For Omar Ashour's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
In a war with endlessly shifting priorities, conflicting aims, few credible commitments and plenty of foreign meddling, any ceasefire today is just as likely to be broken by violence tomorrow.
Europe needs its democracies to unite around a common strategy to defend against manifold security challenges.
No solution for Islamic State and Syria can be achieved without a green light from Russia.
With its mass death sentences, Egypt's military regime is joining the ranks of Adolf Hitler's Nazis and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.
Will an Arab military alliance leave the Middle East better or worse off, particularly given today's growing Sunni-Shiite divide?
If the junta-led political process can somehow roll back from exclusion and media repression, Egypt may yet see a transition similar to Turkey's after 1997.
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first-ever elected civilian president, recently granted himself sweeping temporary powers in order, he claims, to attain the objectives of the revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship. But the decrees incited strong opposition from many of the revolutionary forces that helped to overthrow ...
"They are armed and I am not going to fight a losing battle and kill my men over a demolished shrine," said Fawzi Abd al-'Aali, the former Libyan interior minister, before he "resigned" last August. He was referring to the armed Salafi groups that were ...
Egypt's first-ever freely elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, has appointed his first Cabinet, and guess what? It is crammed with officials from the old regime. Morsi's government clearly reflects the balance of power between the president and the Supreme Council of the Armed ...
"We certainly did not expect the results, but ... our future is certainly better than our present and our past," said Sami al-Saadi, the former ideologue of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the founder of the political party al-Umma al-Wasat, which finished third ...
