No immediate rapprochement is expected between the US and Iran. Hezbollah has been deeply involved in the urban fighting alongside the Syrian regime. As argued by analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hezbollah is suffering human losses which...
The number of foreign fighters in Syria has reached an alarming level. As the Syrian Civil War rages on for a third year, it has morphed into a wider jihad by Islamist militants, both home-grown and foreign imports. Syria has become the "favorite" battleground of the so-called jihadists...
Kurds are fighting jihadists for the future of Syrian Kurdistan. On August 15, a car bomb ripped through a Beirut suburb, killing 21 people. The explosion was but the latest in a wave of attacks across Lebanon throughout 2012 and 2013, that were linked to events inside Syria. The ease with...
Military intervention involves serious risks of regional destabilization. The many actors stoking the long smoldering Syrian Civil War have now seen the conflict explode, following the Bashar al-Assad regime’s employment of sarin gas to stall the rebel advance in the Ghouta suburbs of...
Ensuring the protection of Alawites will expedite an end to the civil war in Syria. Syria has become a proxy war to shift the balance of power between Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East. The struggle over the future of the country was not always a sectarian one; the revolution started as...
The conflict between Sunnis and Shi'as is fueled by Islamists and power politics. Since it became clear in May 2013 that Hezbollah is fighting on the side of the Bashar al-Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War, there has been increasing talk about an escalating religious war between Shi'as and...
The Syrian conflict has permanently altered the character and geography of Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian Civil War has forever changed the character of the organization. Once rooted in lifting the Shi’a of Lebanon to their rightful place in the Lebanese political...
Not all Shi'ites support Hezbollah and not all Jews support Zionism. A response to Josef Olmert. Dear Dr. Olmert, While I appreciate your understanding of the nuances of "modern" Middle Eastern history, I believe your analysis of the region’s socio-political dynamics is overly simplistic...
The civil war in Syria, despite claims to the contrary, is in its core a sectarian struggle. Josef Olmert, former Israeli peace negotiator, argues that the situation in Syria is an example of the historic Sunni-Shi'ite struggle in which Israel is not to blame. Violent civil conflict and...
Carl Anthony Wege, a renowned expert on the Levant region, decodes the complex sectarian dynamics behind the conflict in Syria and argues that the Syrian linchpin in the Shia crescent has vanished. The modern borders of Near Eastern states stretching across the Levant reflect little more than...
