he discovery, from the 1960s until the present, of a small corpus of about twenty texts concerning strings, tuning, and performance from ancient Iraq (loosely equivalent to “Mesopotamia”) and Syria has transformed our view of the earliest stages of music history. Not only is this corpus by far the earliest recorded expression of what might be called “music theory,” but these texts also belong t...

The emergence and actions of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) has received widespread news coverage across the World, largely due to their capture of large swathes of land across Syria and Iraq, and the publishing of execution and propaganda videos. Enticed by such material published on social media and attracted to the cause of ISIS, there have been numerous repor...

Within a fairly short amount of time, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has managed to put large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq under their control. To many observers, the sheer speed at which this “state” was established was dumbfounding. To better understand the roots of this organization and its supporters we present a study using data from Twitter. We start by collecting large am...

This study explores the spatial trends of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) and characterises the relationships between the observed spatial patterns and climate in Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 2009. Areal interpolation revealed the presence of four major hotspots of relatively high incidence rates covering most parts of Syria, central parts of Iraq, and north-western, central, south-east...

Political instability of several countries in the Middle East is overshadowing one of the biggest challenges of the upcoming century: Water a natural resource that is easily taken for granted, but whose scarcity might lead to serious conflicts. This paper investigates an optimal Water Allocation of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivershed by introducing the WATER-Model. A series of scenarios are anal...

Conflict and Health began in 2007 with an aim to provide a forum to document public health responses during and after conflict across the world. The journal has published over 120 articles that span the range of public health domains including, but not limited to, infectious disease control, reproductive health and sexual and gender-based violence, mental health, health system reconstruction, a...

The surprising ability of the jihadist organisation “the Islamic State” to capture and hold large territories in Syria Iraq raises important questions regarding rebel governance civil wars. One understudied aspect growing literature on rule is insurgents’ relations kinship organisations. This article offers a detailed empirical exploration ISIS’ tribal policies mid-2010s. It argues that relativ...

Since 9/11, and even more so with the atrocities committed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, violence in the name of God is predominantly perceived as a “different” kind of violence, which triggers more “absolute” and radical manifestations than its secular counter parts. In its first part, this article will challenge this so called exceptionalism of religious violence by questioning the neat divide b...