Mercenaries, especially operating on behalf of a foreign occupation-force, deserve no mercy. This is the message the Hizbullah have delivered with deadly accuracy in South Lebanon. This has got across clearly to the Zionist occupiers as well as to their surrogates, the South Lebanese Army (SLA).
The war being waged against Islamic activism in the Arab world and Africa has taken an ominous new turn last month as the Arab League’s ‘anti-terrorism’ pact goes into force and plans are put into place for the adoption of a similar treaty by the member-states of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
There was undoubtedly a certain satisfaction in watching the Israelis tearing into each other for a change, instead of tearing into Palestinians, Muslims and just about anybody else they don’t like. The election campaign which ended in Benyamin Netanyahu being conclusive defeated by Ehud Barak was vicious to say the least...
The extraordinary outpouring of international sympathy and goodwill at the death of King Hussain of Jordan last February, and the lavish promises of economic aid made at the time by western and oil-rich leaders have not yet been translated into reality.
The constant in Middle Eastern politics is their inconsistancy. Alliances are made and broken regularly. Who would have imagined five years ago that Iran and Saudi Arabia could be discussing the possibility of a defence pact?
Kuwait, the proud owner of the only elected parliament in the Arab Gulf states, has further consolidated its democratic credentials by giving Kuwaiti women the right to vote and to stand in parliamentary and municipal elections.
Ismail Omar Guelleh was sworn in as Djibouti’s new president on May 8, becoming its second leader since independence in 1977. But, having frequently stood in unofficially for his ailing and elderly uncle
The Egyptian government’s decision to release 1,200 al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya prisoners is a significant development in the long struggle between the militant Islamic groups and the state. Most of the freed Islamists had been jailed without trial or had already served their sentences, and thousands more remain in jail.
Shaikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, the amir of Kuwait, dissolved the country’s Parliament on May 4, shortly before the 50-member body was to vote on a no-confidence motion against Ahmad al-Kulaib, the Minister of Justice, Endowments and Islamic Affairs.
The US suffered what should have been a major international humiliation on May 3, when it was obliged to unfreeze the assets of Salah Idris, the Sudanese owner of the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum which the US bombed in August
A country like Algeria, in the throes of a bloody civil war, with its institutions destroyed and its resources plundered, hardly needs a leader effectively appointed - though ostensibly elected - by those responsible for the mess. Abdul Aziz Bouteflika, the sole candidate and ‘victor’ in the April 15 presidential elections...
Yasir Arafat is perhaps the only person in the world who still clings to the fiction that there is a ‘peace process’ in the Middle East. The Oslo accords which he signed in September 1993 and September 1995 have been an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinian people.
Thousands of non-Palestinian Muslims are languishing in Israeli jails, some of them for more than 20 years. They are routinely subjected to torture, hunger, disease and isolation at the hands of Israeli ‘security forces’ in a systematic attempt to extract information and destroy their Islamic identity.
In his born-again African phase following his recent rejection of Arab nationalism as a racist concept - and perhaps mindful also of the possibility of international rehabilitation following his sending of the Lockerbie suspects to trial in the Netherlands - Libyan leader colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi seems to be joining in the west’s crusade against Sudan.
A new scientific fad, not disimilar to to the current craze about genetically-modified food, has taken hold of Arab dictators. Ailing and ageing and encouraged, if not inspired by the ruthless transfer of power to the late Jordanian monarch’s eldest son, king Abdullah II...
Libya, a international pariah for nearly seven years, received a guarded welcome back into the international community this month. The rehabilitation came after the two Libyan nationals accused by the US and Britain of involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988...
The Arab world is often commented on for the longevity and durability of its leaders. However, the result (from the western perspective) is a set of aging allies for whose deaths contingency plans must be made
Ayatullah Muhammed Sadiq al-Sadr was a marked man the moment he demanded that the Iraqi regime release 106 Islamic scholars jailed since the March 1991 uprising in Southern Iraq. He was gunned down together with his two sons - Mustafa and Muammal - in the holy city of Najaf on February 19, a week after his defiant call.
The Zionists’ altercation with the European Union (EU) over Al-Quds [Jerusalem] which hit newspaper headlines on March 11 was not merely about semantics. While the affair has domestic implications for the Zionists’ forthcoming polls on May 17, the issue is of far wider significance.
Hizbullah mujahideen killed the Israeli general commanding Israeli and South Lebanese Army (SLA) forces in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon on February 28, in a carefully planned and impeccably executed ambush. Three other Israelis were killed with him.
