Taylor said Manafort visited him regularly in Kiev, Ukraine's capital. "He was very transparent about his policy recommendations and political recommendations and style recommendations to Yanukovych," recalled Taylor, now the executive vice president of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

U.S. Institute of Peace Executive Vice President William B. Taylor appeared on BBC World News America to discuss ISIS in Afghanistan and the Trump Administration’s strategy review being led by National Security Advisory H.R. McMaster. Taylor underscored that military options in Afghanistan and the Middle East need to be complemented by a corresponding political strategy.

Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less. They “have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries,” as several fellows at the Center for American Progress put it.

Efforts to dismantle ISIS strongholds have been concentrated in Iraq and Syria. But a small stronghold of fighters made up of former Taliban members has grown in eastern Afghanistan since 2014. The group is known as Islamic State Khorasan, according to a U.S. Institute for Peace report released in November.

“By NATO's own estimates, it's something like 800 fighters countrywide, a big drop over past year,” Colin Cookman, an Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace, tweeted.

So where do things stand today? How far or near, in fact, is Colombia from peace? It’s happening, slowly but surely, says Virginia Bouvier, a senior advisor for peace processes at the U.S. Institute of Peace, in this podcast with AS/COA Online’s Holly K. Sonneland.

Since the bloodless coup, in 1970, that brought the family to power, the Assad dynasty—the founding father, Hafez, and his heir and second son, Bashar—has exasperated nine American Presidents. “Time-consuming, nerve-racking, and bizarre,” Kissinger said of his sessions with Hafez al-Assad. Republican and Democratic Administrations alike have coaxed and cajoled, prodded and praised, and, most recently, confronted and condemned the Assads to induce policy changes.

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party has been in office for only a year, but by-elections held earlier this month are one signal of discontent among many. The contest over 19 seats was not large enough to be a game changer, and voter turnout was fairly low, yet the results are an indicator of the public's view of the National League for Democracy's performance thus far.