OPEC has pulled an eleventh-hour rabbit out of the hat many times before, and it will need to do so again to bring the UAE back into the fold this time. The UAE is the fourth-largest producer in OPEC+ and wants its quota to reflect the over 20% capac...

Militaries generally took a bigger share of budgets in 2020 in aggregate globally, as well as in most emerging markets, and that was despite the Covid-19 emergency response. Middle East: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi. Given the...

Monday's rocket attack on a US-led military base outside the international airport in Erbil (Iraq claim an Iranian-backed group is responsible) is a reminder of the difficult path Iraq is navigating, with its ambitious reform agenda facing both polit...

Iraqi Finance Minister Ali Allawi said in late January that Iraq was in talks with the IMF for a US$6bn loan package, split between US$2bn in emergency funding and a US$4bn programme. This seems to imply that the RFI was not approved, and will disapp...

The risk is that the election delay triggers a resumption of mass protests (and the use of force against those protestors by militia threatened by any change to the status quo of formal politics). Protests kicked off in October 2019 and one of the co...