Opinions

Global markets rarely reveal their vulnerabilities quietly. They do so when shipping lanes come under threat, energy prices surge, or supply chains fracture. Few regions illustrate this reality more starkly than the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which are now among the world’s most contested maritime corridors. What unfolds along these waters no longer remains local. It shapes economic security across the Arab world and far beyond.

Yet, amid growing attention to this strategic corridor, one factor remains persistently underestimated: Somalia.

For decades, Somalia was viewed primarily through the lens of conflict and fragility. That narrative no longer reflects today’s reality. The country is undergoing a consequential transition, moving away from prolonged instability, rebuilding state institutions, and re-emerging as a sovereign actor with growing regional relevance. Situated at the intersection of the Arab world, Africa, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is not peripheral to regional stability; it is central to it.

Geography alone explains much of this significance. With the longest coastline in mainland Africa, Somalia lies adjacent to the Bab al-Mandeb passage connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean. A substantial share of global maritime trade and energy shipments passes through this corridor. Disruptions along Somalia’s coast, therefore, have immediate implications for shipping reliability, energy markets, and food security — issues of direct concern to Gulf states and Arab economies.

For the Arab world, Somalia should be understood not as distant terrain but as a front-line partner in regional security. Stability along Somalia’s coastline helps contain threats before they reach the Arabian Peninsula, whether in the form of violent extremism, illicit trafficking networks, piracy, or the entrenchment of hostile external military presences along Africa’s eastern flank.

Somalia is not attempting to build stability from scratch. Despite persistent challenges, tangible progress has been made. Federal governance structures are functioning. National security forces are undergoing professionalisation. Public financial management has improved. Diplomatically, Somalia has reasserted itself within the Arab League, the African Union, and multilateral forums. These gains continue to be built on daily and reflect a clear commitment to sovereign statehood, territorial unity, and partnership rather than dependency. Somalia today seeks strategic alignment grounded in mutual interest, not charity.

Somalia’s relevance also extends beyond security. Its membership in the East African Community integrates the country into one of the world’s fastest-growing population and consumer regions. East Africa’s rapid demographic expansion, urbanisation, and economic integration position Somalia as a natural bridge between Gulf capital and African growth markets.

There is a clear opportunity for Somalia to emerge as a logistics and transshipment gateway linking the Gulf, the Red Sea, East Africa and the Indian Ocean. With targeted investments in ports, transport corridors, and maritime security, Somalia can become a critical node in regional supply chains supporting trade diversification, food security, and economic resilience across the Arab world.

At the heart of Somalia’s potential is its dynamic population. More than 70 percent of Somalis are aged below 30. This generation is increasingly urban, digitally connected, and entrepreneurial. Somali traders and business networks already operate across Southern and Eastern Africa, spanning logistics, finance, retail, and services. A large and dynamic diaspora across the Gulf, Europe, North America, and Africa further amplifies this reach through remittances, investment, and transnational expertise.

None of these momentums, however, can be sustained without security. A capable, nationally legitimate Somali security sector is the foundation for durable stability, investment confidence, and regional integration.

For Gulf states and the wider Arab world, supporting Somalia’s security sector is therefore not an act of altruism. It is a strategic investment in a reliable stabilising partner. Effective Somali security institutions contribute directly to safeguarding Red Sea and Gulf of Aden maritime corridors, countering transnational terrorism before it reaches Arab shores, protecting emerging logistics infrastructure, and denying external actors opportunities to exploit governance vacuums. Such support must prioritise institution-building, Somali ownership, and long-term sustainability, not short-term fixes or proxy competition.

The stakes are rising. The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are entering a period of heightened strategic contestation. Fragmentation along their African coastline poses a direct risk to Arab collective security. Recent developments underscore this urgency.

Israel’s unilateral recognition of the northern Somali region of Somaliland, pursued outside international legal frameworks and without Somali consent, is widely viewed as an attempt to secure a military foothold along these strategic waters, risking the introduction of the Arab-Israeli conflict into the Gulf’s security environment.

Even more troubling are emerging narratives advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, with proposals to relocate them to Somaliland against their will. Such ideas, whether formally advanced or not, represent grave violations of international law and human dignity. Exporting the consequences of occupation and war onto African soil would not resolve conflict; it would multiply it.

For the Arab world, this should serve as a wake-up call. Allowing external actors to fragment sovereign states or instrumentalise fragile regions for unresolved conflicts carries long-term consequences. Somalia’s unity and stability, therefore, align squarely with core Arab strategic interests and with longstanding Arab positions on sovereignty, justice and self-determination.

Somalia is ready to be part of the solution. With calibrated strategic support, particularly in security sector development and logistics infrastructure, Somalia can emerge as a cornerstone of Red Sea and Gulf of Aden stability, a gateway to East Africa, and a long-term partner for the Arab world.

