Forgotten wars, street violence and delayed elections

As the cold sets in here in the UK, we turn our attention to a region where something's always heating up. The three prongs to today's 'Middle East Analysis' podcast are the elections in Iraq, delayed from June, that have yielded some interesting results, the on-going, out-of-sight-out-of-mind conflict in Yemen - will the violence ever end and does the rest of the world care enough? Then we take a look at the eternally beleaguered Lebanon and some of the worst violence to hit the streets in the past ten years.

But that's not all. A chunk of our hour-long podcast is given over to four reflections from the voice of 'Middle East Analysis', the international lawyer and MENA consultant Dr Harry Hagopian.

Harry reflects on the death of Sir David Amess MP, the mysterious re-appearance in Damascus of Rifaat Ali al-Assad, uncle of Syrian President Bashar after almost four decades in exile in France. In his third reflection, we hear Dr Hagopian lament the falling salty sea levels of the Dead Sea and finally, Harry offers a warm welcome to the new Jordanian Ambassador Manar Munther Dabbas.

Image: © Rod Waddington on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)