Human Security Centre Human Rights and International Security Research

Recent pleas by then Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal for American “boots on the ground” to prevent Tehran from “taking over Iraq” have fallen on deaf ears in Washington.

The fall of Mosul, allegedly to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is not the military victory it has been made out to be. For a start, as the New York Times and Agence France-Presse report, ISIS gunmen (who faced an army outnumbering them fifty-to-one) were able to occupy strategic positions around the city only after Iraqi commanders ordered their troops to stand down and retreat.

Senior Fellow Jacob Campbell's article published in The Algemeiner on Western Foreign Policy in Syria. When the Syrian Support Group, the fundraising wing of the Free Syrian Army, was set up in Washington DC, I joined it to volunteer my services. I did so because I was frustrated at the reluctance of Western governments to arm Syria’s freedom fighters against the tyrant, Bashar al-Assad.

By Jacob Campbell – Senior Fellow 24th  June 2013 They say it is far easier to criticize something than to propose a solution. When it comes to the methods by which the United States prosecutes the war on terror, idealistic ...

By Jacob Sharpe – Senior Fellow 18th June 2013 Iran is a country that adheres very closely to the democratic principle of ‘one man, one vote’. Perhaps a little too closely, in fact, inasmuch as that one man is Supreme ...

Who could have foreseen that Libya, within just one year of Muammar Gaddafi’s death, would join the community of democratic nations? Virtually everyone predicted that the Islamist tide would sweep through Tripoli as it had done through Tunis and Cairo. But it was not to be. Instead, the Libyan people made fools of us all.