Ryan O'Farrell

Some on the Left only oppose imperialism when it is Western. Ukrainians invaded by a regime seeking to erase their country, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Lebanese suffering under Iranian-backed regimes and militias & endured Iran's expansionist wars simply don't interest them.

New poll in Palestine by the Jerusalem Media & Communications Center (JMCC) & Friedrich Ebert Stiftung showing: * 55.8% support peaceful negotiations as the "best method to achieve the Palestinian people's goals of ending the occupation". 13.3% support armed resistance. 17.8% support non-violent resistance. * If elections were held today, 27.5% would vote Fatah, only 7.6% would vote Hamas, 40.2% won't vote. * 50.1% of Palestinians believe that the Oct 7 attacks harmed Palestinians national interests, 15.7% believe it served them * Which political factions you trust? 55% trust no one, 22.3% trust Fatah, 6.7% trust Hamas. jmcc.org/en/File/29187y16832…

My new report w/ @FaysalItani demonstrates through 3 different case studies the devastating consequences of politics of exclusion in the Middle East: The Druze of Syria, political exclusion in Iraq, and the Sunnis in Lebanon. mepc.org/wp-content/uploads/… In the chapter on the Druze in post-Assad Syria, I show how the Druze of Sweidaa' suffer from two forms of political exclusion. The first is in Damascus, where strategic decision-making is highly centralized by a handful of men, all of them former HTS commanders. As part of its negotiations with various actors in Sweidaa', Damascus accepted that Druze be charged with internal security in their areas, but refused to delegate any political authority to the governorate's population, fearing it'll set a precedent for other governorates. Eventually, Damascus decided to resolve the dispute by using force, a decision that produced the July 2025 Sweidaa' massacres. The massacres dealt a death blow (sometimes a literal one) to Sweidaa's vibrant civil society, which was overwhelmingly supportive of integration with Damascus, and empowered a clique of militia commanders, many of them Assad-era war criminals and drug traffickers, who adopted a hardline position toward Damascus. This hardline position, most prominently championed by Sheikh al-Aql Hikmat al-Hajari, rejected the new authorities in Damascus, deeming them to be "jihadists" who seek to subjugate the Druze. According to multiple interviews I conducted with Sweidaa' residents, this once-minority position became the dominant one owing to the massacres. This clique of militia commanders, who've become war profiteers owing to their control of the movement of goods and people in/out of Sweidaa', now dominate decision-making in Sweidaa', excluding Sweidaa's once highly influential civil society. The 2nd chapter documents how Iraq's seemingly inclusive political system, which assigns quotas for minorities and women and where genuinely competitive elections are held, is in fact a limited access order. That is, a system in which a coalition of elites uses control of the state to restrict access to political and economic power, maintaining their dominance through a combination of legal manipulation, patronage, violence, and media control. I detail, based on interviews with Iraqi politicians, activists, journalists and brilliant thinkers, how Iraq's elite was able to maintain the ruling kleptocratic order even in the face of the entry of almost 50 independent "Tishreeni" MPs into the 2021 parliament, through the abuse of Iraqi laws, cooptation, control over patronage distribution, and exploiting the inexperience of the incoming MPs. The 3rd case study, of the marginalization of Lebanon's Sunnis, was written by Faysal Itani, and shows how the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri by Hezbollah and the 2008 coup the militia staged decimated Sunni power within the Lebanese state. This in turn accelerated Hezbollah's domination of Lebanon's politics and state organs, including the security forces.

What Entifadh is saying is absolutely right. The men who kidnapped, tortured & held me captive all receive salaries from the Iraqi state, either as members of an internal security organ (my kidnappers & torturers for 4.5 months) or the Popular Mobilization Units (those who held me for 25 months). Some of my torturers came in to abuse me wearing official state uniform. They would torture me always in the evenings, nights and weekends, because during work hours, they are torturing Iraqis arrested by them.