The “Syrian Democratic Council”—ostensibly a vehicle for Kurdish-Arab coexistence in former ISIS territories—is increasingly looking to normalize ties with the Assad regime, spelling disaster for the displaced residents of Raqqa and elsewhere, with no apparent opposition from its Western sponsors.
How a late French thinker gave us a framework with which to view Syrians as complex individuals, rather than central-casting actors in our grand-narrative fantasies.
Animals have not fared well at militants’ hands in Syria over the past seven years, though civilians have been kinder. Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör traces the shifting role and symbolism of animals in Syria’s recent history.
In his foreword to Theo Horesh’s new book, The Holocausts We All Deny, Yassin al-Haj Saleh decries the present “lack of a global vision or project” capable of resisting the crisis of democracy from China through the Middle East to Trump’s America.
A recent manifesto signed by academics and activists called for a “reimagining of migration” in response to the new UN Migration Compact. Kester Ratcliff proposes further concrete steps toward a more humane—and sustainable—approach by the international community.
While generally well-intentioned, the concept of solidarity involves an unequal power relationship between those offering and receiving it. A preferable state of affairs would be partnership, placing Western activists and their counterparts elsewhere on equal footing.
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.
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.
