I've just returned to Iraq for my final two weeks of reporting before taking a year-long leave. I'm just getting my bearings, trying to figure out the political and security developments and plan to report and blog during this bittersweet trip to Baghdad.

In the meantime, here are a couple of links that caught my eye this week:

Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood
The International Crisis Group has just released this in-depth report on Hosni Mubarak's renewed crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the powerful Islamist opposition force that inspired generations of militant movements. ICG urges integration rather than confrontation, arguing that "the ruling National Democratic Party’s (NDP) refusal to loosen its grip risks exacerbating tensions at a time of both political uncertainty surrounding the presidential succession and serious socio-economic unrest. Though this likely will be a prolonged, gradual process, the regime should take preliminary steps to normalise the Muslim Brothers’ participation in political life." The link above takes you to the executive summary and directs readers to the full, 24-page report.

Obama and the Muslims
Two Muslim women who turned up to support Barack Obama at a rally in Detroit on Monday were told they couldn't sit behind the podium because campaign volunteers didn't want the women's headscarves to appear in photographs or on television with the candidate. Link here. Although the campaign has apologized to the women, this certainly wasn't the first time Arabs/Muslims felt slighted by the "unity" candidate. There was the AIPAC speech, Obama's deliberate distancing of himself from Arab supporters and the widely praised speech on domestic race relations that somehow shoehorned in a reference to Islamist radicals overseas (I wrote a little bit about that here.)