The question is no longer whether Somalia matters in the regional and global Red Sea and Gulf of Aden discussions and plans. It is whether the region will act on that reality before others do.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The first round of Iran-US talks in Muscat produced no breakthrough. The next few weeks will determine whether they laid foundations or merely bought time before escalation.

When Iranian and American negotiators concluded several hours of talks in Muscat on February 6, publicly, neither side signalled any shift from its opening position. Iran insisted the discussions focus exclusively on the nuclear file. The United States arrived seeking a comprehensive framework that would also cover ballistic missiles, regional armed groups, and more broadly, issues Washington has raised publicly, including human rights concerns. Neither prevailed. Both agreed to meet again.

On the surface, this looks like a non-event. It was not.

The Muscat round was the first high-level diplomatic engagement between the two countries since the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, an escalation that Iran later said killed more than 1,000 people and involved strikes on three nuclear sites. That the two sides returned to the same palace near Muscat’s airport where previous rounds were held in 2025, and agreed to return again is significant.

But continuation is not progress. The distance between what happened in Muscat and what a deal requires remains vast.

Diplomacy conducted under military escort

The most striking feature of the Muscat round was not what was said, but who sat in the room. The American delegation was led by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law. It also included, for the first time, Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command, in full dress uniform.

His presence at the negotiating table was not incidental. It was a signal. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was operating in the Arabian Sea as the talks unfolded, and days earlier, US forces had shot down an Iranian drone that approached the carrier.

An Iranian diplomatic source told the Reuters news agency that Cooper’s presence “endangered” the talks. Another, quoted by Al-Araby TV, warned that “negotiations taking place under threat” could impose strategic costs rather than advance them. For Tehran, the message was unmistakable: This was diplomacy conducted in the shadow of force, not as an alternative to it.

Washington, for its part, sees this as leverage. President Trump, speaking on board Air Force One after the talks, described them as “very good” and said Iran wants a deal “very badly”, adding: “They know the consequences if they don’t. They don’t make a deal; the consequences are very steep.”

This is diplomacy framed as an ultimatum. It may create urgency. It is unlikely to create trust, and trust is what this process most desperately needs.

The structural problem

The US withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, despite international verification that Iran was meeting its obligations. That decision shattered Iranian confidence in the durability of US commitments. Tehran’s subsequent incremental breaches of the agreement, steadily increasing enrichment levels from 2019 onwards, weakened its credibility, in turn.

This mutual distrust is not a negotiating obstacle that can be resolved with creative diplomacy alone. It is the defining condition under which any agreement must be built. The US has the capacity to impose enormous economic and military costs on Iran. But power does not automatically produce compliance. For commitments to hold, Iran must believe concessions will bring relief rather than new demands. That belief has been badly damaged.

Consider the sequence of events surrounding the Muscat round itself. Hours after the talks concluded, the US State Department announced new sanctions targeting 14 shadow fleet vessels involved in transporting Iranian petroleum, alongside penalties on 15 entities and two individuals. The Treasury Department framed the action as part of the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. Whether preplanned or timed for effect, the message was clear: Washington intends to negotiate and squeeze simultaneously.

For Tehran, which has consistently demanded that sanctions relief be the starting point for progress, this sequencing confirms precisely the pattern it fears. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi identified this dynamic explicitly, telling Iranian state television that “the mistrust that has developed is a serious challenge facing the negotiations.”

What actually happened in Muscat

Beneath the competing narratives, the outlines of the substantive discussion have begun to emerge. Iran reportedly rejected a US demand for “zero enrichment”, a maximalist position it was never going to accept in a first meeting. The two sides instead discussed the dilution of Iran’s existing uranium stockpile, a more technical and potentially more productive avenue.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reported that diplomats from Egypt, Turkiye and Qatar had separately offered Iran a framework proposal: Halt enrichment for three years, transfer highly enriched uranium out of the country, and pledge not to initiate the use of ballistic missiles. Russia had reportedly signalled willingness to receive the uranium. Tehran has signalled both the enrichment halt and uranium transfer would be nonstarters.

Perhaps the most important development was the least visible. According to Axios, Witkoff and Kushner met directly with Araghchi during the talks, breaking from the strictly indirect format that Iran had demanded for most of last year’s rounds of negotiations. Iran had previously insisted on communicating with the US only through Omani intermediaries. Crossing that barrier, even partially, suggests both sides recognise the limits of indirect talks once bargaining becomes technical.

Oman’s framing was arguably the most honest assessment of the day. Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi described the talks as aimed at establishing “appropriate conditions for the resumption of diplomatic and technical negotiations”.

What the next few weeks will decide

Trump said a second round of talks would take place soon. Both sides indicated to Axios that further meetings were expected within days. The compressed timeline is notable. During last year’s rounds, weeks separated each session. The pace suggests Washington believes the diplomatic window is narrowing, and Tehran is at least willing to test that claim.

