alternatives for continuing to remain so rigid in our approach to security policy in […]

It’s been a little over a year since Fallujah and Ramadi fell to ISIS and almost seven months since US troops returned to Iraq. Back in September I wrote a series describing how we got where we’re at and how things would continue to deteriorate as we send more troops to push the problem past […]

On the night of January 18, 2015, the mother of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was trying to contact him by telephone. When, after repeated calls, she couldn’t get him to answer, she went to his apartment accompanied by Argentine federal police. Repeated ringing of the doorbell wasn’t answered. The door was locked from the inside. […]

This has been a bad month for Iranian General officers in “advisory” roles supporting Syria and Iraq in the ISIS conflict. Losing three Generals in four months in a single conflict cannot be good for morale.

While most of the attention given in the last few months to events in Iraq and Syria has focused on the Kurdish fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan and Rojava, the Kurds don’t particularly care about the rest of Iraq. The majority of the organizations moving to secure Arab Iraq are Shi’a militias, the most prominent (and powerful) […]

On September 22, the Zaydi Houthi movement in Yemen seized control of the capital, Sana’a. This came after a week of clashes with the Yemeni government that reportedly killed up to 340 people. The Houthis, a Shi’a tribal group, have been fighting with the Sunni-dominated government for representation. The Houthis as a group are generally […]

We’ve gotten a few messages here at SOFREP wondering if ISIS (or IS, if you prefer their new designation) will end up as Iran’s client, thus presenting the Western world with a unified Islamist empire/threat.  The question is not only deeply ignorant of the present (and historical) situation in the Middle East, it is unlikely […]