Bobby Ghosh

Almost as soon as president Obama announced the start of normalization of relations between the US and Cuba, the question was raised: Why not do the same with Iran? The chorus has only grown since then, with the most plaintive appeal coming from two members of the  National Iranian American Council. Parsing Obama’s televised speech, Trita Parsi and Ryan Costello argued, “If it’s true on Cuba, it’s true on Iran.“

As more and more Americans plan trips to Cuba, it’s a fair bet many are imagining a country frozen in time by a five-decade embargo. And nothing embodies this perception as much as the image of a 1950s Chevrolet—or Buick, or Dodge—held together by the ingenuity of a Havana mechanic and bits of string. It’s a visual cliché, much beloved of photo editors and holiday-makers, and many Americans believe all cars in Cuba are delightful old jalopies.

Many Americans and Cubans believe that it is the tight noose of the US embargo that keeps the island nation deep in poverty. This narrative suits the regime of Fidel and Raul Castro, because it gives the grim brothers a ready excuse for their inability to give their subjects decent economic opportunities.

Multiple sources are now reporting that a wife and child of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-styled “caliph” of the terrorist group ISIL, are being detained by Lebanese security forces. They were said to have been apprehended at the Lebanese-Syrian border 10 days ago.

As silver linings go, this one’s pretty faint: The men who attacked three US Navy sailors in Istanbul on Nov. 12 were not extreme-Islamist sympathizers of ISIL (a.k.a. the Islamic State or ISIS). Had they been, they might not have settled for (briefly) putting plastic bags over the heads of the Americans and chanting anti-US slogans.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of US president Barack Obama’s latest letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Iran’s Supreme Leader is the suggestion that a nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran could open the way to greater cooperation in the fight against ISIL. The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama invoked the two countries’ “shared interest” in fighting the terrorist organization, also known as ISIS or the Islamic State.

Reports that the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is dead, or at least grievously wounded, must be treated with an abundance of caution: Iraqi and Kurdish officials are highly unreliable sources of news about ISIL. Remember when Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi said the terrorist group, also known as ISIS, was planning to bomb the New York subway—only for US officials to rubbish the claim?

A Nobel prize “messes up one’s life a bit, because it comes with so many commitments—but it also gives you greater opportunity to pursue those things that are valuable to you,” said Amartya Sen, reacting to the news that Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi have been named Nobel peace laureates.

There will be a great deal of talk about India’s soft power over the next few days. Prime minister Narendra Modi, who will address the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, is likely to bring up the subject in several of his 35 engagements in New York and Washington. It is a subject close to Modi’s heart: He talked about it long before he became India’s leader, arguing that soft power can be harnessed to build “Brand India” and benefit the country.

As the US and its Arab allies launched a second round of airstrikes in Syria against the terrorist army known as ISIL, the reverberations could be felt halfway across the world, at the United Nations General Assembly. The strikes provided the soundtrack to the drama unfolding in New York, where US president Barack Obama worked to strengthen an international coalition against ISIL and made his case to the world in a sharply-worded speech.

A great deal is being made of the fact that the Gulf Arab states with the most to fear from ISIL are loath to contribute their militaries to president Barack Obama’s global coalition against the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. Although the Gulf countries are nominally members of the coalition, they have pledged only to provide military “assistance,” rather than aircraft to strike against ISIL targets, much less troops to fight the terrorists.

Now that president Barack Obama has made his case for war against the Islamic State (IS) to the American people, the harder task falls to secretary of state John Kerry: to get Arab states to join a broad coalition against the terrorist group that controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.

As he prepares to tell Americans why going to war against the Islamic State is vital to US interests, president Barack Obama may find himself preaching to the converted: a CNN poll shows 90% of Americans see IS as a threat to their country. Substantial majorities favor more airstrikes against the terrorist group, and greater support for the forces fighting it.

The word from his cave in Afghanistan (or just as likely, his bungalow in Pakistan) is that Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda, has launched the terrorist organization’s latest franchise, in the Indian subcontinent. The new Qaeda-let joins the global chain that already includes outposts in Yemen, Syria, North Africa, Pakistan, and Somalia.

After months of unremittingly dark tidings from Syria and Iraq, some slivers of hope are beginning to shine through. The terrorist army that calls itself the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL) has in recent days suffered a series of military reversals.

Newly sworn in as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan is now a few constitutional amendments from becoming his country’s most powerful leader since Kemal Ataturk. The task of delivering those amendments falls to Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan’s longtime foreign minister and now his successor as prime minister.

Serious people are beginning to talk up the idea of an alliance between the US and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against the seemingly unstoppable forces of the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIL or ISIS).

If you believe the Obama administration had no idea that the United Arab Emirates and Egypt were about to launch airstrikes in Libya last week, I have a bridge you may want to buy. Egypt’s reliability as a US ally may wax and wane, but the UAE has been a steady partner as well as an avid acquirer of American military hardware. The Emirati air force participated in the 2011 NATO-enforced no-fly zone over Libya that led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, American right-wing blowhards and Islamophobes used an insidious question to tar all Muslims with the same brush: “If Islam has a moderate majority, how come we never hear them condemning the terrorists who acted in the name of their religion?”

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. A grave political crisis in Baghdad threatens Iraq’s delicate ethnic and sectarian balance. The incumbent prime minister, a Shia partisan who is as obstinate as he is incompetent, clings to power. Other political parties try to dislodge him, in vain.

The Sunni militants who now threaten to take over Iraq seemed to spring from nowhere when they stormed Mosul in early June. But the group that recently renamed itself simply “the Islamic State” has existed under various names and in various shapes since the early 1990s. And its story is the story of how modern terrorism has evolved, from a political and religious ideal into a death-cult.

Now the world has finally turned its attention to the carnage sweeping through northern Iraq, many are struggling to place the perpetrators—the death cult known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL—in the context of modern-day terrorism. I’m getting the same questions from friends and fellow journalists: Are these guys the new al-Qaeda? Or are they like the Taliban? Or is this movement more like Hezbollah… Boko Haram… Hamas?

“In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.'”

It’s been a week from hell.