Several tests will show whether urgency produces substance or merely speed.

First, the scope question. The fundamental dispute over what the talks are about remains unresolved. Iran won the first procedural battle: The venue moved from Turkiye to Oman, regional observers were excluded, and Araghchi claims only nuclear issues were discussed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said before the talks that the agenda needed to include “all those issues”. If the second round begins with the same fight over scope, it will signal that even the basics remain unsettled.

Second, Iran’s enrichment posture. Before the June 2025 war, Iran had been enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, a short technical step from weapons-grade. Tehran has said enrichment stopped following the strikes. But Iran has also conditioned International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the bombed sites on new inspection arrangements, raising concerns among non-proliferation experts. Conversely, reports of enrichment resumption or acceleration would likely end the diplomatic track.

Third, the military environment. The US naval build-up in the Arabian Sea is not decorative. The drone shootdown near the Abraham Lincoln and Iran’s attempted interception of a US-flagged vessel in the Strait of Hormuz in the days before the talks show how quickly signalling can slide into miscalculation. Whether the carrier group is reinforced, maintained or gradually drawn down in the coming weeks will reveal more about Washington’s assessment of diplomacy than any press statement.

Fourth, the sanctions rhythm. The same-day announcement of shadow fleet sanctions establishes a pattern. If Washington continues to layer new economic penalties between rounds of talks, Tehran will treat it as evidence that diplomacy is performance rather than process.

Fifth, backchannel activity. The most consequential diplomacy over the next few weeks may not occur in formal settings. Oman, Qatar, Egypt and Turkiye have been working behind the scenes to sustain dialogue. If those intermediary contacts remain active, space for de-escalation persists. If they fall silent, the margin for error narrows.

A managed deadlock is not a strategy

The most probable short-term outcome remains neither breakthrough nor war, but a managed deadlock in which both sides maintain maximal public positions while avoiding steps that would make future talks impossible. In practice, this is a pause sustained by caution rather than a settlement anchored in confidence.

For the broader region, the distinction matters urgently. Gulf states have no interest in becoming staging grounds for escalation. Public statements across the region have consistently emphasised de-escalation, restraint and conflict avoidance. But regional actors can facilitate, host and encourage; they cannot impose terms on either Washington or Tehran.

The Muscat talks did not fail. Neither did they succeed. They established that a channel exists, that both sides are willing to use it, and that direct contact between senior officials is possible.

But a channel is not a plan. The absence of war is not the presence of a deal. The period between Muscat and whatever comes next is a window in which miscalculation remains close to the surface, sustained only by the assumption that both sides are reading each other’s signals correctly.

The next round of talks will not produce an agreement. But it may show whether the two sides are building a floor beneath the standoff or simply postponing the moment when that floor gives way.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

After Pakistan announced their boycott of the forthcoming T20I World Cup match against India, the International Cricket Council (ICC) was quick to lament the position the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) had put fans in. “[Pakistan’s] decision is not in the interest of the global game or the welfare of fans worldwide,” the ICC said in a release, before going on to make special mention of “millions in Pakistan”, who will now have no India fixture to anticipate.

Through the course of this statement, and the one the previous week, justifying the ICC’s ultimatum to the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) – which eventually led to Bangladesh’s exit from the tournament – the ICC leaned on ideals of fairness and equality. The “integrity and sanctity” of the World Cup was invoked, as well as the “neutrality and fairness” of such an event.

Pakistan’s fans may clock, of course, that they had not attracted such concern before the Champions Trophy in 2025, when India had refused to play in Pakistan for what were, in truth, purely political reasons. As it happened, a semifinal and the final of that tournament were eventually moved away from Pakistan, India’s cricketing magnetism pulling the knockouts to Dubai, after the ICC had adopted a “hybrid” model wherein India played all its matches outside the “host” country.

This was a key moment setting cricket on its current trajectory. In return for India’s refusal to play in its home country, Pakistan insisted they would not travel to India for this year’s T20 World Cup – two of the most storied cricketing nations on the planet descending to reciprocal petulance. In the lead-up to this World Cup, Bangladesh was also drawn into the fray, the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise’s jettisoning of Bangladesh bowler Mustafizur Rahman prompting Bangladesh to demand all its matches be played in Sri Lanka (India’s co-host for this tournament), and that demand, in turn, leading to it being thrown out entirely.

All claims that any of these boycotts are founded on security concerns are, in fact, bogus; security assessments ordered by the ICC had found India sufficiently equipped to handle Bangladesh’s visit, while Pakistan had hosted ICC-sanctioned international cricket involving multiple touring teams, and Pakistan had played an entire One Day International (ODI) World Cup in India as recently as 2023.

