Azerbaijan-Jordan: recent developments and future cooperation to curb the Shia Crescent

Shia Crescent goes “Full Moon” post-October 7 During the Global War on Terror in the early 2000s, King Abdullah II of Jordan coined the term “Shia Crescent” to describe the Iranian grand strategy of large-scale and wide-ranging ideological armed struggle to create a Shiite empire from Tehran to Damascus. There is no other way to…

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Karabakh after war: Mapping post-conflict reconstruction

In the summer of 2022, Azerbaijan began resettling its first village in Karabakh*, a region in its southwest that had been under Armenian control for about 30 years and was partially recaptured during the 2020 war. Since a war in the 1990s, the predominantly Armenian-populated mountainous parts of Karabakh, as well as seven Azerbaijani-majority districts…

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Hamas pivot towards Iraq signals involvement from Iran’s ally

As headlines rage over an inevitable war between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group in Southern Lebanon, Hamas is using this time out of the spotlight to regroup, realign, and reposition. Eyes on the Israel-Hamas War are quickly shifting toward the north as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a reduction of…

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“Russians never leave,” or how Azerbaijan proved the opposite

On April 17, 2024, an extraordinary development – something that does not happen every day – swept through the region and shocked the observers: the Kremlin confirmed the early withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from Karabakh, a year ahead of schedule. Back in 2020, around 2,000 Russian peacekeepers arrived following Moscow’s mediation of a ceasefire that halted the fighting between…

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