Mideast Week in Review - June 26 // FAI ONLINE

Afghanistan - A 6.1 earthquake struck the eastern province of Khost, Afghanistan last Wednesday, killing over 1,000 people and injuring at least 1,500 in Afghanistan’s deadliest quake since 1998. Over 2,000 homes were destroyed in a radius extending over 500 kilometers (310 miles) of mountainous terrain. The tremor was felt as far away as India.

Local Afghans began sifting through rubble by hand to rescue survivors in the aftermath of the quake, while the leader of the ruling Taliban party made a rare appeal to the international community for immediate assistance, exhorting aid organizations to “help the Afghan people affected by this great tragedy and to spare no effort.” More than half of Afghanistan’s population of almost 40 million people already subsist on international aid, as the nation has slipped into near-universal poverty and famine in the wake of the Taliban takeover in August, 2021. Meanwhile, the Taliban is still battling the twin threats of ISIS-K jihadists and the National Resistance Front (NRF), a residual force of the Northern Alliance which has opposed the Pashtun-led Taliban movement since the 1990’s.

Syria and Syrian Kurdistan - After a decade of animosity, the Palestinian Hamas movement has reconciled with the Assad regime in Syria, largely due to mediation efforts brokered by the Hezbollah terrorist group. The Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are all connected by their largest patron, the Iranian regime, who has redoubled efforts to unite opposition to the State of Israel as it continues to develop its nuclear program.

Hamas sided with Sunni rebel factions against the Assad regime in the early days of the Syrian Civil War, angering Iran and leading to reports that the ayatollahs in Tehran has stopped funding the Palestinian organization. However, it is clear that the Iranian regime did continue its relationship with Hamas in the Palestinian territories over the past decade, even as its al-Quds Force within the IRGC propped up the Assad regime in Syria, a testament to the fact that the issue of the State of Israel is enough to unite the various factions and sects of radical Islam which would otherwise find themselves in opposition to one another.

Meanwhile, in Syrian Kurdistan (aka Rojava), the female leader in the Kurdish PYD party, the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), encouraged military cooperation between the SDF, the Assad regime, and pro-Iranian militias in their mutual opposition to a fourth Turkish invasion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on June 1 to green-light another military incursion into Syrian Kurdistan, targeting the communities of Manbij and Tel Rifaat, where the SDF and pro-Assad forces are active. The PYD and Assad regime are strange bedfellows, as Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez spent a half-century repressing Kurdish culture and Arabizing Kurdish lands in Northeast Syria.

Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Assyrian allies formed the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) after the Syrian army withdrew from the Rojava region in 2012 to fight Sunni Arab rebel forces in the west. Alarmed by the ascendency of the PYD, an offshoot of the Kurdish PKK movement in Turkey, Erdogan ordered three invasions of Kurdish-majority areas of northern Syria along the Turkish border between 2016-2019. The three operations have displaced over a half-million Kurds from their homes and produced hundreds of documented incidents of war crimes and atrocities against the local population.

Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan - The Iraqi parliament swore in 69 new MP’s last Thursday after 73 members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s parliamentary bloc resigned en masse the week before. Sadr’s party won the largest share of seats in Iraq’s parliamentary elections last October, but deadlocked with other Shiite parties more closely allied with Iran. Senior Iraqi politicians are now calling for snap parliamentary elections in response to the political crisis.

Muqtada al-Sadr gained notoriety as the firebrand Shiite cleric whose militia was violently opposed to the American occupation of Iraq between 2003-2010, killing hundreds of American soldiers. Once supported and protected as a proxy of the Iranian regime, al-Sadr has since broken from his former patrons in Tehran, espousing the doctrine of an Iraqi government free from all foreign influence. al-Sadr formed a coalition with the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), led by the Barzani family in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as moderate Sunni parties, who are all opposed to the influence of Iranian parties and militias inside Iraq.

Meanwhile, in Iraqi Kurdistan, a gas field administered by the United Arab Emirates has been struck with at least six Katyusha rockets in the last week, including three times in the last 72 hours. The strikes came as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) announced plans for a pipeline between the Khor Mor gas field and Turkey. Although no claim of responsibility has been published, the attacks fit the profile of pro-Iranian militias who are opposed to Turkey and the KRG’s ruling party. At least two workers at the gas field have been lightly injured by the rocket fire.

Also in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkish state-run media took responsibility for the assassination of a senior Syrian Kurdish politician last Sunday. Hussein Shibli was the co-chair of the AANES’s executive committee, the autonomous, democratic body of Northeast Syria. He was visiting allied Kurdish parties in the city of Sulaymaniyah when his vehicle was struck by a drone operated by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization. Turkey accused Shibli of being a member of the PKK, a Kurdish socialist movement which has fought several insurgencies against the Turkish government since the 1980’s, and which Turkey considers to be a terrorist organization. Three others in the vehicle with Shibli were also killed, and one injured.

As incidents of war, strife, earthquakes and famines continue to mount across the Middle East, we would ask the Maranatha global community to continue in prayer for unreached people groups across the region. We pray for the schemes of the enemy to be restrained, for divine wisdom to be granted to international leaders, and for each calamity and catastrophe to open “wide, effectual doors” for laborers of the Mideast harvest fields.

Maranatha!