Zaki Chehab (born 1956) is an Arab journalist. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of ArabsToday.net, an Arabic-language news website.
Until October 2009, Chehab was London Bureau Chief of Al Hayat – LBC TV. He has covered the Middle East for a variety of newsmedia including The Guardian , CNN, and the BBC. Chehab has covered numerous Middle Eastern conflicts, including the Lebanese Civil War, the 1982 Lebanon War, the First Intifada, and the wars in Yemen, the Gulf and Afghanistan.
Chehab was born in Tyre, South Lebanon on 29 December 1956.[ citation needed ]
In 1985, Chehab moved to London to work for London-based Arab newspapers and magazines. He eventually joined Al Hayat where he would become Political Editor.[ citation needed ]
In the late 1980s he covered the Iran–Iraq War, the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the West Bank and Gaza, the 1994 civil war in Yemen, the Somali Civil War, the Eritrean–Ethiopian War, and the Algerian Civil War.[ citation needed ]
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Chehab moved into television, analysing the events in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Arab–Israeli conflict for CNN, BBC, Channel 4 and others.[ citation needed ] He became an LBC (Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation) Senior Editor based in London, while maintaining his position at Al Hayat.[ citation needed ] Chehab reported from the war in Afghanistan. In 2003, he spent several months in Iraq during the war and its aftermath, reporting from Iraqi cities as they fell to American and British forces. On 30 June 2003 on LBC TV, he became the first journalist in the world to broadcast interviews with members of the Iraqi resistance. [1] [2]
He is the author of the 2005 book Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency and the 2007 book Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement both published by I.B. Tauris in London and Nation Books in New York City.[ citation needed ]
Chehab appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on 21 May 2007. [3]
The United Arab Republic was a sovereign state in the Middle East from 1958 until 1961. It was initially a short-lived political union between Egypt and Syria from 1958 until Syria seceded from the union following the 1961 Syrian coup d'état. Egypt continued to be known officially as the United Arab Republic until it was formally dissolved by Anwar Sadat in September 1971.
The Arab world, formally the Arab homeland, also known as the Arab nation, the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a large group of countries, mainly located in West Asia and North Africa. While the majority of people in the Arab world are ethnically Arab, there are also significant populations of other ethnic groups such as Berbers, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians, among other groups. Arabic is used as the lingua franca throughout the Arab world.
The Middle East, or the Near East, was one of the cradles of civilization: after the Neolithic Revolution and the adoption of agriculture, many of the world's oldest cultures and civilizations were created there. Since ancient times, the Middle East has had several lingua franca: Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Arabic. The Sumerians, around the 5th millennium BC, were among the first to develop a civilization. By 3150 BC, Egyptian civilization unified under its first pharaoh. Mesopotamia hosted powerful empires, notably Assyria which lasted for 1,500 years. For centuries after the 7th century BC, the region was dominated by Persian powers like the Achaemenid Empire.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), also referred to as West Asia and North Africa (WANA) or South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), is a geographic region which comprises the Middle East and North Africa together. However, it is widely considered to be a more defined and apolitical alternative to the concept of the Greater Middle East, which comprises the bulk of the Muslim world. The region has no standardized definition and groupings may vary, but the term typically includes countries like Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the UAE, and Yemen.
Dominic Robertson is the international diplomatic editor of CNN.
Al-Hayat was an Arabic newspaper based in Beirut from its founding 28 January 1946 to 1976 and in London after its refounding in 1988. It was a pan-Arab newspaper owned by Saudi Prince Khalid bin Sultan, that had a circulation estimated over 200,000. It was the newspaper of record for the Arab diaspora and the preferred venue for liberal intellectuals who wished to express themselves to a large public. Founded in 1946, the paper closed in March 2020 after years of financial problems.
The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International, widely known as LBCI or MLEI in Arabic Abbreviation, is a private television station in Lebanon. LBCI was founded in 1992 by acquiring the assets, liabilities and logo of LBC, an entity founded in 1985 during the Lebanese Civil War by the Lebanese Forces militia. LBCI went global in 1996 when it launched its satellite channel LBC Al-Fadha'iya Al-Lubnaniya covering Lebanon, the Arab world, Europe, America, Australia and Africa.
The Arab–Israeli conflict is the phenomenon involving political tension, military conflicts, and other disputes between various Arab countries and Israel, which escalated during the 20th century. The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been attributed to the support by Arab League member countries for the Palestinians, a fellow League member, in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict; this in turn has been attributed to the simultaneous rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, though the two national movements had not clashed until the 1920s.
The war on terror, officially Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks in 2001, and is the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. Some researchers and political scientists have argued that it replaced the Cold War.
Osama Hamdan (Hamadan) is a former senior representative of Hamas in Lebanon and Tehran. He previously held the position of Head of International Relations Department for Hamas and Chair of the Political Committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Sherifa D. Zuhur is an academic and national security scholar of the Middle East and Islamic world. She was most recently a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies, University of California, Berkeley and is the director of the Institute of Middle Eastern, Islamic and Strategic Studies.
The Arab Cold War was a political rivalry in the Arab world from the early 1950s to the late 1970s and a part of the wider Cold War. It is generally accepted that the beginning of the Arab Cold War is marked by the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which led to Gamal Abdel Nasser becoming president of Egypt in 1956. Thereafter, newly formed Arab republics, inspired by revolutionary secular nationalism and Nasser's Egypt, engaged in political rivalries with conservative traditionalist Arab monarchies, influenced by Saudi Arabia. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the ascension of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as leader of Iran, is widely seen as the end of this period of internal conflicts and rivalry. A new era of Arab-Iranian tensions followed, overshadowing the bitterness of intra-Arab strife.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) is an American nonprofit research group and advocacy think tank founded in 2007 by military historian Kimberly Kagan and headquartered in Washington, D.C. ISW provides research and analysis of modern armed conflicts and foreign affairs. It has produced reports on the Syrian civil war, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War, "focusing on military operations, enemy threats, and political trends in diverse conflict zones". ISW currently publishes daily updates on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel–Hamas war. ISW also published daily updates on Mahsa Amini protests in Iran.
The Axis of Resistance is an informal coalition of Iranian-supported militias and political organizations across the Middle East. Formed by Iran, it unites actors committed to countering the influence of the United States and Israel in the region.
The Arab Winter is a term referring to the resurgence of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism in some Arab countries in the 2010s in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The term "Arab Winter" refers to the events across Arab League countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including the Syrian civil war, the Iraqi insurgency and subsequent war in Iraq, the Egyptian Crisis, the Libyan crisis, and the Yemeni crisis including the Yemeni civil war.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are engaged in a proxy conflict over influence in the Middle East and other regions of the Muslim world. The two countries have provided varying degrees of support to opposing sides in nearby conflicts, including the civil wars in Syria and Yemen; and disputes in Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar, and Iraq. The struggle also extends to disputes or broader competition in other countries globally including in West, North and East Africa, South, Central, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus.
The Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict refers to the ongoing struggle for regional influence between Qatar and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), both of which are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It is sometimes called the New Arab Cold War. Bilateral relations have been especially strained since the beginning of the Arab Spring, that left a power vacuum both states sought to fill, with Qatar being supportive of the revolutionary wave and Saudi Arabia opposing it. Both states are allies of the United States, and have avoided direct conflict with one another.