What is also clear, however, is that the ICC has now allowed its sport to become the medium through which South Asian states, currently as riven as they have been for decades, exchange geopolitical blows. What’s more, the ICC has begun to favour one set of geopolitical ambitions over others, India never so much as copping a censure for its refusal to play in Pakistan, while India’s men’s team’s refusal to shake hands with the Pakistan players in last year’s Asia Cup has now been adopted across the Board of Cricket in Control’s (BCCI’s) teams – the women’s and Under-19 (U19) sides following suit. To take the ICC at face value would also require believing that ICC Chair Jay Shah is conducting his business in complete separation from Amit Shah, who is India’s home minister.

It is India’s stupendous cricket economy that has chiefly brought about this imbalance. Since 2014, when a Big Three (India, Australia, England) takeover at the ICC diverted cricket to a hypercapitalist path, the game’s top administrators have been adamant that it is profits that must define cricket’s contours. Because India is the wellspring of much of the game’s finances, the ICC has organised for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to receive close to 40 percent of the ICC’s net earnings, while international men’s cricket largely surrenders a fifth of the calendar to the IPL. The sport’s high-octane driver of financial growth demands protection, or so the official line goes. If member boards fail to align with the BCCI agenda at the ICC, it has long been taken as read that the BCCI may threaten to cancel India’s next tour of that country, which in turn may shatter the smaller board’s revenues. The vote to issue that ultimatum to the BCB had run 14-2 against Bangladesh. A board must never forget at whose table it eats.

A cricket world that has spent 12 years lionising economic might cannot now be surprised that politics has now begun to overrun even the game’s financial imperatives. That monopolies tend to lead to appalling contractions in consumer choice has been a fundamental tenet of economics for generations. Hundreds of millions of Bangladesh fans are about to discover this over the next few weeks, as will the remainder of the cricketing world on February 15, when India and Pakistan were due to play. That profit-driven systems, which equate wealth with power, frequently lose the means to check the most powerful, is another longstanding principle in political economics.

The tournament’s competitive standards will also undoubtedly slip for Bangladesh’s absence. Bangladesh have a body of work in cricket that, respectfully, utterly dwarfs that of Scotland, who have replaced them. There are warnings here, too, for other cricketing economies. Although broadcast revenues from Bangladesh are a mere sliver of the mountains India presently generates, macroeconomic indicators from Bangladesh (a growing population, an improving gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) ranking) suggest that market is set to grow in future decades. If the ICC is willing to freeze a Full Member with Bangladesh’s potential, what will it do to more vulnerable boards – Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and the West Indies, for example?

The irony for many boards is that they have largely served the BCCI’s agenda at the ICC for a dozen years, helping extend its financial dominance. Since the Big Three first carved up governance and finances at the ICC in 2014, most smaller boards have been enthusiastic supporters of the BCCI’s programme, believing that only by appeasing India can they survive, which in itself is a tacit admission of a galling lack of ambition. And still, a dozen years of carrying this water has delivered them to no less bleak a position. In fact, several of the smaller Full Members have regressed..

Sri Lanka Cricket, for instance, has in recent years been among the BCCI’s most loyal allies. But it has now been a dozen years since any of their senior teams made the semifinal of a global tournament. Their Test cricket survives, but barely – the schedule is increasingly thin. Sri Lanka men only have six Tests on their slate in 2026, having had as few as four Tests to play last year. Cricket West Indies, meanwhile, has not seen a major resurgence on the field either, their men’s T20 fortunes having subsided since 2016, while both their men’s and women’s ODI teams have failed to qualify for the most recent World Cups. Zimbabwe Cricket is in no less challenging a footing now than it was two decades ago.

New Zealand and South Africa have held their own on the field, especially in women’s cricket and in the Test format. But to get here, Cricket South Africa (CSA), in particular, has had to be publicly chastened by the BCCI – in 2013, when India shortened a tour there because the BCCI resented the appointment of a CEO it didn’t like. More recently, South Africa’s top T20 league has also failed to feature Pakistan players, because each of the SA20’s franchise owners has a base in India. Excluding sportspeople based on the circumstances of their birth cuts hard against the ethos of post-Apartheid sport in South Africa. And yet even this national ambition has been subjugated by Indian political interests. Smaller boards have become so reliant on funds flowing from India that India increasingly chooses the terms of their cricketing survival.

Now, a World Cup is about to begin with Bangladesh having learned the harshest lesson of all. The BCB had been among the first of the smaller boards to sign away power to the Big Three during the first takeover in 2014. In 2026, the BCB now finds itself deeply out of favour for non-cricketing reasons.

India is inarguably the greatest cricketing superpower there ever has been. Even in the days of the Imperial Cricket Conference (the ICC’s predecessor), Australia and England could perhaps be relied on to check each other’s most predatory instincts. Such checks do not hold when one board is the sun, and the remainder are merely planets in its orbit. Perhaps the lesson for CA and the ECB – the BCCI’s most eager collaborators – is that the time may be coming when India has decided they are past their use-by date too. Why shouldn’t the BCCI freeze them out eventually? Would India not merely be doing what all superpowers tend to do, which is to leverage its stupendous power until all others either conform or are cast off? And why should the BCCI’s ambitions fall short of gobbling up even those established markets?

