The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

RSIS presents the following commentary The Iran Nuclear Deal: Rewriting the Middle East Map by James M. Dorsey. It is also available online at this link . (To print it, click on this link .). Kindly forward any comments or feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentaries, at RSISPublication@ntu.edu.sg No. 217/2013 dated 27 November 2013 The Iran Nuclear Deal: Rewriting the Middle East Map By James M. Dorsey Synopsis The agreement to resolve the Iranian nuclear programme could rewrite the political map                           of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as strengthen the US pivot to Asia. It could                       also reintegrate Iran into the international community as a legitimate regional power. Commentary IF ALL goes well, the pr...

Grant Wahl > INSIDE SOCCER More Columns Email Grant Wahl   American Pharaoh: Ex-U.S. coach Bradley has  Egypt on brink of WCup 4 in Share Former U.S. national team coach Bob Bradley is trying to lead Egypt to its first World Cup since 1990. Reuters Look . There's Bob Bradley, the American coach of the Egyptian national soccer team. On a warm September night in Cairo, Bradley and his wife, Lindsay, arrive at the open-air El Prince restaurant in Imbaba, a vibrant working-class neighborhood in the Egyptian capital. Two years after a popular revolution, two months after a military takeover, one month after the mass killing of 800 protesters, the country remains on edge. A car bomb, the first in ages, went off the other day. Its intended target: the Minister of the Interior. Authorities just extended the state of emergency, including a curfew of 11 p.m. on most days and 7 p.m. on Fridays, the hol...

What Role for World Cup in Arab Spring? JAMES M. DORSEY QUERY  | November 11, 2013       |  Send to a friend Less than a year from Brazil 2014, in  Egypt  and Turkey alike, the stadiums give the pulse of the protests and the people A soccer brawl last year, in which more than 70 militant soccer fans died, galvanized significant numbers of Egyptians against the military and security forces. The brawl accelerated the military’s desire to turn power over to an elected government. Eighteen months later, mass protests, involving Muslim Brothers, non-Brothers and street battle-hardened soccer fans took place to oppose the military ouster of elected president Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood. Both the coup and the crackdown were backed by a significant segment of Egyptian society. The resistance to military rule and the security forces by many soccer fans and the youth groups that formed...

By James M. Dorsey Qatari authorities, in a bid to counter criticism that the Gulf state lacks a soccer culture as well as a sense that low attendance of matches could constitute a form of protest, has launched a politically sensitive survey to gauge reasons for its empty stadia. The survey on the website of the Qatar Statistics Authority (QSA), in cooperation with the Qatar Football Association (QFA) and the Sports Statistics Technical Committee, is likely to produce limited responses given that participants are required to identify themselves by entering their email addresses and the fact that the survey does not include questions about whether club ownership is a factor. To be fair, the survey does not verify email addresses which means participants do not necessarily need to provide a correct address. The survey is further noteworthy as it seeks to canvass the opinions of both Qataris, who account for a small minority of the Gulf state’s 2 million inhabitants, a...

Shia women mourn during the funeral of four Iranian embassy security guards who were killed in the suicide attack outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. Thousands of people turned out to mourn for the guards, all of whom were members of Lebanon's powerful Shia movement Hezbollah, which is also backed by Iran and is fighting alongside Assad's troops against Sunni-led rebels. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images) Reese Erlich November 21, 2013 00:39 Subscribe to Reese Erlich on Facebook What it means to call the bombing of Iran's embassy in Beirut 'sectarian violence' Syria's civil war is increasingly seen as stoking a regional conflict based on religious differences. But don't forget about political motives, analysts say. BEIRUT — In the aftermath of the horrific twin bombings of the Iranian Embassy here, streets remained strewn with rubble and burned-out cars. Two suicide bombers unsuccessfully attempted to blow up the embassy, killing ...