Author

Sarie Khalid

Sarie Khalid is a U4 student currently pursuing degrees in Economics, Political Science and Islamic Studies. An Indian-Pakistani by heritage, Sarie specializes in Middle Eastern and South Asian politics, international security, geo-economics and energy markets. For the 2018-19 publication year, Sarie served as MIR Editor in Chief.

Opinion: On the Christchurch Terror Attack

Sarie Khalid Mar 15, 2019

Yesterday, forty nine people were gunned down as they gathered for Friday prayers in Al Nour mosque and Linwood mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. At Al Nour, the shooter livestreamed himself walking into the place of worship and opening…
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Syria’s Marshallah Plan

Sarie Khalid Feb 22, 2019

The Assad regime has survived the Syrian civil war. ISIS is defeated. Arab Spring-era resistance groups like the Free Syrian Army are crumbling. The Trump administration's military withdrawal has apathetically (and recklessly) abandoned its…
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The Year of the Black Swan

Sarie Khalid Feb 11, 2019

In his book,The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb describes a black swan as a highly improbable event which has major ramifications. While Taleb warns that the possibility of black swans should be taken into account, they are usually judged…
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What’s next for the “Switzerland of the Middle East?”

Sarie Khalid Dec 23, 2018

Located on the south-eastern tip of the Arabian Gulf, Oman is surrounded by nations prone to meddling in each other’s domestic affairs and locked in Iran and Saudi Arabia's sectarian cold war. Despite this, the tiny sultanate has…
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The Art of Pakistan’s Superpower Financial Finesse

Sarie Khalid Dec 3, 2018

Pakistan has always been an enigma in international politics. The country has historically leveraged its geo-strategic location and vast military capabilities against global powers in exchange for financial and military aid. Even during the…
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Democracy, Blasphemy and the Struggles of Being Indian-Pakistani

Sarie Khalid Nov 13, 2018

If Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1947, they wouldn’t be Italian, they’d be Indian and Pakistani. Sadly, my twin sister and I are the only ones in my family with this split identity as inter-marriage is considered taboo. It's tough…
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Mapping Montreal One Story at a Time: An Interview with Montreal startup EaglePulse

Sarie Khalid Sep 9, 2018

EaglePulse is a Montreal-based student startup that is dedicated to making local Montreal news more digestible by mapping them out on an interactive map of the city. Started by Concordia University software engineering students Mohammad…
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Spot Fixing the Pakistani Election

Sarie Khalid Aug 14, 2018

Twenty six years ago, Imran Khan captained Pakistan to its first ever World Cup championship after narrowly beating England 249/6 to 227/10, having scored a decisive 72 runs and taking the last wicket of the game. Since then, Khan …
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Xi Jinping’s ‘How to Tame Your Dragon’

Sarie Khalid Jun 9, 2018

In 2015's spy thriller Kingsman: The Secret Service, its charming antagonist Mr. Valentine, brilliantly played by Samuel L. Jackson, is informed by his bodyguard that she had "contacted the KGB, MI6, Mossad, and Beijing" in search of the…
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Editor’s Desk: We are Mir

Sarie Khalid May 14, 2018

Branded a CIA agent by the Taliban, and a Taliban sympathizer by his critics, Hamid Mir is the face of political journalism in Pakistan. Listeners across the country tune into his talk show CapitalTalk on Geo News, one of Pakistan’s two…
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The Imperial Imam: Islam, Empire, and the Diplomacy of Revolutionary Iran

Sarie Khalid Jan 31, 2018

The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been shaped by its revolutionary, Shia Islamist and imperial Persian origins. The regimes led by Ayatollah Khomeini (1979-1989) and Ali Khamenei (1989-present), the Supreme Leaders of…
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Too Big To Fail: What Next For US-Pakistani Relations?

