Latest news with #WashingtonInstituteforNearEastPolicy
Ya Biladi
2 days ago
- Politics
- Ya Biladi
A US think tank credits Algeria with a role in resolving the Sahara issue
An American think tank with close ties to Israel is lobbying in favor of Algeria's interests under the Trump administration. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, founded in 1985, stated in a recent report that «Algeria can serve as a key U.S. security partner in an increasingly volatile region». In January, Algiers and Washington even signed a military memorandum of understanding. The think tank encourages U.S. officials to «capitalize on Algeria» eagerness to restore its global image as a capable peace broker on the continent. However, that «eagerness» has been met with rejection by Sahel countries. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—united since September 2023 under the Alliance of Sahel States—have strongly denounced what they described as «Algerian interference in their internal affairs». Beyond the instability in the Sahel, the think tank also acknowledges Algeria's «crucial role» in resolving the Western Sahara conflict. «Boosting Algeria's self-perception as a valued partner will be critical given the unprecedented Western alignment behind Morocco's plan to negotiate a resolution to the Western Sahara conflict at the UN Security Council, and what appears to be an irreversible U.S. position of recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the territory». The report suggests that «Algiers might even conceivably play a role in persuading the Polisario to accept a negotiated model of self-governance, with the Moroccan autonomy plan as the starting framework. But this unlikely development would have to be premised on U.S. respect for Algeria». Despite claiming only «observer status» similar to Mauritania, Algeria has officially rejected the most recent UN Security Council resolutions calling for the resumption of the Round Table process, which has been stalled since March 2019. On Thursday, Algeria's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated its support for a resolution allowing the Sahrawi people «to exercise their inalienable and imprescriptible right to self-determination, in accordance with the relevant resolutions of international legality emanating from the General Assembly or the Security Council». For the record, Algeria hired U.S. lobbying firm BGR Group in September 2024 to defend its interests in Washington. The firm is known for its strong ties to Israel. Notable figures such as John Bolton, a staunch supporter of both the Polisario Front and Israel, the late Republican Senator James Inhofe (who passed away on July 9, 2024), and former UN envoy for Western Sahara James Baker, all voiced support for Algeria's position. In December 2020, all three welcomed the resumption of diplomatic relations between Rabat and Tel Aviv but simultaneously condemned President Donald Trump's recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
Mint
3 days ago
- Politics
- Mint
Iran is moving to rearm its militia allies
Iran suffered a significant setback when Israel killed top military leaders and the U.S. struck its nuclear facilities, but a pattern of high-value weapons seizures shows Tehran is making new efforts to arm its militia allies across the Middle East. Forces allied with Yemen's internationally recognized government this week intercepted a major shipment of missiles, drone parts and other military gear sent to Houthi rebels on the Red Sea coast. Syria's new government says it has seized a number of weapons cargoes, including Grad rockets—for use in multiple-launch systems mounted on trucks—along its borders with Iraq and Lebanon. The Lebanese army, meanwhile, has seized shipments brought in across its border with Syria that include Russian antitank missiles favored by Hezbollah. 'Iran is rebuilding its presence in the Levant by sending missiles to Hezbollah and weapons from Iraq to Syria," said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Washington Institute for Near East Policy with expertise in Iran's militia allies. Yemeni forces said Wednesday they had seized a record number of Iranian missiles destined for the Houthis. The shipment was intercepted by the National Resistance Force, a military coalition aligned with the Yemeni government. The U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for America's military operations in the Middle East, said it was the National Resistance Force's largest seizure of advanced Iranian conventional weapons—750 tons of cruise missiles, antiship and antiaircraft missiles, warheads, targeting components and drone engines. The shipments were hidden aboard a ship called a dhow, beneath declared cargoes of air conditioners. They included Iranian-developed Qader antiship missiles and components for the Saqr air-defense system, which the Houthis have used to bring down U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones. Previous seizures by the Yemeni and U.S. governments generally yielded small arms or spare parts rather than fully assembled missiles. The seizure comes just weeks after a cease-fire stopped Israel's 12-day air campaign against Iran—a series of attacks that demonstrated Iran's vulnerability despite the arsenal of missiles and militia allies it had built up to protect itself. The U.S. joined in the attack by bombing key Iranian nuclear facilities. This spring, the U.S. pounded Houthi positions for nearly two months in an effort that ended with a cease-fire and left the Houthis looking for more high-end hardware. 'The timing and scale of this shipment strongly suggest Iran is moving quickly to replenish Houthi stockpiles depleted by U.S. airstrikes," said Mohammed al-Basha, founder of U.S.