1. Home
  2. News & Issues
  3. Middle East Issues

Qatar Rising

Qatar's Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani

When Qatar put in a bid for the 2022 World Cup, few expected the tiny emirate to win, let alone best the United States at it. The victory speaks of Qatar's rising influence in the Middle East under one of the region's most enlightened leaders.

Small Emirate, Outsized Influence

Middle East Issues Spotlight10

Club Mid: The Mideast's Best Travel Spots for 2011

Sunday January 9, 2011

Tauzeur is for lovers: The Times discovers one of Tunisia's Saharan treasures. (© Farridji)

Every year around this time The New York Times draws up an extensive list of the best places to go during the year--the world's best travel spots. It's always a fun list--a wonderful way to catch up on some of the world's forgotten spots (who would have thought to look up the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, the Austrian resort town known for its plethora of ski lifts and now, increasingly, for its restaurants?).

As far as the Middle East is concerned, it's a curious if entirely unscientific way to gauge the region's hold on the western imagination. Maybe not so unscientific: is it entirely coincidental that last year the Middle East (broadly interpreted, as always at Middle East Issues, as the region between North Africa and Pakistan) rated just three spots out of 31, a pretty dismal batting average (.097). Not to mention the fact that all three spots were clichés: Damascus, Marrakesh and Istanbul. Fine cities each, but not quite the most original picks in the world, and Marrakesh had been picked the year before. Seriously. Of all the gin joints from Casablanca to Lahore, and Times editors had to fall back on a repeat?

The previous year's batting average wasn't that much better: four spots out of 44, but at least Beirut topped the entire list (admittedly, your writer was born and raised there), and Marrakesh aside, the other spots had the benefit of being interesting picks: Qatar's Doha and Egypt's Red Sea.

The banner year was 2008. Check it out: seven of the 53 destinations were in the Middle East, and each one of them a daring pick, including spots in Libya, Iran and Algeria--not quite the first places that pop to mind when considering a fun trip for a week.

And so here we are with picks for 2011. The Times is picking 41 spots this year, a respectable number that suggests the economy may be on the mend (though nothing like the flush feel of 2008, which proved to be more of a reflection of the previous go-go years). How did the Middle East do this year? Not back at all, considering. Five spots in all, a very respectable 15 percent. And the picks are on the border between interesting and fascinating: Iraqi Kurdistan; Tlemcen, Algeria; Oualidia, Morocco; Port Ghalib, Egypt; Tozeur, Tunisia; and Erzurum, Turkey. Here we go.

Read the full article, "The Middle East's Best Travel Spots, 2011."

See Also:

The Middle East's Wars on Reporters

Saturday January 8, 2011

Silenced: Emin Demir was the editor of Turkey's sole Kurdish-language daily, Azadiya Welat. (Reporters Without Borders)

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report on freedom of the press and the killing or murder of reporters around the world. As usual, the Middle East ranked high in the number of killings, with Pakistan leading the way: 11 reporters kileld there, outgunning even Iraq, where seven reporters were killed. Three journalists were killed in Somalia. Also, one reporter was killed in each of the following countries: Lebanon, Israel, Afghanistan and Yemen. That's the big picture.

The year began badly in Yemen, though those killings appear to stem from family trouble rather than political motives. Yemen Today reports: "Yemen's number one radio director was murdered along with his son and daughter in their home in the Daris zone north of Sana'a last Wednesday. Abdul Rahman al-Absi, 61, was born in Taiz and worked for Sana'a radio for the past 40 years as a radio director. The capital police arrested Hussam Abdulrahman al-Abs, 23 years old, and accused him of killing his father, AbdulRahman, his sister, and his brother. The suspect later confessed to the killing however the source did not give any further details."

Killing reporters isn't the only way to muzzle the press, of course. Reporters are muzzled all over the Middle East, particularly in the dictatorships of North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, and the repressive climes of Saudi Arabia, Iran and, to some extent the United Arab Emirates and the Arab Peninsula's other small emirates.

