MENA Unleashed

📬 MENA Unleashed is on Substack, providing regular analysis on the constant stream of geopolitical events in the region. We dissect the economics and trade route dynamics behind overwhelming news, breaking them down into concise, digestible insights on a region caught in the crossfire of Great Power competition. menaunleashed.com

A friend of mine is organising the distribution of frozen meat to 500 families immediately after Eid prayer in Gaza. The aim is simple. Many families have been deprived of the chance to have Eid meat for the past three years. This is a small attempt to give them back part of what Eid is supposed to feel like. The work is being done by a trusted team of grassroots volunteers who have helped us before with aid distributions and know the families on the ground. The cost is $16 per kilo. Anyone who wants to join, contribute, or help families eat meat this Eid, please message me directly. Every kilo makes a difference.

@ahmedas27003533 مين قلك الوسيط لا يقدم شيء؟! انتا فاهم دور الوسيط غلط عفكرة. الوسيط دائما طرف بس هو وسيطلانو مصالحو مقبولة من الطرفين بقدر متسامح عليه. الي ملوش مصلحة بفاوضش وملوش دخل. هنا قطر طرف متأثر مثل باكستان وبيحاول يخلص الحرب مش لانو وسيط نزيه بس لانو طرف متضرر.

@MENAUnleashed الوسيط ليس شرط عليه يقدم شيئ , مثلا عمان كان الوسيط ايام اتفاق 2015 ولم تقدم شيئ سوي انها مجرد وسيط موثوق ينقل الرسائل و اكيد الذهاب والاياب بين المفاوضين القطريين و الايرانيين يؤكد دور قطر في الوساطة والا لماذا هناك تواصل و لقاءات متكررة بينهم

يقال ان رئيس بنك المركزي الايراني في قطر ايضا , يبدو تم التوافق علي تحرير جزء من الاموال المجمدة الايرانية عن طريق قطر و يبدو قطر اصبحت الوسيط الاساسي في المفاوضات لا يقل اهمية عن الوسيط الباكستاني بسبب خبرتها في الوساطة بشكل عام ويبدو ايران مرحبة بدور القطري في المفاوضات

@ahaydar_a وصلت بس عمليا صعب تشغيلها لانو فش حرية حركة

محلّقات منقضة من السماء الذي لم تعد له وحده، تجوب الشوارع والمواقع والثكنات، كالعقبان تبحث عن فرائس جائعة لصيدها. تعتبر هذه المواجهة انقلاباً حقيقياً في سلسلة الصراع، حيث أنها من المرات النادرة التي يدفع فيها العدو أثماناً بشرية أكبر من التي ندفعها نحن. هذا التحول، بالتزامن مع كل ما يجري، إذا استمر، سيكون له ما له. قريبا إن شاء الله تصل إلى الضفة وغزة

@ahmedas27003533 شو عندهم القطريين يقدمو عشان يفاوضو؟! ملهمش دور.

@MENAUnleashed و حتي اليوم , ايران نفسها تؤكد ان زيادة قاليباف و عراقجي للقاء المسؤولين القطريين للنقاش حول المفاوضات لانهاء الحرب واضح جدا ان قطر لاعب دور اساسي في المفاوضات تحت الطاولة وان كان باكستان هي الواجهة و العلني x.com/AsharqNews/sta…

US President On Truth Social says that all Muslim leaders he spoke with have except one or two said they will join the deal starting with Qatar and Saudi. He claims Iran will join the Abraham Accords accordingly and it will be the greatest deal in human history. He keeps losing wars and then asking others to accepted as a win. Clearly he is on hopium and had too much of it. No one will bail Israel out. It is done. Stop trying to gaslight mankind as if everything is about saving the most barbaric country. It is not. More importantly, the Islamic Caliphate Regional Market that I prophesied is emerging de facto. The US is saying make it about Israel but everyone else is saying no. It will be about a liberated Palestine ultimately. Jews will be integrated into the greater Caliphate Market and apartheid will be dismantled. Post: "Those Countries discussed are Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates (already a Member!), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain (already a Member!). It may be possible that one or two have a reason for not doing so, and that will be accepted, but most should be ready, willing, and able to make this Settlement with Iran a far more Historic Event than it would, otherwise, be. The Abraham Accords have proven to be, for the Countries involved (The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kazakhstan), a Financial, Economic, and Social BOOM, even during this time of Conflict and War, with the current Members never even suggesting leaving, or taking so much as even a pause. The reason for this is that the Abraham Accords have been great for them, and will be even better for everybody, and bring true Power, Strength, and Peace to the Middle East for the first time in 5,000 years. It will be a Document respected like no other that has ever been signed, anywhere in the World. Its level of Importance and Prestige will be unparalleled! It should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit. If they don’t, they should not be part of this Deal in that it shows bad intention. In speaking to numerous of the Great Leaders mentioned above, they would be honored, as soon as our Document is signed, to have the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of the Abraham Accords. Wow, now that would be something special! This will be the most important Deal that any of these Great, but always in Conflict Countries, will ever sign. Nothing in the past, or in the future, will surpass it."