-based Middle East security advisory Basha Report. It shows Tehran wants to 'sustain their high operational tempo targeting Israel and commercial maritime traffic," he said. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei on Thursday said any claim Tehran had sent weapons to Yemen was baseless. The resupply effort might already be yielding results. Last week, Houthi fighters used rocket-propelled grenades, missiles and drones to sink two merchant ships in the Red Sea, killing at least three crew members and taking others hostage. The militant group has also been lobbing ballistic missiles at Israel for weeks, though most are intercepted. While the seized cargoes transited through the East African country of Djibouti, which sits across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen, the National Resistance Force found multiple documents in Farsi indicating their origin was Iran. The documents included a manual for cameras used to guide antiaircraft missiles and a quality certificate attached to a missile fin manufactured by an Iranian company. Iran's efforts to move weapons to Hezbollah have been extensive as well. The militant group was forced into a cease-fire last fall after an Israeli campaign of covert operations, airstrikes and a ground incursion wiped out most of its arsenal and leadership. There has been 'an intensifying trend in recent months of smuggling attempts via or originating from Syria" to Lebanon's Hezbollah, said Michael Cardash, the former deputy head of the bomb disposal division at Israel's national police. The arms pipeline has been crimped by the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, which was aligned with Iran, and its replacement by a hostile government. Traffickers now have to bring in arms in small shipments after previously sending truckloads, said Cardash, who is now in charge of explosives research at Israeli security consulting firm Terrogence. In one example in June, the Interior Ministry of the new Syrian government announced it had seized Russian-made Kornet antitank missiles en route to Lebanon in a truck transporting cucumbers. In May, the General Security branch intercepted Iranian-made air-defense missiles near the Lebanese border, according to media outlets affiliated with the new Syrian government. Despite extensive efforts to keep Hezbollah from restocking its battered arsenal, the militant group, like the Houthis, has had some success. It manufactures its own drones and medium-range rockets, and has managed to restructure its smuggling networks to a degree and smuggle in some Kornets and other sophisticated weaponry, a person familiar with the group's operations said. Write to Benoit Faucon at
Iraq Business
12-07-2025
- Business
- Iraq Business
Leveraging Iran's Defeat to Strengthen US-Iraq Security Relations
By Michael Knights, for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News. Leveraging Iran's Defeat to Strengthen U.S.-Iraq Security Relations Tehran's Iraqi proxies mostly sat out the twelve-day war, but this pragmatic restraint will not forestall growing U.S.-Iran competition over Iraq's airspace, economic partnerships, and other sectors. Click here to read the full report. Tags: Dr Mike Knights, Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba, Iran, Kata'ib Hezbollah, Kataib Hezbullah, militias, PMU, Popular Mobilization Forces, Popular Mobilization Units, United States, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Mint
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Mint
For Iran's nuclear program, a month is longer than it sounds
The furious debate over whether U.S. strikes obliterated Iran's nuclear program or only delayed its progress toward being able to build a nuclear weapon by a few months skips over a key component in the equation: Iran's political calculation. If Iran were to make the decision to build a nuclear weapon, it would be betting that it can complete the job and establish deterrence before the U.S. and Israel intervene—through military action, economic pressure or diplomacy—to stop it. A longer timeline increases the risk of being spotted or struck again, which could dissuade Iran from taking such a gamble in the first place. So measured on the Iranian nuclear clock, a delay of a few months could translate into a lot longer than it sounds if it keeps Tehran from moving ahead. 'If they start their breakout effort, and it takes them three more months, that's a lot of time to respond. It gives you time to detect it. It gives you time to mount a response," said Michael Singh, managing director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior official at the National Security Council. 'It's not nothing." The 2015 international nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, which granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, was designed to keep Iran a year away from being able to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. President Trump pulled the U.S. out of that agreement in his first term. Iran scaled up its nuclear work a year later and by May this year, it was producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon every month. Before the war, the general assumption was it would take Iran a few months to make a crude weapon as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and deliverable by truck or ship, and one to three years to make a warhead that could be fit atop a missile. Some analysts are concerned thatthe attacks by Israel and the U.S. may have convinced hard-liners in Tehran that the only way to preserve the regime is to make a run at developing nuclear weapons. 'If Iran decides to weaponize, it will take more time than it would have otherwise," said Alan Eyre, a former State Department official and member of the U.S. negotiating team under the Obama administration that worked on the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. 