No reporters were killed in Turkey last year, but before you suspect the place to be the democratic nation it claims to be, here's the latest from Reporters Without Borders: "Reporters Without Borders is appalled to learn of the surreal 138-year prison sentence passed against Emin Demir, former editor of Turkey's sole Kurdish-language daily Azadiya Welat, for 'propaganda in support of Kurdish rebels' and 'belonging to a terrorist organisation.' Demir, aged 24, was charged with supporting the cause of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), seen as a terrorist organisation by a number of countries, including Turkey, the European Union and the United States. The court issued a warrant for her arrest since she did not attend the hearing."

It's a grimly old story: "The newspaper Azadyia Welat has already been suspended eight times by the Turkish justice system. At least nine of its journalists are currently in prison, including two other former editors, sentenced on similar charges to those against Demir, to unbelievable sentences. Vedat Kursun was sentenced on 13 May 2010 to 166 years in prison. Ozan Kilinç was sentenced in his absence on 9 February to 2010 to 21 years in prison. He was also stripped of his civic rights. The three ex editors have now been sentenced to a total of 325 years in prison between them."

Two other reporters are facing long sentences over similar accusations. Yet Turkey is considered one of the more benevolent countries when it comes to press freedom in the Middle East. Don't be fooled. The double standard is a Turkish government specialty.

See Also:

The Return of Muqtada al-Sadr

Thursday January 6, 2011

Through the shattered walls: Muqtada al-Sadr, center, has a way of wedging his way into Iraq's strategic intersections. (John Moore/Getty Images)

If Iraq is one of those surreal places these days, as it has been even before George Bush launched his war in 2003, it's because it continues to be the definition of an altered state. It was so during Saddam Hussein's regime, when reality was whatever he wanted it to be down to the last moment (remember Baghdad Bob?). It was so in the entire run-up to Bush's war, when the Bush administration outdid Saddam's in inventions, fabrications and downright lies, thanks to an overzealous CIA and an uncurious president. It was so in the days of "shock and awe," when we heard the defense secretary--the eternally smug and self-satisfied Donald Rumsfeld--schematize the invasion and early occupation as if it were an afternoon puzzle on his patio in Mount Misery (the actual name of his vacation home). It was so throughout the insurgency, and it's been so since the American component in the war has retreated to its safer garrisons, leaving the maiming and dying to Iraqis as the country has failed, to this day, to unify politically or socially.

Surrealism has its stars. Among them: Muqtada al-Sadr, whose nickname, in the western press anyway, is always "radical," principally because he never hewed to the American way, preferring instead to wage a war of his own against the occupation--to the point that casualties inflicted by al-Sadr's black-shirted militias exceeded those inflicted either by Sunni tribesmen or by "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," whatever that is (considering how much of an all-purpose construct of convenience by the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon it happens to be).

After 2007 al-Sadr left Iraq, ostensibly in fear for his free life, because he may or may not have been accused in the murder of another cleric. Also, because his militia at the time, the Mahdi Army, had jumped the shark as such: Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi strongman and prime minister, had decided to establish his own hegemony over what parts of Iraq he controlled. He joined forces with the Americans and declared war on the Mahdi Army. And won.

So al-Sadr went to Iran to lick his wounds, and maybe lend some of the insurgent expertise he'd learned to those Iranians feeding their own brand of insurgency long-distance, with weaponry and the occasional mercenary. He had time on his hands. He knew Iraq. He knew the way it works, which is to say: the way it doesn't work. And it hasn't. Last year's election produced a stalemate which only al-Sadr, as it turned out, could break when, irony of irony, al-Maliki could remain prime minister only if al-Sadr, as kingmaker, made him so. Salvador Dali would have had a lot of fun painting that.

