18 June 2018
The Assad regime is much more than a mere dictatorship—understanding it, and its horrors, requires updating our conventional thinking about murderous states, argues Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
Commentary
Seeing Beirut slide into war in 2006 transformed the late TV presenter, moving him to humanize peoples—in the Middle East and beyond—whose voices were rarely heard in the US mainstream.
As then-defense minister, Hafez al-Assad was instrumental in Syria’s loss of the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967. His quest to avert accountability for this defeat was at the heart of the tyranny he instated over the following decades, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the June War’s anniversary.
The divide between Syrians inside the country and those outside has never been sharper. For the country’s sake, the two groups must make their relationship mutually advantageous, rather than antagonistic.
For years, the Syrian regime’s allies in Lebanon have spread crackpot conspiracy theories about plots to prevent the country’s more than 1 million refugees returning. Now they belatedly realize Assad’s own actions may turn their scarecrow into reality.
It's impossible on any day, but especially a day like this year’s Nakba Day, to ignore the inherent bond between the Palestinian and Syrian causes.
There was a real opportunity after last month’s chemical atrocity to amass a powerful international coalition against Assad, Russia, and Iran—an opportunity the West squandered, argues James Snell.
With over 600,000 Armenians slaughtered on future Syrian territory in 1916, the Armenian Genocide ought to be more than a footnote in Arab history, argues Vicken Cheterian in response to Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
For Syrians, the past is long gone, while the future—a homeland free of Assad—is forbidden, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh in this reflection on exile, time, and revolution.
Twenty-five years after returning to post-war Lebanon, our writer reflects on the disappointed hopes of a generation, and how the country “somehow feels worse now than it did then.”
Enthusiasm on the left for Vladimir Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria has strong echoes of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that killed and displaced millions, including relatives of this author.
In his ninth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes that “a crack in the wall of your dark prison” may now have opened.