@JeremyVineOn5 We have a bad economy and they too. so i think we have no hand to ask for otherwise.

Would you swap the pound for the Euro in order to rejoin the EU? It's a condition demanded by an EU chief after Labour challengers Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham put a return to the bloc back on the agenda. Is scrapping sterling a price worth paying?

@BradRey03174856 @OrevaZSN we jealous again?

@MENAUnleashed @OrevaZSN This may be the dumbest tweet I’ve seen in months on here and that’s saying something

I really want to know what these billionaires' end game is. They take away jobs, replace everything with AI, inflation goes up, healthcare costs increase, and no one can afford rent or food. How are they going to make money if no one can afford their products?

Quietly and without too much public fuss, both MBZ and MBS have in the past 30 days activated the full deployment of AI agent in all government agencies. This was the number 1 priority after the ceasefire with Iran took shape. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have spent the past month handing their governments to AI agents. Both states claimed this was was done for efficiency, but it is closer to consolidation, and the war explains the timing. Both capitals moved within weeks of the war with Iran winding down. That is not housekeeping. It is a lesson learned being applied. Abu Dhabi approved a federal framework to run agentic systems across 50% of government and ordered 80,000 officials trained, with the first agents already live. Riyadh moved under its Year of AI, where the state-owned HUMAIN brought in Accenture to drag ministries out of pilots and into full operation. The story being told is austerity. The war drained reserves, the deficit is widening, and even the sovereign fund's firepower is no longer untouchable. AI is sold as the way to cut payroll without cutting the services that payroll delivers. One official projection puts the saving at $56 billion a year. But austerity is the cover, not the cause. You do not retrain 80,000 people and rewire how the state makes decisions to save a line in the budget. Look at what the war exposed. A ministry is a building full of people. A single strike takes it offline, and even without a strike, staff do not sit at their desks while missiles fall. They work from home, lose secure access, or leave the city. A workforce can be killed, displaced, frightened, or refuse to show up. None of that touches an agent. No commute, no family to evacuate, no building it has to physically occupy. It runs from hardened, distributed data centres. Automating the state is also a way of hardening it. This is the part the efficiency framing misses. It is continuity of government, built for a war that is not finished. The Gulf has learned that its bureaucracies are soft targets, and it is quietly removing the softest part, the people. It also moves power inward. Agents compress decisions that once passed through many hands and pull authority upward into a single layer. A bureaucracy, though, is never only administration. It is a constituency. It can stall, leak, slow-walk, and be captured by rival branches of the ruling family. An agent layer does none of this. It answers to its operator and no one else. Call it coup-proofing by software. There is a cost the rulers are quieter about. The Gulf civil service was patronage, a jobs programme, the distributive side of the ruling bargain. Hollow it out and you keep the bargain's appearance while removing the constituency it built. A generation of nationals is being told, softly, that the state no longer needs them. And the sovereignty is thinner than the branding. HUMAIN is sold as national infrastructure, and US Accenture is brought in to ensure the monarchy survival by running AI integration. The agent is not there to serve the citizen. It is there to keep the state running when the citizen, and the official, cannot or will not.

@mustafawaleed95 Indeed you can frame it as such. But it is actually clever and well played. Smart

@MENAUnleashed Iran has gone woke smh

This is the first time I've seen a particularly clever use of language here. people hate the word toll. so iran call it an environmental tax because no one hates that and it targets businesses not consumers. well played. this will actually work espically if iran followed with a clear media campaign on the kind of activities this will actually include

@SebJohnsonUK these sallaries are so low compared to the us and you are celeberating how poor the uk is compared to the us they can lure them with low pay even.

