( Middle East Eye )- After the Syrian regime’s recapture of Aleppo in December 2016 and the consequential pushing and cornering of major rebel forces into Idlib, the tide of the Syrian civil war was decisively turned in favour of the government. Ever since, it has mainly sought to...

( The Guardian )- My life in Yemen is dominated by fear. As director of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, and one of the few remaining independent voices in Yemen, I have been detained, seen colleagues assassinated, and buried friends killed by Saudi airstrikes. Now, half of my country...

( Al-Monitor )- Turkey appears to be hoping that its bombing this week of Sinjar in Iraq and Rojava in northern Syria will enable it to intervene in those countries on a larger scale. Since Turkey launched Operation Euphrates Shield in Syria in August 2016, attacks against organizations...

( New York Times )- The world seems awash in chaos and uncertainty, perhaps more so than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Authoritarian-leaning leaders are on the rise, and liberal democracy itself seems under siege. The post-World War II order is fraying as fighting spills across...

( Foreign Policy )- In 2012, President Barack Obama warned that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would “change [the] calculus” of U.S. policy toward the Syrian civil war. A year later, faced with evidence that Assad had used sarin gas against his...

( The New Arab )- Though still evolving, President Donald Trump's plans for Syria have come into clearer view since he ordered cruise missiles fired on a Syrian air base to punish Assad for a chemical weapons attack. The strategy breaks down into three basic phases: defeating the Islamic State...

( The Guardian )- Is Asma al-Assad a war criminal? Is she a threat to British national security? These are the questions the home secretary will consider if she gives any attention to the call by the Liberal Democrat’s foreign affairs spokesman Tom Brake that she withdraw the Syrian president’s...

( The New Arab )- Over the past two centuries, Arabs have asked themselves an endless stream of questions. The appropriate role of Islam in politics; the dialectic relationship between tradition and modernity; the pros and cons of liberalism and socialism; the meaning and purpose of a true...

( Al-Monitor )- Maxim Suchkov writes that following the visit of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Moscow this week, “the departure of President Bashar al-Assad was and remains a non-starter for Russia. What neither Lavrov nor Putin would probably say to Tillerson, but do expect him to...

( The Guardian )- The US military strike against the Shayrat military base, in response to a brutal chemical weapons attack on civilians in the rebel-held area of Khan Sheikhoun, has the Twitterverse and media fulminating over the idea of US-led regime change in Syria. Now to be fair, no one...

( The Guardian )- Rex Tillerson’s plane touched down in Moscow on Tuesday amid a smoky haze caused by a fire at a nearby rubbish dump. More than one observer found the metaphor irresistible. The US approach to Syria – the term “policy” would dignify it with a coherence it does not deserve – is...

( The Guardian )- Many reasons were advanced for Donald Trump’s decision to order last week’s strike on a Syrian airfield. In addition to the justifications he gave – the US national interest, the need to demonstrate that the use of chemical weapons had a cost, the emotional response to the...

( Al-Monitor )- With the Islamic State (IS) nearly defeated in Iraq, Baghdad and Damascus have remarkably stepped up security and military cooperation. On March 29, the Iraqi Federal Intelligence and Investigation Agency announced that, through coordination between the two countries, the Syrian...

( The Washington Post )- Today’s news from Syria, where an apparent chemical weapons attack has taken the lives of dozens of civilians (including children), reminds us once again of the desperate need for justice for those who have suffered atrocities in that country’s civil war. Yet there are...

( The Guardian )- Is regime change in Syria back on the US agenda? For most of Syria’s six-year civil war the US has been pushing for the departure of Bashar al-Assad, even if former president Barack Obama was unwilling to use military options to remove him. Donald Trump had conspicuously...

( Washington Post )- It is either a turning point or a welcome aberration that President Trump found the cruelly extinguished lives of Syrian children to be compelling (or at least contributory) in his decision to use force in Syria. The nerve gas attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime, he said,...

( New York Times )- President Trump ordered a barrage of missiles to strike an airfield in Syria on Thursday evening in response to the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria. Here are some things we know — and don’t know — about the president’s actions. What We...

( The New Arab )- President Donald Trump is not known for his ideological and political constancy, but he came into office having actually been relatively consistent in his rhetoric on Syria.  For Trump, the major focus was on eliminating the Islamic State (IS); the Kurdish PKK was...

( New York Times )- On March 25, an orthopedic surgeon named Ali Darwish was operating on a patient in a suburb of Hama, Syria, when two barrel bombs were dropped at the entrance of the underground hospital where he was working. Soon, a strong smell of chlorine spread throughout the hospital....

(Al-Monitor)- Is it a coincidence that the Trump administration’s flurry of statements that it no longer actively seeks the departure of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad came during US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit to Turkey last week? In a press availability with Turkish Foreign...