Iraq's Political Violence Deconstructed

<p>What the election data reveals about the poor performance of Tishreen-aligned parties, and how the Coordination Framework’s method for selecting the nominee for the premiership will shape the final choice.</p> 

In this episode, the Iraqi Voices team offers immediate thoughts on the preliminary election results and analyzes the performance of various coalitions. We also lay out the next steps in the government formation process and discuss the impact of high voter turnout on Iraq’s polit ... Show More

International actors, including Iraq’s neighbors, are watching closely as the country heads toward elections. But what should guide their approach once the votes are in and government formation begins? This episode explores regional interests, the dangers of interference, and how ... Show More

This week on Babel, Jon speaks with Dr. Haider al-Abadi, an Iraqi politician who served as prime minister from 2014 to 2018, while the country was battling the Islamic State Group (ISG). They talk about his decision making as prime minister, the Iraqi government's response to the ... Show More

<p>On Monday August 29th, Iraq came closer to civil war than it has for year. The fears of many Iraqis that political tensions would spill out into violence were coming true.</p> <p>After 11 months of parliamentary elections, government formation is still help up by complete poli ... Show More

This week Jon is joined by Hassan Hassan, director of the program on non-state actors in geopolitics at the Center for Global Policy and the editor-in-chief of its new online journal, Newlines Magazine. Hassan talks to Jon about his late colleague, Hisham al-Hashimi, and the rese ... Show More

In a special episode of Babel to mark the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, Jon sits down with two Iraqi guests to talk about the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. Dr. Marsin Alshamary is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard's Belfer Cen ... Show More

Michigan’s primary today will test President Biden’s viability with Muslim voters amid the war in Gaza. One Arab American leader says the community is abandoning Biden and looking for alternatives — Donald Trump might be one of them. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edi ... Show More

In this roundtable discussion our editors examine how the past year has progressed, discuss how things may go over the next year and consider a few fundamentally positive truths about the whole conflict. Meanwhile our senior producer travels through Ukraine, getting a measure of ... Show More

“You took me to one side and said be very, very careful of these people, these neo-cons. Because they’re going to use this to do all sorts of stuff that you shouldn’t be involved in.” What are the limits of foreign intervention? Do the American people still want their country to ... Show More