Anthropic is hiring for 6 roles in London and is willing to pay up to £630k A YEAR for each. The AI lab is expanding its London presence and has secured a new office for 800 people. As part of this expansion it has over 40 open roles available in London. Six of these are for different research engineers (e.g. reinforcement learning, scaling etc..) with the salaries reaching up to £630k! This excludes stock options. BONKERS OpenAI, Anthropic, Ineffable Intelligence, Google DeepMind, Recursive... the war for AI talent is HEATING up in London. I wouldn't be surprised if salaries hit over £1m soon.

this is a coffee shop where you are not allowed to sit.

x.com/Fa__h95/status… someone should writie a master thesis on the political economy of saudi coffee shops under vision 2030. I will share wit h them whatt to write even i just dont have the time to do it. it will be fun. for context, coffee shops are labour absorbing institutions in saudi. a lot of saudi vision 2030 sme growth came from coffee shops and coffee shops like businesses. they also absorbed unemployment and allowed for gender employment figures to look better. it is getting to a stage where coffee shops are over glamourised.

There are reports from Iran too that the state has begun to seize the assets of those deemed as collaborators with Israel for treason. The theme is prolific and quite regional. Some should write about this. Happy to if someone has an opportunity. x.com/clashreport/st…

I saw someone from Egypt say that his gov should take advantage of the situation at some point and nationalise UAE assets in Egypt for their treason. In Kuwait, the state seized the pensions of the de-nationalised Kuwaitis for their treason. In the UAE, Emiratis have forced Pakistanis and Iranians to liquidate their assets and leave the country after unrevoking their residency permits. I dont know who is advising businesses and wealthy individuals but the gulf is not the place to park your capital moving forward. There are big unresolved matters and the stakes are high for everyone they are willing to take unthinkable measures. Trust me, the law has zero value there. None whatsoever. Everything is done according to the leader crazy wishes. Gulf governments revenus got slashed by the war and they are looking for funding sources from within. This means higher taxation, fines, and penalties. Ownership rights are no longer a priority but monarchy security and survival. Understandably. It will likely get worse over time and fiscal balance worsen. someone said this will not be done to westerners as they are protected. however the west is no long security wise superior. no one will take your property rights into considerating as thing go south and all look for survival. also dont forget the US is at war with Saudi just as much as Iran. they tried to kill Tamim of Doha as a message to MBS in 2025 but MBS is not budging so the fissure with the US is no longer manageable. it is effectively broke.

@resist_truth @SyrianSunniAids @Ma10km ههههه عوي كمان. مصر غلبت اسرائيل وحماس غلبتهم. انتو شو عملتو؟ حررتو الجنوب وبعدين بديتو قتل بالكل الي مش زيكم بالاقليم وتسعون بخراب المنطقة مع ال سلول واهدار الثروات بمعارك وهمية عدمية كافرة.

@MENAUnleashed @SyrianSunniAids @Ma10km عم تحكي على المشاريع وبحياتكم ما كان عندكم شي مشروع. ما بقى ولا حزب من أحزابكم و غزة عم تباد وشعبكم عم بيتفرج

مقتل جندي كل يوم لمدة شهر أهم من مقتل ٣٠ جندي فى يوم واحد .

@resist_truth @SyrianSunniAids @Ma10km العبرة مين بفوز بالاخر يا حج. بعرف حزين انو مشروعك اتضح انو سراب وسقط بسرعة كبيرة. بس هاد من افعالكم وسوء نوايكم وحسدكم وكبركم على الله. الى مزابل التاريخ

@MENAUnleashed @SyrianSunniAids @Ma10km You ran away in 1948 in 1978 and in 1982 روح عوي عند الإسرائيلية يا ديوث

@arab14361 هلا انتا صح مبعتش بس لانو مش تبعك لتبيع انتا مستعد اتبيع لو بيضمن بقاء الملكية لكمان ٣٠ سنة. اتخيبو جفايط فضحتوتا بالعلن كاطفال سخيفين

منذ أمس، وأنصار إسرائيل من داخل أمريكا وخارجها يلّوحون بلغة تهديد لا تخفى ضدّ السعودية؛ لأنّها جعلت حل الدولتين شرطًا… هؤلاء لا غرابة من لغتهم، ولا خططهم، ولا موقفهم، لكن العجيب أنْ يرى بعض العرب والمسلمين مثل هذه المواقف، ثم بعدها يقولون: بعتم القضيّة الفلسطينية! الإنصاف نبل!

@m3aadh Are you dumb? They frose 300 billion mostly state assets

@MENAUnleashed Billionaires mansions and yachts are not “state assets”