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Dr. Walid Phares

Dr. Walid Phares, Walidphares.com, is the author of the "The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East," and “The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy,” He is a Professor of Global Strategies and the Co-Secretary General of the Transatlantic Legislative Group on Counter Terrorism.

Most Recent Articles by Dr. Walid Phares:

Middle East and Iraq's Christians under attack

By now, all Christians living in the second largest city of Iraq, Mosul, have been removed, their belongings stolen, their houses seized, their churches burned or transformed into Mosques by an army brandishing black flags with Koranic inscriptions on them.
- Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Khomeinist Dome: Iran's Larger Nuclear Strategy

As a reader of Khomeinist global strategies since the early 1980s, and as I have argued over decades in books and articles, Tehran’s regime possesses a much larger nuclear strategy than the simple acquisition of mass destruction weapons.
- Friday, April 25, 2014

The Lost Spring

This month, my book The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid will be in libraries across America and online. This new book, published by Palgrave-McMillan in New York, is an analysis of the evolution of the Arab Spring and its future. It also addresses other democratic revolutions, upheavals and civil wars in the Middle East, including events in Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and beyond.
- Wednesday, March 5, 2014

The "Iran deal," Washington’s gravest mistake in Foreign Policy

The Obama administration, in its first and second terms, has committed strategic mistakes in the Middle East which will undermine U.S. national and security interests for many years, even under subsequent administrations after 2016.
- Friday, February 28, 2014

A Miracle on the Nile…

A miracle on the Nile has been accomplished this week. Tens of millions of Egyptian citizens from all walks of life, Muslims and Christians, conservatives and liberals, seculars and religious, young and old, and in some instances, healthy and sick, have come out to cast a vote in the referendum of the century: either to say yes to new moderate constitution, relatively democratic, or to say no and revert to an Islamist constitution adopted by the previous Muslim Brotherhood regime.
- Saturday, January 18, 2014

A real interim choice for Syria

In the northeastern part of Syria—contiguous to Iraq and Turkey—lies al Hasaka or the Triangle, also known as al Jazeera province. As large as Lebanon, this area is inhabited by roughly four million Kurds, one million Christians and a half million Arabs. Assad forces have practically left the area, and Kurdish militias have set up patrols, stopping Al Qaeda militias trying to enter these districts.
- Friday, September 13, 2013

The Nile of Democracy will Flood Egypt’s Jihadists

As soon as the Egyptian military asked President Mohammed Mursi to step down and dismantle his Muslim Brotherhood regime, millions in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities and towns celebrated the end of what they felt was a dangerous fascistic regime.
- Monday, July 8, 2013

U.S. and Syria: Strategic choices

Two years and three months after the start of the Syrian revolution and its subsequent transformation into a full-fledged civil war, the United States stands at a historic crossroads; intervening with the goal of crumbling the Assad regime and assisting in erecting an alternative power in Damascus or backing the opposition to a point where the regime has no other choice than to negotiate at Geneva.
- Monday, June 17, 2013

U.S. administration wrongly advocates the Islamist interpretation of Islamophobia

The State Department issued a report denouncing what it called "a spike in anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and Asia." It said that "Muslims also faced new restrictions in 2012 in countries ranging from Belgium, which banned face-covering religious attire in classrooms, to India[,] where schools in Mangalore restricted headscarves."
- Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The AP Capitulates to the Muslim Brotherhood on narrative

In a stunning move, the Associated Press (AP) capitulated to pressures by Islamist group CAIR to drop the use of the term "Islamist" when describing self-declared Islamist militants and movements. The AP's retreat is indicative of a crumbling of parts of the so-called "mainstream media" in its reporting about the Middle East, the Arab world and the Muslim world.
- Sunday, April 7, 2013

Obama abstract on the Middle East, admits Jihadi expansion, ignores Taliban after 2014

In his State of the Union speech of 2013, President Barack Obama addressed several crises in the Middle East and on the front of fighting terror. On Afghanistan President Obama assessed the outcome of his policies as a weakening of the Taliban and committed to a sustained withdrawal from the country while helping the Afghan Government to take the lead in military missions. The role of the US after withdrawal in 2014, according to Obama will be to assist the fight against al Qaeda.
- Monday, February 18, 2013

Why Americans of Mideast Descent Have Shifted to Romney

When Senator Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, most Americans of Arabic and Middle Eastern origin supported him. Mobilized as were many Americans for “change” on the one hand, these communities were also submitted to an impressive campaign by Islamist-leaning organizations and supporters of Arab regimes, on the other hand, all opposed to the incumbent’s foreign policy then. They used President Bush’s endorsement of Arizona Senate Republican John McCain to frame Obama’s opponent as anti-Arab and border Islamophobe. To them, Obama was squaring off with a candidate who supported the so-called “Bush wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Saturday, November 3, 2012


Prague’s Havel is gone waiting for the Middle Eastern Havels to come

As I was watching the carriage transporting the late Vaclav Havel, the first President of free post-Communist Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, into the Prague Castle I was sobered and deeply moved. Having been a witness to major world changes spanning from the end of the twentieth to the start of the twenty-first centuries, I was now watching the departure of a giant of his time who happened to be a modest and a shy man leading a small Central European nation. His words, his life story, and his commitment to liberty have brought hope to many people around the world, far beyond those who speak Czech.
- Friday, December 23, 2011

Middle East Studies failed to predict and address the “Arab Spring”

When the young Tunisian burned himself in protest against authoritarian oppression and lack of economic justice, triggering massive demonstrations in this small North African country, commentators hesitated to coin the movement as an Arab Spring. It took months, and events exploding in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria before the West coined the upheavals "Arab Spring." And as the movement was developing throughout the region the West was also unsure as to which direction these revolutions are going to go.
- Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Iran’s MAD strategy has a strategic rationale

My first book, The Iranian Islamic Revolution, published way back in 1986, dealt with the historicity of the 1979 Khomeinist Revolution in Iran. In it, I exposed the Khomeinist regime’s long-term ambitions and revisionist account of events that led to the Shah’s overthrow and Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to power in the alleged Islamic “Republic” of Iran.
- Sunday, November 6, 2011

Iran’s Botched Act of War in Washington

For the Iranian regime to attempt a terror strike on American soil, and particularly in Washington DC, including a high profile assassination and blowing up two important Middle Eastern embassies, it means that the Ayatollahs have crossed the conventional red line separating them from the previously cautious strategies of Terror.
- Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Arab Spring Falls on Egypt’s Coptic Christians

imageThe credibility of the Arab Spring took a bloody hit on Sunday October 9th when Egyptian Army forces shot dead more than thirty Christian Copts and wounded scores of them. In addition, the action by the Army was paralleled by armed men, described as Salafi Jihadists by Coptic sources, seen also shooting and hitting demonstrators with knives. At a few weeks from the legislative elections in Egypt, this violence impacts the debate about the Spring of Egypt but also challenges US and European policies towards the current and perhaps the forthcoming Government. Can the West support - and fund - a regime that kills members of the weakest community in Egypt, months after the fall of Mubarak?
- Monday, October 10, 2011

Al Awlaki is gone but his Jihadists are multiplying

Imam Anwar al Awlaki held two important positions in the cobweb of international Jihadi terror. First, he was one of the emerging younger leaders of al Qaeda after the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Out of Yemen, from which his family originates, he had built a network of recruits capable of performing missions in the Arabian Peninsula, but also communicating with the Shabab of Somalia and many cells inside the West.
- Friday, September 30, 2011


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