October 17, 2017
Qasem Soleimani, leader of the elite Quds force of the IRGC and a key player in Iran's military actions in Syria and Iraq. He reportedly advised the PMF in the Kirkuk operation. Via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
Kirkuk, a multi-ethnic city near the borders of the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) that had been cont...
August 8, 2017
A map of Syria. ar-Raqqa, Deir ez-Zour (transliterated as Dayr az-Zawr on this map) and al-Sukhnah are all visible.
The Trump administration has yet to elaborate on a strategic policy for Syria. While some changes have been clear, including delegating more authority to military commanders in the field, little has been done on a higher level. The Trump admini...
May 21, 2017
US President Donald Trump greeted with flowers upon arriving in Riyadh, May 20th 2017. Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks, via Flickr.
Donald Trump's "Islam" speech is in the books. Overall, it was a major shift for Trump himself, but contained relatively little substance and policy beneath the admitt...
May 20, 2017
Hassan Rouhani, the re-elected President of Iran at a campaign convention in 2013. Photo by Tasnim News Agency, via Wikimedia Commons. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani won another term in Iran's elections yesterday. He thoroughly defeated his main rival, Ebrahim Raisi (a conservative cleric who leads the Astan Quds Razavi, a powe...
May 10, 2017
Recently fired FBI Director James Comey at a press conference in 2016. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Shortly after the news broke that FBI Director James Comey had been fired by the Trump administration, a political shock that's dominated the news cycle since, the Republican rejoinder began filtering out from sources both official and unoffic...
The Caravansarai
The Caravansarai is a place for news, analysis, culture, and current events with a strong focus on international news.