Painting, too, the return of al-Sadr to Iraq on Wednesday, to chants of "long live the leader," a leader whose bearded sideburns have turned slightly gray, giving him a burst of distinguished clericalism he had lacked a few years ago, when he was constantly compared to his late father as the dumber son (the father was murdered). In unfairness to Muqtada, he does have a bit of a bug-eye look to go with what used to be a bug-eyed demeanor, but the Persian detour appears to have acted like so much Xanax: he's put his militia manners aside. He's taking up the mantle of the calmer politician. Maybe he learned a thing of two from the Iranian regime--namely, that you don't have to win elections to win power. He's learned from Sarah Palin, too: populism only goes so far when you don't have a plan. He does have a plan. The same plan he had when he left Iraq for Iran: bide his time. He knows that in time, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's reigning Shiite cleric and sage, will die (al Sistani has little patience for al-Sadr), and that Iraq will be crying for a replacement. Al-Sadr thinks he can be that replacement, and more: he has designs on the political leadership, too. And why not? In the end, he can always count on a base that, worse comes to worse, can also remember its happier Mahdi days.

So Muqtada "Fonzi" al-Sadr has returned, a bit less Fonzi, a bit more Richie--or at least as rich in expectations about Iraq as Iraqis have of him. Absence sure makes the heart grow blurrier. And more surreal.

See Also:

Egypt's Copts, and Mubarak's Regime, Under Attack

Monday January 3, 2011


Look Out: Even before the attacks on Copts in Egypt, demonstrators last December were marching in front of the United Nations in new York, demanding better protection for Egypt's Christian minority. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Bombings of mosques in Pakistan or Iraq don't make the front page anymore. Bombings of churches, or the murder of Christians, in Egypt or Iraq, do. The reason for the difference is paradoxical. Internecine attacks between Muslims have become commonplace, the western "war on terror" being a sideshow to the real war going on within Islam between Shiites and Sunnis, a war the west has (unfortunately) little interest in, which is why the west keeps misunderstanding the east, and misfiring as it tries to tame it.

But attacks by Muslims against Christians have, since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, been relatively rare. The surge of such attacks, while still relatively rare compared with the Muslim-on-Muslim sort, is attracting a parallel surge of interest in the West, where Christians, devout Christians anyway, feel emotionally and personally struck by the attacks. The Times has been chronicling the violence against Iraqi Christians since November, and the two attacks on Coptic churches in Egypt have generated widespread coverage, the more so because Copts have been taking to the streets of Cairo, angrily, and bucking the Egyptian tendency to endure more than protest.

That the attacks in Egypt, and the government's meek response, are coinciding with the waning era of Hosni Mubarak's presidency won't help the old despot as he attempts to hand off power to his son. Egyptians are tiring of the man and his regime. And his initial attempts to blame al-Qaeda haven't stuck. The bombing that killed 20 Copts the morning of New Year day appears to be the work of a home-grown, old-fashioned sectarian terrorist.

The Muslim Brotherhood immediately condemned the attack, calling it "a threat to Egypt's stability, which all divine religions explicitly forbid," though Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti took a more oblique, to not say idiotic, route. Instead of condemning the attack outright, he couched it as an attempt to turn Muslim against Muslim--as if the murder of Christians, or simply the murder of human beings,k whatever their sectarian stripes, didn't warrant condemnation on its own terms. Galileo for fanatical Muslims of the Wahhabi or Taliban sort never happened, of course: the universe revolves around their flat-earth brand of Islam. At least he had the decency to disavow Islam's role in the attacks.

There are close to 10 million Copts in Egypt, making them the single largest Christian minority in the Middle East. They're often the scapegoat. When Egypt had its swine flu outbreak, it blamed Copts.

See Also:

Discuss in my Forum

About.com Special Features

Top 25 Urban Legends

Could the wild story in that chain email you were just forwarded actually be true? Read up on the latest rumors, hoaxes, and urban legends to find out. More

US Federal Budget Primer

Ever wonder where exactly your tax dollars go? Find out how the federal budget works, and its impact on you. More

  1. Home
  2. News & Issues
  3. Middle East Issues

©2011 About.com. All rights reserved.

A part of The New York Times Company.