Cricket is now making clear its allegiances, and despite the ICC’s rhetoric, its commitments are no longer to neutrality and competitive equilibrium which are such vital rudiments of any sport. Other boards have allowed India’s will to prevail to such an extent that its motives now need not be merely economic; they can be nakedly political. And cricket is being eaten alive in this dark intersection between money and politics.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Last month during the violent clashes between Kurdish forces and the Syrian army, the United States delivered a devastating message to Syria’s Kurds: Their partnership with Washington had “expired“. This was not merely a statement of shifting priorities – it was a clear signal that the US was siding with Damascus and abandoning the Kurds at their most vulnerable moment.

For the Kurds across the region watching events unfold, the implications were profound. The US is no longer perceived as a reliable partner or supporter of minorities.

This development is likely to have an impact not just on the Kurdish community in Syria but also those in Iraq, Turkiye and Iran.

Fears of repeat marginalisation in Syria

US support for Damascus under interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa paves the way for a centralised Syrian state – an arrangement that Kurds throughout the region view with deep suspicion. Their wariness is rooted in bitter historical experience.

Centralised states in the Middle East have historically marginalised, excluded and assimilated Kurdish minorities. The prospect of such a system emerging in Syria, with US backing, represents a fundamental divergence from Kurdish hopes for the region’s future.

The approach the Assad regime to the Kurdish question was built on systematic denial. Kurds were not recognised as a distinct collective group within Syria’s national fabric; the state banned the public use of the Kurdish language and Kurdish names. Many Kurds were denied citizenship.

Al-Sharaa’s presidential decree of January 16 promised Kurds some rights while the January 30 agreement between Damascus and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) included limited recognition of Kurdish collective identity, including acknowledgment of “Kurdish regions” – terminology conspicuously absent from Syria’s political vocabulary and government documents in the past.

These represent incremental gains, but they are unfolding within a transitional government structure that aims for centralisation as its ultimate objective. That is why Syrian Kurds remain suspicious of whether the promises made today will be upheld in the future.

While a consensus has emerged among the majority of Kurdish groups that armed resistance is not strategically viable at this stage, any future engagement with the US will be perceived with mistrust.

Possibility of renewed Shia-Kurdish alliance in Iraq

After years of power rivalries between Shia and Kurdish parties in Iraq, both groups are now observing developments in Syria and potential changes in Iran with a shared sense of threat and common interests. If in 2003, their alliance was driven by a shared past – the suffering under Saddam Hussein’s regime – today it is being guided by a shared future shaped by fears of being marginalised in the region.

At both the political and popular levels, Shia and Kurdish parties and communities have had much more in common over the past few weeks than in the past. This convergence is evident not only in elite political calculations but also in public sentiment across both communities.

For the first time in recent memory, both Kurdish elites and ordinary citizens in Iraq are no longer enthusiastic about regime change in Iran, a position that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

In addition, last month, Iraq’s Shia Coordination Framework, an alliance of its Shia political parties, nominated Nouri al-Maliki for prime minister, the most powerful position in the Iraqi government. Remarkably, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the dominant Kurdish political force, welcomed the nomination.

The KDP’s support for al-Maliki was not solely a reaction to anger over US policy in Syria. It was also rooted in Iraqi and Kurdish internal politics. The endorsement is part of an ongoing rivalry between the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) over Iraq’s presidency, an office reserved for the Kurds. The KDP needs allies in Baghdad to ensure its candidate, rather than the PUK’s, secures the position.

However, Washington might see an alignment between the KDP-led Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq and an al-Maliki-led government or a similar government in Baghdad as not conducive to its interests in Iraq, especially its efforts to curb Iranian influence.

Before casting blame, Washington should ask itself why the Kurds feels compelled to adopt this position. The Kurdish stance cannot be fully understood without factoring US policy in Syria into the discussion. From a Kurdish perspective, the US has not been a neutral arbiter in Syria.

The peace process in Turkiye

Over the past year, many believed that the sustainability of Turkiye’s peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) hinged on a resolution of the Kurdish question in Syria and the fate of the SDF.

The violent clashes between Damascus, backed by Ankara and Washington, and the SDF threatened to close the door on negotiations. Remarkably, however, not all avenues have been shut.

It now appears the two issues are being treated as separate files. Negotiations with the PKK are likely to continue within Turkiye’s borders, and crucially, PKK leaders have not translated their disappointment over the weakening of the SDF into a definitive rejection of talks with Ankara.

What sustains this dynamic is that the SDF has not been entirely dismantled, leaving some breathing room for continued dialogue between Ankara and the PKK.

