On 3 November, after several false starts and nearly four years on from when the Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman first went public with his plan to sell off a portion of the energy giant Aramco in an initial public offering (IPO),…

The Americans call the five day halt to Turkey’s military incursion into Northern Syria a ceasefire, while the Turks prefer to call it a pause. The Kurds call the incursion something else. For them and for American soldiers who fought with…

It is one year since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He did not come out alive. The day after he disappeared, the Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman said that he had left the consulate twenty…

The latest twist in the Iran saga is the abrupt sacking by President Trump of his National Security Advisor John Bolton. Bolton says he resigned, Trump says he fired the moustachioed ultra hawk. It scarcely matters which version is…

In April 2014 DLA Piper, a London-based legal firm released a report entitled “Migrant Labour in the Construction Sector in the State of Qatar.” Qatar’s government had commissioned the report in light of numerous allegations…

Were you to ask me “will war break out with Iran,” I would say after President Donald Trump’s recent tweet the odds are definitely leaning to no. Why is that? Well let’s look at the tweet: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the…

US President Donald Trump, together with his National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has vowed to limit Iranian oil exports to zero. Or as John Bolton put it in an interview with Fox News “we are…

The decision by the United Arab Emirates in December last year to re-open its embassy in Damascus marked a march back from what had been the somewhat equivocal anti—Assad position the Gulf state had assumed in the early days of the Syrian…