One of the big stories to come out of the Middle East in the past decade has been the warming relations between Jerusalem and a number of Arab states, brought together by shared concerns over the growing power of Iran. But these informal, quiet alliances go back much further, explains Clive Jones:

According to apologists of Bashar al-Assad, and those they have managed to dupe, he has been making war for the past ten years against terrorists, and any Western attempt to engineer his ouster would be to let the terrorists win. But in fact Assad did much to help Islamic State (IS) come into being, and to keep it alive. Matthew Levitt writes: