Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From MESH Admin
This map of Lebanon, prepared by Lebanon-Support, seeks to identify areas of “vulnerability” within Lebanon—what might best be described as potential flash points—as of June 2008. The map’s authors describe the map’s layers in these terms:

Political layer, displaying the electoral weight of the opposition and “loyalists” in each of the electoral districts of […]

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From MESH Admin
The clashes in Lebanon last month revealed the underlying fault lines within the country. These two maps, prepared by Lebanon-Support, are useful references to where they run.

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From MESH Admin
Last week, as Israel conducted countrywide civil defense and military exercises, UNIFIL increased its patrols on the Israeli-Lebanese border. The Beirut Daily Star reported:
On the Lebanese side, hundreds of UNIFIL and LAF [Lebanese army] patrols—on land and in the air—were met with the complete absence of Hizbullah fighters. But Hizbullah was present […]

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From MESH Admin
This past November, Le Monde diplomatique published a map (in English) entitled “Geography of Chaos,” illustrating conflicts in the Middle East. The map shows major conflicts; areas of high tension; states or territories at war, in fragmentation, or lacking central authority; arrows indicating the possible spread of chaos; states aligned with the United […]

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From MESH Admin
Two recent maps are useful guides to aspects of the present situation in the West Bank. To view each map in full, click on the thumbnail (a pdf file will open).

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From MESH Admin
On Thursday evening, Turkish forces entered northern Iraq to do battle with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has called the move “a limited military incursion into a remote, isolated and uninhabited region.” According to various sources, there have been clashes in the Qandil mountains along the Iraqi-Iranian […]

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From MESH Admin
Here is the latest (January 17) map of trends in ethno-sectarian violence in Baghdad, from the Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I). The green areas are predominantly Shiite, the blue are mostly or predominantly Sunni, and the brown areas are closely mixed. The yellow-orange-red inflammation indicates “incidents where deaths occurred from any means that were […]

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