The recent declaration of a Caliphate by IS (Islamic State, formally ISIS) could have huge security ramifications throughout the Middle East. In territory captured in both Syria and Iraq by IS, the Islamic State has blurred the borders, leaving the potential for a break-up of an increasingly unstable Iraq an ever growing possibility.

America’s commitment to the principle that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend has come back to bite them on more than one occasion, and now Bashar Al-Assad is beginning to realise that even just leaving one’s enemies to fight it out can be problematic.

The trial and conviction of Australian journalist Peter Greste and two of his al-Jazeera colleagues has attracted world wide media coverage as it highlights the extent to which due process violations have spread throughout Egypt’s judicial system following the regime change almost a year ago.

The decision by the UK government to take steps towards the re-opening of the UK Embassy in Iran carries with it a potentially dangerous precedent, firstly in misrepresenting the values supposedly underlining UK foreign policy, and secondly in providing tacit approval for Iran's current actions, and by extension how Iranis conducting itself regionally and internationally.

We humans do have a strange way of dealing with illness at times. So many of us seem to take the ‘if it ain’t hanging off it’s probably fine’ approach to that twinging chest pain or that cough that has not gone away for a month.

The active sectarian rivalry and conflict in Iraq – long exploited by successive governments in Bagdad – has reached crisis proportions. Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and a primary oil centre, was overrun and occupied June 12th 2014 by the Sunni militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) (ISIS) which formerly fought under the al-Qaeda banner. ISIS are making gains on their previous successes in taking large parts of the central city of Fallujah in December 2013

Despite a fairly new name, ISIS has a considerable pedigree as a terrorist and insurgent organisation. Before taking its current name in 2013, it was known as the “Islamic State of Iraq”, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” and “The Organisation for Monotheism and Jihad”,

The rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham) in Iraq and Syria is a source of major concern across the Middle East. The Islamist group’s ambition to create an Islamic state is not limited to Iraq and Syria, as confusion over its name may suggest.

The initial step in assessing the potential military response to recent events in Iraq is to seek to understand how the security situation in the country degenerated so quickly. The most obvious and urgent question that needs to be answered is how as few as 800 ISIS militants (out of a total of around 6,000 in Iraq), were able to overrun a garrison of around 25,000 Iraqi troops.

On Tuesday, the jihadist group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham) launched a long-planned assault on Iraq, seizing control of Mosul, the country’s second largest city, after taking large parts of the central city of Fallujah and nearby Ramadi in December 2013.