First Independent Mena Newspaper
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) sees new opportunities in the mayhem prevailing in Iraq. The fall of Mosul on June 10 to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) propelled a humiliating retreat of the US-equipped Iraqi army from several key cities north of Baghdad including Baiji, home to the Iraq’s largest oil refinery […]
With the spectacular fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham (ISIS) and the humiliating retreat of the US-equipped Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), Iraq’s future as a unified state hangs in the balance. ISIS represents only a symptom in the current crisis facing Iraq, the deep causes lie in the grab […]
Narendra Modi’s landslide victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party against the incumbent National Congress in India’s national elections has bought a new political dynamic to south Asia’s key strategic actor. India hopes that Modi, a former tea seller and advert for the country’s social mobility, will begin an overdue purge of corruption and elitism. However […]
Twenty years ago the Bosnian Civil War was coming towards its slow conclusion and the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords instituted an internationally agreed settlement that ended the violence. This conclusion of conflict is probably unique because it was exactly that; there are no definitive incidents of recrimination after the fighting ceased. However whilst bloodshed was […]
When Mehdi Jomaa assumed the role of Tunisia’s interim Prime Minister in late January, he did not know how disastrous the true economic condition of his country was. He admitted it roughly a month later during a televised interview by saying that the hole in the budget deficit was about 4 billion dinars (2.5 billion […]
Amid deep political turmoil, there is a mounting concern in Egypt as Ethiopia forges ahead with its plan to build the $4.8 billion Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile’s main tributary. The hydroelectric dam, to be Africa’s biggest, sounded the alarm bell for Egypt due to its possible impact on the flow of the river. […]
Over the past weekend, the Ukrainian government was ousted, Ukraine’s parliament reinstated the 2004 constitution and former President Victor Yanukovich is on the run in Russia. One might be forgiven to think of these developments in isolation. But it is in fact a reminder that reactionary regimes rarely deliver the sort of stability they are […]
King Mohammed VI of Morocco who is on a four-nation tour in Africa, the second in less than a year, launched on Monday a heartfelt call for boosting inter-African cooperation, rebuilding Africans’ trust in their own potentials, overcoming Afro-pessimism and unleashing the continent’s intellectual and material potential. “Africa should learn to trust Africa… and African […]
Three years down the road from the wave of Arab Spring revolutions that affected the Middle East and North Africa region, MENA economies remain depressed. Egypt’s gross domestic product contracted by about 3 percent in the second quarter of 2013 while the growth rate amounted to only 2 percent last year, when compared to 2.3 […]
New year 2014 will likely be very significant at least from the viewpoint of the London Stock Exchange, which stakes to become the world centre for Islamic finance. Earlier last year, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron announced the plan to issue sukuk – Islamic financial certificates often compared to Western bonds. The first sukuk certificate […]