Tunisia

1. Tunisia • For all its modern traits, Tunisia had one of the most repressive governments in a region full of police states, and levels of corruption among its elite that became intolerable once the economic malaise that gripped southern Europe spread to the country. The uprising began in December 2010, when a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in the impoverished town of SidiBouzid to protest his lack of opportunity and the disrespect of the police. In the months after the revolution, Tunisia struggled with continued instability, new tensions between Islamicists and secular liberals and a still-limping economy. But of all the Arab states, it may have been the best positioned for a successful transition to a liberal democracy, with its relatively small, homogenous population of about 12 million, comparatively high levels of education, an apolitical military, a moderate Islamist movement and a long history of a unified national identity. The prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, created a government of unity, but in late February 2011, as demonstrations continued, he resigned in response to complaints that he was too closely tied to Mr. Ben Ali. He was replaced by BejiCaidEssebi, who was chosen because during a long career as an official of the Tunisian dictatorship he built a record of trying to change the system from within.

2. Algeria • Algeria is the second-largest country in Africa, with over four-fifths of its territory covered by the Sahara Desert. The country has a population of 35 million people mainly located near the northern coast. In January 2013, Algeria was drawn into the conflict in Mali, its neighbor to the south, when militants seized dozens of hostages from an internationally managed gas field in Algeria, saying the act was in retaliation for a French military assault on the Islamist extremists who had taken control of northern Mali. The next day, Algerian forces launched a raid that led to days of fighting in the maze-like complex. The following week, the prime minister said that 37 hostages had been killed, including three Americans, and that 29 of the kidnappers had been killed and three had been captured. The kidnapping was said by officials to be the work of Al Mulathameen, a group that broke away in 2012 from the Al Qaeda branch, and which is led by a militant and smuggler named MoktharBelmokthar who has been active in politics, moneymaking and fighting for decades in the Sahel.

3. Egypt • Egypt is a state where corruption is widely viewed as systemic, which is also why the crowd gets aggressive trying to buy up the subsidized bread. Cheap state bread can be resold, often for double the original price. “What has not changed in Egypt for 50 years, is not going to change now,” Mr. Muhammad said, though it was unclear if he meant the chaos in front of him or the cheap bread cooking behind him.Much of what ails Egypt seems to converge in the story of subsidized bread. It speaks to a state that is in many ways stuck in the past, struggling to pull itself into the future, unable, or unwilling, to conquer corruption or even to persuade people to care about one another. How do you take a broken system that somehow helps feed 80 million people and fix it without causing social disorder? That is a challenge for Egypt at large, and for this little bakery where Mr. Muhammad ekes out a living, with a cigarette hanging from his lips and an angry crowd demanding his bread.Bread, in Egyptian Arabic, is called “aish,” which literally means life, rather than “khobz,” the word that other Arab speakers use. “The word, applied to bread, gives this everyday element an almost mystical quality,” said Hamdy el-Gazzar, author of “Black Magic,” a popular novel recently translated into English. “Egypt’s relationship to bread is not one of freedom, but of necessity.” Egypt started subsidizing staples like bread, sugar and tea around World War II, and has done so ever since. When it tried to stop subsidizing bread in 1977 there were riots. Egyptians are generally not known as explosive people, but tell them you are raising the price of bread — of life — and beware. So the bread subsidy continues, costing Cairo about $2.74 billion a year. Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education. But it is not just the cost of the subsidy that plagues the government. The subsidy also fuels the kind of rampant corruption that undermines faith in government, discourages investment and reinforces the country’s every-man-for-himself ethos.

4. Libya • Hundreds of Libyan gunmen stormed the Tripoli studios of private television station Alassema on Thursday (March 7th), kidnapping five employees, Libya Herald reported. According to employee Rajab Ben Gazi, who witnessed the attack, the mob was a mixture of revolutionaries, Islamists and civilians. A secretary and two TV anchors were later released unharmed. Alassema TV manager Jomaa Al-Osta and executive director Nabil Shaibani remain missing. One of the anchors, Mohammed al-Sharkassi, told another news channel he had been briefly detained by "former rebels from Tripoli... angered by the editorial policies of Alassema TV", AFP reported. In other security news, United Nations envoy TarekMitri strongly condemned the Tuesday attack on General National Congress (GNC) President Mohamed Magarief and other lawmakers during a legislative session near Tripoli. The UN Special Representative for Libya called on all citizens "to refrain from settling political issues through violence and to resort to peaceful means in expressing their demands".

