Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
Yevgeny V Prigozhin built the mercenary force Wagner Group as he enriched himself thanks to his ties with President Vladimir Putin which helped him get the Russian government's lucrative contracts for construction and catering
Iraq reaped the bitter fruits post-2003 of the adventurism of another Westerner Paul Bremer, who fell back upon the colonial divide-and-rule policy to counter a broad-based challenge to the American occupation and prepared the ground for ISIS to tap into resentment over the Sunni purge
Colonnaded thoroughfare Al Rasheed Street was built to commemorate the Ottoman victory in Kut al-Amara during the First World War before the scales tipped in Britain’s favour and the British troops drove Ottomans out with the help of Arabs
Britain and France secretly hammered out the Sykes-Picot accord in 1916 to arbitrarily redraw borders by marking straight lines with a rude chinagraph pencil and a ruler on the Middle East's map as their shared spoils of the First World War without letting the region's people have a say
Baghdad quickly became the world's cultural lodestar after its foundation, which has been described as 'a glorious milestone in the history of urban design' and 'a landmark for civilisation', in the eighth century
