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The humanitarian catastrophe in Syria is one of the greatest of recent decades, but in a world which gets so consumed with constant breaking news and the bombardment of all sorts of information, the electrifying noise of barrel bombs and the real cry for help are not reaching our ears....
Nine minutes. No blood, no tears, no screams and no speeches. Nine minutes of scenes from a refugee camp were far more expressive than other scenes which may have unintentionally transformed the Syrian tragedy into a lame narrative that no longer interests audiences and which has...
Saudi Arabia's appointment of Prince Muqrin as deputy crown prince is a first step towards addressing its biggest dynastic challenge for 50 years and forestalling a possible succession crisis in the world's top oil exporter. The ruling al-Saud family is fast approaching the moment when...
With the Ukraine crisis, any fleeting hope that the U.S. and Russia could soon broker a political settlement in Syria has vanished. The United States needs an alternate strategy for strengthening Syrian moderates who can resist both the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime and al-Qaeda...
After three years of war in Syria, one of the things we have learnt is that al-Qaeda’s followers don’t really want to live in the seventh century. Their favoured social medium is Twitter, and they often use the modern vernacular when they tweet. Here is what one jihadist wrote recently...
As the Syrian revolution enters its fourth year, the question remains as to whether Bashar al-Assad’s regime will exit power or whether it will finally be able to eliminate the opposition and subjugate the majority revolting against it? The enormous number of daily battles...
After months of battlefield stalemate in Syria , a flurry of reports from Washington, Jerusalem, Amman and the Gulf suggests a major new clandestine effort is under way to open up a "southern front" against the regime of Bashar al-Assad . Central to the mooted plan is a renewed...
The brutal war in Syria could grind on for a decade as Iran and Russia prop up President Bashar al-Assad's regime and jihadist groups flood the battlefield, experts warned Thursday. Assad has chosen a deliberate "Machiavellian strategy" of standing by while militant groups such as...
"The good times are over," a Doha-based diplomat told me glumly last week, as if foretelling the political earthquake about to hit Qatar. On March 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain announced in a joint statement that they were withdrawing their ambassadors...
Two developments took place in the past month that point to remarkable changes within Syria's Islamist landscape. In early February, al Qaeda's central leadership disavowed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) -- a favor ISIS repaid a few weeks later, when it...
FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “ the tide of war is receding ” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other...
Friends of mine who just came from Damascus described how the city transformed into a ghost city, and how depressing it is to walk in its up-scaled residential areas such as Abu Romana , Al Malki, which have become dark and empty of its people . Even though these areas...
The Assad regime continued the burial of the Geneva “peace” process on Saturday, two weeks after talks with the opposition in Switzerland ended in stalemate. Bashar al-Jaafari, Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations and a participant at Geneva, told the Syrian-American Forum...
Iran is boosting its support for President Bashar al-Assad, sending top military advisers to Damascus to gather intelligence and train Syrian troops, sources with knowledge of the movements have said. The increase in assistance from Syria's long standing ally reportedly coincided...
For Ukraine’s Muslims, the ongoing political crisis should not directly affect their 500,000 member community, according to the country’s grand mufti. However, according to observers, a Russia-leaning swing in politics could be “totally suicidal” for Ukrainian Muslims. The crisis in...
The complaining by Saudi officials over the past months seems to have paid off. The Obama administration is moving to patch up differences between the two countries. A little over a month before the one-day summit between the U.S. President and Saudi King Abdullah, there is optimism....
It was less than 20 years ago, when Hussam Zayade climbed with his friends the old walls of Daraya’s Ottoman era mosque in Syria. “We read the old scriptures on the inner dome, as if we were archaeologists, looking for a discovery,” he recalls. The Goddess of Love, the Roman ruins, the...
The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the universe had existed for ever. The reason humanity was not more developed, he believed, was that floods or other natural disasters repeatedly set civilisation back to the beginning. Today, humans are developing ever faster. Our...
IS PRESIDENT Obama creeping toward a rethinking of his Syria policy? Some words he spoke Tuesday raised our hopes. At a news conference with French President François Hollande, Mr. Obama described the Syrian conflict, which he dismissed five months ago as “ someone else’s civil war...