5. Saudi Arabia • Saudi Arabia raised crude production in February to 9.15 million barrels a day, an increase of 100,000 barrels daily from the previous month, an official with knowledge of the country’s oil policy said. The world’s largest crude exporter supplied 9.16 million barrels a day to the market compared with 9.26 million in January, the Persian Gulf official said, asking not to be identified because the information is confidential. Crude delivered from storage accounted for the 10,000 barrel-a-day excess of supply over production in February, the official said. The monthly gain in output came after Saudi production declined in January to the lowest level since May 2011, the official said. Saudi Arabia produced close to 9 million barrels a day for a third month, helping to keep OPEC’s total output near the group’s official target of 30 million barrels. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pumped an average of 30.7 million barrels a day in February, as rising Libyan production outpaced the cut by Saudi Arabia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

6. Jordan • Jordan, one of America’s most important allies in the Middle East, was hit in late January 2011 by the waves of unrest that spread across the Arab world in the wake of the revolution in Tunisia. Protests were led by the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, but included leftists and trade unions. Demonstrators protested economic hardship and demanded the right to elect the prime minister, who is currently appointed by King Abdullah II. On Feb. 1, the king dismissed his cabinet and prime minister in a surprise effort to calm street protests that had also been fueled by the country’s worst economic crisis in years. In June, he announced that the government would in the future be elected, not appointed, responding to a demand of protesters calling for democratic change. That fall, the king fired his government yet again. For most of 2011, demonstrations subsided. The increasingly violent rebellion in neighboring Syria and the brutal suppression by the government of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, appeared to have dampened the enthusiasm of some activists in Jordan, who fear the prospect of a slide into chaos. King Abdullah in November 2011 had become the first of Syria’s Arab neighbors to call for a change in government there. But in September 2012, angry protests erupted over a planned 10 percent increase in gas prices, part of an effort to reduce the subsidy burden on the state budget and fill a $3 billion deficit caused largely by a decrease in aid from Persian Gulf states. King Abdullah quickly cancelled the increase after a weekend of demonstrations and after 89 of Parliament’s 120 members signed a statement of no confidence in the prime minister over the hikes.

7. Yemen • Yemen is a poor, deeply divided country that has been in turmoil since January 2011, when protesters inspired by the Arab Spring took to the streets in a violent uprising against the autocratic rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh — at a cost of hundreds of deaths and rising chaos. In February 2012, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, the country’s former vice president, was elected president. But the reality is that Mr. Saleh still wields considerable influence in Yemen. His relatives control most of the military and government security agencies. Mr. Hadi has been slowly shedding his government of officials from the old administration who are either members of the Saleh family or staunch Saleh loyalists. But this has not always gone smoothly, and the extent of Mr. Hadi’s authority to remake Yemen remains in doubt. And while Mr. Hadi has been fending off Saleh loyalists, his fledgling government has found itself overwhelmed by a set of dangerous new challenges to the country’s stability, including a series of bold attacks by a resurgent militant movement in the south, where many are eager for secession and a security breach has allowed an Al Qaeda affiliate to grow strong. In addition, he has faced open defiance from the old guard, after he tried to dismiss or reassign officials loyal to his predecessor, Mr. Saleh. Financially struggling, Yemen is facing an increasingly brazen Qaeda franchise that controls large parts of its territory in the southern provinces of Abyan and Shabwa. With the government and army remaining fractured, the militants have taken advantage of the power vacuum.

8. Syria • The wave of Arab unrest that began with the Tunisian revolution reached Syria on March 15, 2011, when residents of a small southern city took to the streets to protest the torture of students who had put up anti-government graffiti. The government responded with heavy-handed force, and demonstrations quickly spread across much of the country. President Bashar al-Assad, a British-trained doctor who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, Hafez al-Assad, at first wavered between force and hints of reform. But in April 2011, just days after lifting the country’s decades-old state of emergency, he set off the first of what became a series of withering crackdowns, sending tanks into restive cities as security forces opened fire on demonstrators. In retrospect, the attacks appeared calculated to turn peaceful protests violent, to justify an escalation of force. In the summer of 2011, as the crackdown dragged on, thousands of soldiers defected and began launching attacks against the government, bringing the country to what the United Nations in December called the verge of civil war. An opposition government in exile was formed, the Syrian National Council, but the council’s internal divisions kept Western and Arab governments from recognizing it as such. Syrian opposition factions signed an agreement in November 2012 to create a unified umbrella organization with the hope of attracting international diplomatic recognition as well as more financing and improved military aid from foreign capitals. The coalition, known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, was recognized by Britain, France, Turkey and several Gulf Arab countries. However, several extremist Islamist groups fighting in Syria said they reject the coalition.