Sarie Khalid Jan 13, 2018

2018 started on the worst possible note for US-Pakistani relations. Donald Trump’s inaugural tweet accused Pakistan of pocketing $33 billion in US aid since 2002, providing safe haven to terrorists and even thinking US leaders are…
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The Two-State Solution: An Obituary

Sarie Khalid Jan 2, 2018

Writer's note: A glossary for certain key terms can be found at the end of the article. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel will have a seismic impact on Middle Eastern geopolitics and Washington’s…
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Not So Sharif: “Fontgate”, Praetorianism and Illiberal Democracy in Pakistan

Sarie Khalid Oct 18, 2017

The resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over his family’s offshore wealth revealed by the Panama Paper leaks has plunged Islamabad into a protracted political crisis. Coupled with Donald Trump’s public accusations that the Pakistani…
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Speak Loudly And Carry A Bigger Stick: The Implications of Trump’s Escalation of the Syrian…

Sarie Khalid Apr 10, 2017

President Trump’s missile strike on a Syrian military base in Homs Province to punish the Assad regime for its latest criminal chemical weapons attack is a game-changer in the politics of the Syrian civil war. The Tomahawk missile assault…
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Israeli-Levantine Tensions Reach Same Old Heights

Sarie Khalid Apr 6, 2017

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s Alawite regime would not have survived the Sunni revolt that erupted in 2011 without Iran’s commitment of Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah fighters to the battlefields in the Levant. Iran’s political,…
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Barack of Arabia: Obama’s Diplomatic Legacy in the Middle East

Sarie Khalid Dec 8, 2016

Eight years ago, President Obama electrified the world with the promises to end the wars of his predecessor in Iraq and Afghanistan, close down Guantanamo Bay and end America’s traditional support for autocrats and dictators in the Middle…
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Dying to Kill

Sarie Khalid Oct 28, 2016

“...We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” – The Irish Republican Army, Irish republican paramilitary group. In the 20th Century, suicide terrorism was an outlying, exotic tactic used sparsely by a handful of…
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Under the Cloak of War: The Ghost Battles in the Levant

Sarie Khalid Aug 24, 2016

The Syrian Civil war has become a deadly geopolitical and humanitarian catastrophe. For the first time since Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Russian military is in combat against rebel militias trained and armed by the CIA. In Afghanistan,…
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The Pied Piper of Raqqa: Identity, Martyrdom and the Lure of ISIS

Sarie Khalid Jul 25, 2016

So why does an ordinary All-Canadian boy from Kemptville, Ontario, whose teenage dream was to play in the NHL, suddenly resurface as a foot soldier for the first ever self-styled “caliphate” in the modern history of the Middle East? This is…
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An Army with a State: Pakistan’s Serial Praetorians

Sarie Khalid May 25, 2016

Two states were born at the stroke of midnight on August 14th 1947 from the twilight of the British Raj in the South-Asian subcontinent. One nation evolved into the world’s largest parliamentary democracy. The other nation degenerated into…
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The Peace to End All Peace: The Munich Ceasefire and the Coming of the Second Cold War

Sarie Khalid Feb 27, 2016

President Obama and his diplomats assured the world there was no military solution to the Syrian civil war, even after Assad’s regime violated an American “red line” not to use chemical weapons against its own people in 2013. President…
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For Caliphate and Country: Britain’s Imperial Legacy and the Air War in Syria

Sarie Khalid Jan 15, 2016

Prime Minister David Cameron cannot ignore the legacy of Britain's colonial history in the Arab world as he begins a new war against ISIS in Syria. British imperial interests convinced Winston Churchill to create the Kingdom of Iraq in 1920…
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How ISIS Terror Has Reshaped World Politics

Sarie Khalid Nov 30, 2015

The mass slaughter in Paris, the lock down in Brussels, the anti-Arab paranoia on the European far right, the backlash against Syrian refugees, open borders, the very idea of European integration, the xenophobic fulmination of Donald Trump…
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How ISIS and Sunni Rage Remade the Middle East

Sarie Khalid Oct 28, 2015

The Bush White House’s decision to invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist dictatorship and De-Ba’athification of the Iraqi military and intelligence agencies were the immediate causes of the Sunni insurgency that erupted in 2004.…
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