By Hassan Hassan (The National)- The battle for Mosul resumed on Thursday after a two-week operational pause. During the pause, according to Arabic reports, Baghdad came under increased pressure to allow at least two militia organisations to join the operations inside Mosul. Banning such...

(Al Jazeera)- It is safe to say that, until recently, the debate over Syria's political future came down to one thing: the fate of President Bashar al-Assad. With his victory in Aleppo, and the firm support of Iran and Russia, it is also fairly safe to say that the Syrian president's future is...

(Wall Street Journal)- The cradle of the Arab Spring, Tunisia remains the freest Arab democracy. It has one of the region’s most developed economies and highest literacy rates. And it is also by far the largest source of foreign fighters heading to join Islamic State in Syria and Iraq....

(Washington Examiner)- In his year-end press conference, President Obama reflected on the tragedy that has befallen Aleppo, Syria, where Iranian-backed militias and Russian warplanes helped Syrian dictator Bashar Assad reclaim the city and conduct a crime against humanity rivaling Rwanda and...

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the most powerful person in Turkey in almost a century, rivaled only by Ataturk — the secular founder of the republic. Erdogan first assumed power as prime minister in 2003, and in 2014 he won elections to become president. After already having controlled...

“Responsibility for this brutality lies in one place alone, with the Assad regime and its allies, Russia and Iran,” President Obama said last week of the barbarity in Aleppo, Syria, “and this blood and these atrocities are on their hands.” My journalism students and I here in Dubai follow...

As counterintuitive as it may sound, ISIL will still be stronger than Al Qaeda in Syria even after the former is dislodged from Mosul and Raqqa. Many counterterrorism experts have argued in recent months that it is time to turn attention towards Syria’s Jabhat Fateh Al Sham, formerly known...

Frederic C. Hof is director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. He advised Hillary Clinton on Syria at the State Department in 2012. Some 70 months ago, unarmed, ordinary Syrians rose peacefully against a regime whose incompetence and corruption they had come...

The fall of Aleppo is a human catastrophe. It’s also a demonstration of the perils of choosing the middle course in a military conflict. Sometimes it’s possible to talk and fight at the same time. But in Syria, the U.S. decision to pursue a dual-track, halfway approach made the mayhem worse....

(The Guardian)- The fall of Aleppo will neither end the conflict nor bring more stability to the country. The continuing offensive by the Syrian regime to capture the rest of the eastern side of the city has led to the capture of about 75% of the rebel-held area. But the regime’s swift advances...

(Al Jazeera)- When the Russian intervention into the Syrian conflict accelerated in mid-2016, many analysts and partisans declared the "Battle of Aleppo" to hold the key to the future of the Syrian conflict. Decisive victory one way or another, or the re-establishment of a military...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- Syrian opposition figure and former political detainee Michel Kilo said he told the Saudis that for every fighter killed in Syria will save 5 Saudis later due to the projects and aggressive intentions of Iran towards Saudi Arabia which Iran will not hesitate to implement if it...

(News Deeply)- On September 17, U.S., British, Danish and Australian warplanes attacked a Syrian military base in Deir Ezzor that had been holding out against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) for months. The U.S.-led coalition’s airstrikes killed at least 62 Syrian troops before a frantic...

(The Guardian)- Her hair was tastefully curled, her makeup flawless and discreet. Asma al-Assad’s tone, too, was impeccably sober when she gave her first television interview in eight years earlier this week. Like all Syrians, she told her interviewer in her light London accent, she felt...

(Vox)- The hot new policy idea in Washington is the hottest old idea: direct US military intervention in Syria’s civil war. In the past several months, the siege of the rebel-held eastern part of the city of Aleppo has dramatized the war’s terrible cost. In the last debate, Hillary Clinton...

(theguardian)- Speaking at the Conservative party conference last month Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, set out a vision of Britain as a “soft power superpower”, projecting values through influence, ideas and the power of persuasion. If ever there were a time and a place for exercising our...

(Bloomberg)- Vladimir Putin’s backing for the relentless air bombardment of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo has provoked some foreign governments to accuse Russia of carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The U.S. and some European Union countries including Germany are considering...

(Independent)- Syria’s army and Hezbollah and Iranian allies are preparing for a massive invasion by thousands of Isis fighters who will be driven out of Iraq when Mosul falls. The real purpose behind the much-trumpeted US-planned "liberation" of the Iraqi city, the Syrian military suspect, is...

(The Guardian)- The novel way of diplomacy proposed by foreign secretary Boris Johnson has so far materialised in a lone gentleman with a poster outside our embassy – not something I would describe as a big diplomatic victory. But the very fact of having to resort to (non-existent) campaigners...

(theguardian)- The far left’s ideology is not “leftwing” in any sense that a socialist from the 19th or 20th centuries would have understood. It is simply opposition to the west whatever the west does. Occidentalism explains the appearances of Labour’s leaders on Iran’s propaganda channels , the...