Politics of Fear in Iraq’s Election Campaigns

This episode explores the recent election of Salahuddin’s governor and what it signals about cross-sectarian coalition-building in Iraq’s evolving political landscape. The hosts analyze the growing generational divide between Iraq's old guard politicians and emerging younger lead ...  Show more

The outgoing government recently claimed it had met 88% of the targets set out in its three-year Government Program, even as it announced emergency austerity measures. In this episode, we scrutinize the credibility of that performance rating and examine the deeper fiscal reality ...  Show more

This week on Babel, Jon speaks with Dr. Haider al-Abadi, an Iraqi politician who served as prime minister from 2014 to 2018, while the country was battling the Islamic State Group (ISG). They talk about his decision making as prime minister, the Iraqi government's response to the ...  Show more

On Monday August 29th, Iraq came closer to civil war than it has for year. The fears of many Iraqis that political tensions would spill out into violence were coming true.

After 11 months of parliamentary elections, government formation is still help up by complete poli ...

This week Jon is joined by Hassan Hassan, director of the program on non-state actors in geopolitics at the Center for Global Policy and the editor-in-chief of its new online journal, Newlines Magazine. Hassan talks to Jon about his late colleague, Hisham al-Hashimi, and the rese ...  Show more

In a special episode of Babel to mark the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, Jon sits down with two Iraqi guests to talk about the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. Dr. Marsin Alshamary is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard's Belfer Cen ...  Show more