'But, paradoxically, we might have strengthened their resolve to seek a nuclear weapon now." 'They're going to be figuring out how to reconstitute some sort of defensive strategy, or at least create a new one, because the one they had doesn't work anymore," he said. Nuclear experts and U.S. officials say Iran could have stashed away enough centrifuges and material to race for a bomb. Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an interview with CBS's 'Face the Nation" on Sunday, said Iran has the industrial and technological wherewithal to resume enriching uranium in a few months. U.N. atomic energy agency chief Rafael Grossi said Iran can resume enriching uranium in a few months if it wants. 'The capacities they have are there," Grossi said. 'They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that. But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there." Grossi's agency is responsible for inspecting Iran's nuclear sites but hasn't been able to visit the sites since the Israeli strikes on Iran began June 13. Iran's options now include trying to reconstitute a covert nuclear program and produce a bomb as fast as possible. A second option would be to agree to a diplomatic path that limits their ability to build a weapon by ending its enrichment of uranium, which the Trump administration has pushed. Iran could also try to split the difference: engage in nuclear diplomacy while quietly advancing its nuclear program. That would mean working in secret at sites hidden from international inspectors, which would make the task more cumbersome. Trump and his administration say the U.S. airstrikes using 14 30,000-pound bombs and a salvo of cruise missiles have destroyed the facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. If so, Iran would need new, hidden enrichment sites, as well as facilities to turn enriched uranium into metal for a bomb core and manage a covert program that can get nuclear scientists to the site without being spotted. 'Iran will never obtain a nuclear bomb, because Operation Midnight Hammer obliterated their nuclear capabilities," White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said when asked about Iran's prospects for rebuilding its nuclear program. Iran has worked for decades on know-how relevant to developing nuclear weapons and has mastered most of the aspects of building a bomb, according to the IAEA and Iranian and Israeli officials. The Trump administration says it destroyed Iran's nuclear facilities at Fordow. Before the war, Iran had amassed a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium large enough for 10 nuclear bombs if further enriched. It would have taken about a week to convert enough of the 60% material into 90% weapons-grade enriched uranium for one nuclear weapon, according to the IAEA. Iran had also tested out many of the components needed to build a bomb and kept that knowledge alive for a new generation of scientists through experiments and studies ostensibly designed for peaceful purposes. The fate of the fissile material stockpile and how many centrifuges Iran still has remain unclear. Some may have been moved from Iran's nuclear sites before the U.S. attack. The IAEA's inspectors lost the ability to track Iran's manufacturing of centrifuges due to restrictions Iran imposed in response to Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 deal. Inspectors have also spent six years seeking the whereabouts of a vast array of equipment from Iran's decades-old nuclear weapons program that Tehran dispersed in 2018. It could include lines for making uranium metal and equipment for testing high explosives and other key equipment for making a bomb. Iran's pre-2003 nuclear program aimed to produce a small arsenal of nuclear weapons deliverable by missile. Experts believe Iran has yet to seriously work on miniaturizing a nuclear weapon and integrating it onto a missile, which could take one to three years. 'This process of actually making a warhead is not just a physical process. It also comes down to the engineering," the Washington Institute's Singh said. 'There's a little bit more art, rather than just science, to that part of it." The office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence assessed in March that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hadn't reauthorized the program to develop a nuclear weapon he suspended in 2003. What Khamenei decides in the wake of the attacks is now the biggest consideration in any timeline. 'We don't know if that is an actively running clock," said Eric Brewer, a deputy vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former senior official at the White House National Security Council and National Intelligence Council. 'These timelines are in some ways evolving, and they depend upon what choices Iran makes next." Write to Jared Malsin at and Laurence Norman at
Iraq Business
01-07-2025
- Business
- Iraq Business
Strengthening the US-Iraq Relationship through Energy and Security
By Noam Raydan and Devorah Margolin, for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News. Redefining and Strengthening the U.S.-Iraq Relationship Through Energy and Security Iraq is more stable than it has been in decades but still faces enormous security and energy challenges, including the risk of spillover from Iran-Israel hostilities, dependence on unreliable Iranian gas amid untapped domestic opportunities, an untested Syrian government, and the unrelenting Islamic State threat. Click here to read the full article. Tags: caliphate, China, Daesh, featured, Iran, ISIL, ISIS, Islamic State, Russia, Syria, terrorism, United States
