More than nine years into the Syrian crisis, there are steady reports of Syrian militants fighting in Libya’s civil war over 1,200 miles away.
The majority of media outlets in the US seem to agree, with hindsight, that the wars in the Middle East initiated by George W. Bush and prolonged by the next two presidents were launched under false pretenses and represent a waste of blood and treasure. Curiously, they also seem to believe that...
How could there be affinity between Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin? What drives international relations? Everyone knows the answer to that. It’s the same thing that wins elections: “the economy, stupid!” But what seals international relationships? That’s a different question and...
Short of a full military victory by one side or the other, there is no prospect of Syria being stitched back together soon. When it started in 2011, the Syrian protest movement against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was entirely domestic and mostly peaceful. I was there and observed...
People of Aleppo are suffering from a lack of political will to take decisive action among the world’s powerful countries. The fall of Aleppo, and the horrific bombing campaign that has including the targeting of schools and hospitals, has been compared with the atrocities of Srebrenica,...
Civilians in Iraq and Syria are paying the price for Western weariness of military interventions. The Syrian city of Aleppo now resembles an eerie ghost of Dresden or Stalingrad—burning, in ruins, decimated and helpless. Millions have been displaced across the region, hundreds of thousands...
The White Helmets, volunteers who provide humanitarian aid in the worst of conditions, have been targeted by a very caustic conspiracy theory. A young man, wearing a white helmet and a distinctive yellow-and-blue badge on his arm, digs for four hours in the rubble of a building destroyed by a...
The Syrian Civil War will continue because of protracted repression, rising sectarianism, the collapse of Iraq, extensive foreign interference and a tortured past. On September 25, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations (UN), declared with much passion, “what Russia is...
The nightmare of Syria can be seen as a gloomy metaphor for what is happening within the borders of other countries. The war in Syria is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for all the civilians who suffer from constant aerial bombardment, who are trapped without food and medical assistance inside...
A gardener who tended to Aleppo’s lost hopes of peace. Abu Al-Ward—Father of the Flowers—and his 13-year-old son Ibrahim have been running a garden center in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo for the past five years. Among death and destruction, the sanctuary is a subtle defiance of the...
