18 June 2020
So powerful are Washington’s new sanctions on Syria that even some opponents of Assad are unsure about them. Our own Syrian reporters have a range of views, two of which are presented head-to-head in this article.
Commentary
As Trump threatens to turn the army on peaceful demonstrators, Syrian activist and author Leila Al-Shami writes what Americans might learn from Syria’s nine-plus years of revolutionary struggle.
Rather than developing south Syria economically, having recaptured it militarily, the Assad regime has reverted to the same old neglect and misgovernance that pushed the region to revolt in the first place.
Now in its tenth year, Syria's war has seen an entire generation of reporters come and go, exposing its crimes in minute detail to a world that only ever grows more indifferent.
An exiled Syrian poet wonders why émigrés often prefer their second language when writing and speaking about the deeply emotional.
Too rarely does it occur to Westerners, worried about the erosion of their democracies, that refugees from Syria and elsewhere have valuable experience striving for civic values against authoritarian forces.
It’s never easy to be optimistic about Lebanon, but the uprising of the past week offers a real chance for lasting change—if the protest movement plays its cards well.
How a scion of the Assad regime's inner circle placed flattering profiles of himself in Western publications, and what this bodes for the future of online media.
Since the end of the Cold War, terrorism has come to be seen as the world’s principal political “evil,” in a manner that ignores or even rewards violence carried out by states, even when that violence reaches the scale of genocide, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
A young member of Syria's Türkmen minority, living as a refugee in Istanbul, writes of the fears sparked by the Turkish government's new crackdown on Syrians, and his broader disappointment at the breakdown of communal relations between Turks and Syrians, brought on by xenophobes left and right.
A Syrian doctor says the UN’s plan to stop attacks on hospitals in Syria has failed. If it can’t be fixed, it should be abandoned.
Using videos of Western-style parties in Syria, the Assad regime has sought to portray itself as a defender of liberal modernity against benighted "terrorist" opponents. Yet these crude and dishonest propaganda efforts only underscore the oppression at the heart of Assad's state, writes Robin Jones.