The next few weeks and months could be decisive in destroying what remains of Syria's weapons of mass destruction. A quarter of the arsenal still remains with Assad and his regime wants to keep enough of that to threaten the world. On Tuesday, Syria’s state-run news agency reported...

(Al Arabiya- Joyce Karam)- There were no groundbreaking announcements or game changers on Syria in U.S. President Barack Obama’s “West Point” speech yesterday. But there was a shift, as Obama departed from his usual political talking points into embracing a counterterrorism approach...

As Islamist rebels were negotiating a merger to form the Islamic Front, their Qatari sponsors approached them with a proposal. The Qataris asked the rebel groups to issue a moderate founding statement that would make no reference to an Islamic state, in exchange for public and official...

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To protect the innocent and to defeat the Assad dictatorship, Syrians should work with Israel to create a safe haven. I spent more than a decade in Syrian prisons and therefore know what kind of regime this is. It is one which believes that torture is a form of dialogue. This was...

The Syrian civil war is gradually altering the dynamic relationship between Hezbollah and Israel. Over the past decades, this relationship morphed from an asymmetrical confrontation between a conventional army and a sectarian militia to an ongoing conflict between a state and a...

THE Syrian regime likes to keep up the appearance of a constitutional state rather than one run by a family cabal girded by a ruthless security apparatus. So when diplomats tried to mediate between the regime and the opposition in Geneva in February, President...

Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese party, is trying to find a balance between its large scale military involvement in the Syrian conflict and containing its repercussions inside Lebanon. The strategy has so far seen the party pursue more conciliatory policies in Beirut, as it goes on the...

A “new regional balance” is a phrase you often hear among policy wonks in Washington dealing with the Middle East. On the surface, it refers to obvious new realities that have shaped the region post-Iraq war and the Arab Spring, but it also reflects the Obama administration’s mindset...

Recent statements by top Iranian officials appear to divulge the Islamic of Republic of Iran’s frustration and dissatisfaction with the Assad apparatuses’ inability to thoroughly crack down on various rebel groups and oppositional fronts, and to regain full control of the state....

For over three years now, the Syrian conflict has been continually punctuated with reports indicating an overall worsening of the humanitarian crisis. The world knows the situation is dire but with kidnappings rampant and various actors restricting access to besieged areas, there is...

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...

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...

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 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...