In the  Odessa Steps scene  of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film  “Battleship Potemkin,”  a boy no more than 3 or 4 years old is shot by czarist troops. Bleeding, he falls to the ground, where he is trampled by a frantic crowd fleeing the massacre. His anguished mother gathers...

The fierce competition between the proxies of the two mainstream Kurdish factions in Syria’s Kurdish areas, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) may sabotage Kurds’ best opportunity to achieve self-rule within Syria in a century. The Democratic Union Party...

The attack the U.S. is threatening Bashar Assad with for alleged chemical weapons use will now be an "unbelievably small, limited kind of effort." Is America becoming a paper tiger? When the White House's foreign policy team aren't dissembling or dithering, they can be found fudging,...

Much of the  debate over U.S. intervention in Syria  boils down the conflict there to a clash between the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and an armed rebellion in which al-Qaeda affiliates play a significant role. Typically ignored in that conversation are the voices of the...

Sometime this week, Congress will begin voting on a resolution that would support President Obama’s proposal to launch limited strikes against the military forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as retribution for their use of chemical weapons.  Although  Washington  is...

 Ali Habib is well known in Syrian society mostly because he served as the chief of staff between 2004 and 2009 (known to young draftees and hence families).    Life   General Ali Habib was born in 1939 in Safita, Tartous. He graduated...

With America's credibility tarred, persuading anyone other than France and Britain will be difficult. It was perhaps the greatest "Perry Mason moment" in the history of the UN Security Council. When U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson challenged his Soviet counterpart, Valerian Zorin, to...

So the U.S. launches a military strike. Then what? As the Obama administration and the  U.S. military  plot military action against Syria, they should be spending just as much time — and arguably more — considering what happens next. Once Washington crosses the threshold of...

The moral outrage is all over this debate. As the West prepares to launch airstrikes against the Syrian regime in retaliation for its alleged use of chemical weapons, lines of global leaders and their cheering commentators are using a superior sense of morality to justify it. Last year, Obama...

 This contribution by our reader Mohamed Al-Masri,Zaman Alwasl to publish the article without editing or censorship.     Syria's regime represented in Bashar al-Assad had fallen long ago; it has fallen only emotionally, logically, humanly and even...

In the first two weeks of Ramadan, 1,262 Syrians were killed. The news didn’t make headlines and people were not agitated. This makes us wonder if what’s happening in Cairo killed the Syrian revolution or if the latter is fading into the background like what happened with Iraq after explosions...

 The military's overthrow of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood's fall from power in Egypt have sent Islamist parties around the region scrambling to preserve gains made in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the Arab Spring uprisings. The stunning reversal has...

In the border towns where Syrian rebels recuperate and resupply, the buzz is that the long wait for Barack Obama may be near an end. The excitement is not the result of the White House announcement on June 13 that the United States will supply light weapons to the groups seeking to...

I'm in Oslo to give a seminar and a public lecture at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, and I'm looking forward to hearing how world politics looks from a Nordic perspective. I haven't been to Norway since 2009, when my visit coincided with the Norwegian Nobel Committee's surprising...

Frustrated by the  muddle that is  U.S. policy in Syria, a growing cadre of hawkish Democrats are putting pressure on the White House to finally outline to the public and to Congress its objectives in the protracted 2 ½ year civil war. The latest and perhaps most outspoken Democrat to...

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign affairs minister, is not the only one who said: We supported Hezbollah when it fought Israel but we are now against it because it’s fighting the Syrian people. Many are today justifying their past stances using this same excuse. With...

American President Barack Obama’s  decision to provide the Syrian opposition with light arms and ammunition  is not considered a significant shift. It’s certainly not a strategic move either, but a limited tactical one that does not live up to the level of military escalation...

Srebrenica, 26 May 2013. I am staring at almost eight thousand tombstones. Males between twelve and eighty years old have been massacred because they believed in the wrong God. It all happened in a few days. We all know the story of Srebrenica, but when you stand in the middle of the graveyard,...

Let’s imagine a world in which Bashar al-Assad wins a military victory, remains in power, and defies the world to deal with him. Because, unfortunately, it appears to be an all too plausible scenario. An  influx of Hezbollah fighters  from Lebanon, and support from Iran’s...

Wednesday, 29 May 2013 Octavia Nasr When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, I was a teenager, growing up in a peaceful household that was neither political nor sectarian. Although Hezbollah  was born then as a resistance movement to Israel’s presence in Lebanon, the...