| Summary/Abstract |
Over the last seven years, social upheavals and civil wars [1] have torn apart the political order that had defined the Middle East ever since World War I. Once solid autocracies have fallen by the wayside, their state institutions battered and broken, and their national borders compromised. Syria and Yemen have descended into bloody civil wars worsened by foreign military interventions. A terrorist group, the Islamic State [2] (also known as ISIS), seized vast areas of Iraq and Syria before being pushed back by an international coalition led by the United States.
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