The Iranian Kurds

The Iranian Kurds, although farther away from Syria, have also observed events there and made their conclusions. The abandonment of the SDF reveals the unpredictable nature of US support for the region’s minorities.

In light of this and given continuing US incitement against the Iranian regime, it is quite significant that the Iranian Kurds collectively and deliberately decided not to be at the forefront of the recent protests or allow themselves to be instrumentalised by Western media.

The Kurdish community in Iran is not enthusiastic about a potential return of Reza Pahlavi, who clearly enjoys support from Washington, and the restoration of the shah’s legacy, which was also oppressive. Iranian opposition groups – many of them based in the West – have not offered a better prospect for the Kurdish question. There is widespread fear that the current regime could simply be replaced by another with no guarantee for Kurdish rights.

Some Iraq-based Iranian Kurdish armed groups did carry out attacks on Iranian positions near the Iran-Iraq border. But the main Iranian Kurdish armed actors chose not to engage directly or escalate militarily. Their calculations are based on the uncertainty about the endgame envisioned by Israel and the US and the reality that any escalation would provoke Iranian retaliation against Iraqi Kurds.

With each abandonment of its Kurdish allies, the US further erodes the foundation of trust upon which its local partnerships rest. Iraqi and Syrian Kurds have learned to live with American unreliability, but this arrangement may not endure indefinitely. When it fractures, the consequences for US influence in the region could be profound.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralysed. He experiences constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them. Nor can his mother. To keep the spasms under control, a drug called baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscles and stops the shaking. Suddenly halting the use of baclofen can have serious health consequences.

Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the family’s tent in al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza a week ago. It was her son’s seventh day without the medicine. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs leave him screaming out in pain.

Baclofen is unavailable anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.

Jamal now endures dozens of spasms each day. There is no alternative medication or substitute. There is no relief, only pain.

Jamal’s story is not to be told, if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their way.

Speaking at the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute last month, he said, “We need to make sure that the story is told properly so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. At this line, the audience applauded.

Pompeo went on to say that every war has civilian casualties, but the true victims in this case are the Israeli people. His concern is that October 7th and the war in Gaza would be remembered “incorrectly”.

It seems Pompeo wants to argue that the people of Gaza are just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war.  They are to remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.

His remarks reflect the next phase in Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s people, their mosques, their schools and universities, their cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now embarked on the erasure of memory and martyrdom.

The campaign is evident both inside and beyond Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an institution that has long preserved the status of the Palestinian refugee population and safeguarded their right of return under international law – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices have had a bit more freedom to speak – is now shadow banning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.

In the US, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, local laws are weaponised to come after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for using what should be their protected right to free speech. Laws are even passed at the state level in the US to shape what can be taught at schools about Israel and Palestine.

But what Pompeo – and those like him who misread biblical verses to justify their support for Israel and its genocide – do not understand is that Palestinians have faced erasure before and have overcome it. We will do so again.

In thinking about memory and bearing witness, the word “martyr” comes to mind. “Martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus”, meaning “witness”, and features prominently in the Bible. Similarly, the word “shaheed” in Arabic is derived from the root of the word for “witness” or “witnessing”. As the word evolved, it also took on connotations of violent suffering due to one’s beliefs, and even a sense of heroic steadfastness due to the scale of one’s sacrifice.

I can think of no better word than “shaheed” to describe Jamal and the people around him: they are living martyrs. Jamal’s little body has witnessed immense suffering; it has been pounded with the violence of the war, and he – like his mother – pushes on because of his overwhelming desire to live.

All around Jamal and Shaima’s tent are thousands of other tents. Day and night, each of them is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Inside the tents, cold and often wet from the recent floods, are thousands of other people who require urgent and important medical evacuation to hospitals.

The pain and suffering are immense, yet the likes of Pompeo continue to justify the ongoing and historically rooted process of the elimination of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian people are also poets at heart. And what Pompeo – who devalues language, memory and history – will never understand is that the poet is a witness.

As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his verses:

Those who pass between fleeting words

Take your names with you and go

Rid our time of your hours, and go

Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sands of memory

Take what pictures you will so as to understand

That which you never will:

How a stone from our land becomes the ceiling of our sky.

The Palestinian people will keep memory alive, just as we have kept alive the pain of Beit Daras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Muhammad al-Durrah, Anas al-Sharif and the roots of every olive tree ripped from its soil. The Palestinian people, and millions in solidarity around the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the living martyr Jamal, each of us will take the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Ever since the crackdown on protests in Iran between January 8 and 10, there has been contention on what the true death toll of those bloody events is. According to figures provided by the Iranian government, 3,117 people were killed, including civilians and security forces. Yet estimates from outside the country have put the number at anywhere between 5,000 and a staggering 36,500.

This wide range not only reflects the fact that it has been extremely difficult to verify these reports, but also that there has been a concerted effort to use the death count to manufacture global consent for an attack on Iran and, in a deceitful rhetoric, downplay the official death toll of the genocide in Gaza.

Since the outbreak of the protests, there has been a race to estimate and report on the casualties – something I call a “Death Toll Olympics”.

Iran-focused human rights organisations led by dissident activists have been going through all sorts of evidence and testimonies to verify the number of the dead. As of writing this piece, the US-based organisation HRANA (Human Rights Activists News Agency) has cited more than 6,000 deaths and a further 17,000-plus cases under examination.

However, there are valid doubts about the speed of the activist-led verification process.

For every reported death, multiple accounts have to be examined, possible duplications must be identified and eliminated; and dates, locations and specific circumstances must be cross-checked against the timeline of events.

Furthermore, any visual evidence has to be localised and authenticated based on open-source data or corroborated by the accounts of multiple witnesses. From an investigative standpoint, the reliability and quality of activist-led counts that increase rapidly on a daily basis, therefore warrants caution.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, has cited a conservative estimate of around 5,000 deaths. At the same time, she has mentioned that unverified numbers of up to 20,000 have been reported to her by medical sources.

The described obstacles, and difficulties of verification over the past weeks, have been further exacerbated by Iran’s severely restricted internet access. Despite this, major media outlets have begun distributing much higher figures, solely based on vague anonymous sources who claim privileged access within Iran’s government or health sector.

On January 25, for example, UK-based TV network Iran International published a report claiming 36,500 were killed, citing “extensive reports” allegedly obtained from the Iranian security apparatus – reports it has neither published nor otherwise made transparent.

The same day, United States news magazine Time published an article titled “Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30,000, According to Local Health Officials”. It claimed that “as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone” based on the accounts of two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health, whose identities were not revealed for security reasons. Notably, the magazine admitted in the text that it did not possess any means to independently confirm that number.

Two days later, British newspaper The Guardian followed the same trend with an article titled “Disappeared bodies, mass burials and ‘30,000 dead’: what is the truth of Iran’s death toll?” The piece introduced the figure of 30,000 based on estimates of an anonymous doctor, who spoke to the newspaper. He and his colleagues in Iran, the outlet admitted, were actually hesitant to provide a concrete figure.

Other media – from the Sunday Times to the Pierce Morgan Uncensored show – have cited papers circulated by Germany-based ophthalmologist Amir Parasta claiming death toll numbers between 16,500 and 33,000. However, the latest available version of the paper, dating back to January 23 uses disputable extrapolation methods to reach its figures. Strikingly, Parasta does not make any secret of his affiliation with Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s ousted Shah

The exiled crown prince and his team, whose extensive social media manipulation and disinformation efforts have been exposed by recent investigations by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and University of Toronto’s The Citizen Lab, have been key actors in inciting and escalating the recent protests towards confrontation. Accordingly, the fatality numbers disseminated by Mr Parasta cannot be perceived as neutral and constitute partisan estimates at best.

Despite acknowledging their own inability to verify these estimates, the media in question nevertheless put these extreme figures in titles and subheadings. It didn’t take long for other outlets to report on these inflated numbers, referring to these major publications as primary sources. Activists and Western politicians have also used them to push their respective agendas, thereby further fuelling a spiral of disinformation campaigns on social media. – In other words, a “death toll olympics” was born.

All of this has served two ends.

First, it has supported efforts to manufacture consent for foreign military intervention and malicious political action. While the protests were still ongoing, US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened military action against Iran in the event of a deadly crackdown. As of writing these lines, there has been a significant US military build-up around Iran, effectively thickening the war cloud.

Second, the speculation about the Iranian death toll has helped pro-Israel politicians and commentators in the West to downplay the casualties of the Israeli war on Gaza. In this way, it has become a utilitarian tool for relativising the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Confronted with mounting pressure regarding the death toll, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the authorities to “publicly publish the names and personal data of those deceased during the recent bitter incidents”. His director of communication has even promised that a procedure has been set up to examine and verify any conflicting claims.

It remains to be seen how effective and transparent the promised procedure will turn out. It is undeniable that thousands have been killed in Iran, mostly by Iranian security forces, amid a multi-day brutal crowd and riot control effort.

Structural obscurity and the restricted access to Iran for independent experts will likely mean that the exact death toll will never be determined. However, the more transparency can be established regarding the scale of the killings, the more likely it is that the perpetrators can be held accountable.

An arduous verification process of the recent deaths is crucial not only for the sake of accountability, but also to expose the media manipulation that is once again preparing the ground for a unilateral US-led act of aggression in the Middle East. In light of this, the “Death Toll Olympics” remains an ignominious disservice to the wretched of the Earth from Palestine to Iran.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Over the past year, United States President Donald Trump has pursued “peace-making” all across the world. A prominent feature of his efforts has been the belief that economic threats or rewards can resolve conflicts. Most recently, his administration has put forward economic development plans as part of peace mediation for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Syria.

While some may see Trump’s “business” approach to “peace-making” as unique, it is not. The flawed conviction that economic development can resolve conflicts has been a regular feature of Western neoliberal peace initiatives in the Global South for the past few decades.

Occupied Palestine is a good example.

In the early 1990s, when the “peace process” was initiated, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres started advocating for “economic peace” as part of it. He sold his vision of the “New Middle East” as a new regional order that would guarantee security and economic development for all.

The project aimed to place Israel at the economic centre of the Arab world through regional infrastructure — transport, energy and industrial zones. Peres’s solution for the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” was Palestinian economic integration. The Palestinians were promised jobs, investment, and improved living standards.

His argument was that economic development and cooperation would foster stability and mutual interest between Israelis and Palestinians. But that did not happen. Instead, as the occupation continued to entrench itself after the US-brokered Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), anger in the Palestinian streets grew and eventually led to the outbreak of the second Intifada.

This neoliberal approach was tested again by the Quartet – consisting of the United Nations, the European Union, the US and Russia – and its envoy Tony Blair in 2007. By then, the Palestinian economy had collapsed, losing 40 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in eight years and plunging 65 percent of the population into poverty.

Blair’s “solution” was to propose 10 “quick impact” economic projects and fundraise for them in the West. This went hand-in-hand with the policies of then-Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in what came to be known as “Fayyadism”.

Fayyadism was sold to Palestinians as a pathway to statehood through institution-building and economic growth. Fayyad focused on generating short-term economic gains in the occupied West Bank while simultaneously rebuilding the Palestinian security apparatus to meet Israeli security demands.

This model of economic peace never addressed the root cause of Palestinian economic stagnation: the Israeli occupation. Even the World Bank warned that investment without a political settlement ending Israeli control would fail in the medium and long term. Yet the approach persisted.

There were Palestinians who benefitted from it, but they were not common Palestinians. They were a narrow elite: security officials who gained privileged access to financial institutions, contractors tied to Israeli markets, and a handful of large investors. For the wider population, living standards remained precarious.

Rather than preparing Palestinians for statehood, Fayyadism replaced liberation with management, sovereignty with security coordination, and collective rights with individual consumption.

This economic approach to conflict resolution merely gave Israel time to entrench its colonial enterprise by expanding its settlements on Palestinian land.

The latest economic plan for Gaza, presented by Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, is unlikely to bring economic prosperity to the Palestinians either. The project reflects two deeply contradictory dynamics: it foregrounds opportunities for investment and profit for global and regional oligarchies while systematically ignoring the fundamental national and human rights of the Palestinian people.

Security is framed exclusively around the needs of the occupying power, while Palestinians are compartmentalised, securitised, and surveilled — reduced to a depoliticised labour force stripped of social and national identity.

This approach views people as individuals rather than as nations or historically established communities. Under this logic, individuals are expected to acquiesce to oppression and dispossession once they obtain jobs and improve their living standards.

These strategies are failing to build peace not just in Palestine.

In the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the US has proposed expanding the demilitarised zone and converting it into a joint economic zone, featuring a ski resort. The US approach seems designed not only to pressure Syria to relinquish its sovereign rights over the territory, but also to recast it as a security project in ways that primarily benefit Israel. Under this framework, the US would act as the security guarantor. Its close alliance with Israel, however, puts its impartiality and true intentions in doubt.

In Ukraine, the US has proposed a free economic zone in parts of the Donbas region, from which the Ukrainian army would have to withdraw. This would allow Moscow to expand its influence without direct military confrontation, creating a buffer zone favourable to Russian security interests.

The Donbas has historically been one of Ukraine’s industrial bases, and transforming it into a free economic zone would deprive Ukraine of a critical economic resource. There are also no guarantees that the Russian army would not simply advance after the Ukrainian withdrawal and take the whole region.

These neoliberal “solutions” to the conflicts in Gaza, the Donbas and the Golan Heights are doomed to fail just like the economically-driven peace initiatives of the 1990s and 2000s in occupied Palestine.

The main problem is that the US cannot really provide credible guarantees that the areas would remain stable, so investors can secure returns on their investments. That is because no solid political settlement would be in place, given the fact that these proposals ignore the political, cultural and most importantly, national interests of the people living in these regions. As a result, no serious or independent investor would commit capital to such an arrangement.

Nations are not made up of consumers or labourers; they are made up of people with a common identity and national aspirations.

Economic incentives should follow, not precede, a political resolution that secures the self-determination of indigenous peoples. Any conflict-resolution framework that ignores collective rights and international law is therefore bound to fail. Political settlements must prioritise these rights, a requirement that stands in direct opposition to the logic of neoliberalism.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.