Following the collapse of Jaysh al-Islam’s rule in Douma, Yassin al-Haj Saleh traveled to Turkey to seek answers from the city’s displaced residents about his wife, Samira, and three other activists abducted with her there in 2013.
The story of a Tartous café frequented by the city’s disillusioned youth offers a ground-level look at the hopes that drove the revolution and the fractures that tore the country apart.
Work bans, endemic delays, and no translation assistance are just some of the extensive legal and bureaucratic obstacles faced by Syrian and other refugees seeking asylum in Britain. Al-Jumhuriya speaks to lawyers and civil society activists trying to help those trapped in legal limbo, in the UK and across Europe.
Three former ISIS fighters now undergoing “anti-extremism” courses at a center north of Aleppo tell our reporter the Assad regime’s brutality and slick video propaganda were among the top reasons they joined the world’s most reviled jihadist organization.
A military defector recounts his remarkable journey from the Assad regime’s army to a rebel brigade in Homs—via Palmyra prison—to exile in Idlib and, finally, menial labor in Turkey, where he still searches for the dignified life he hoped the revolution would bring him.
Will there still be lemons on the tree of our house in Douma next year? wonders this displaced resident. If so, who will eat them?
For over 100,000 civilians expelled from Eastern Ghouta, their new homes in official shelters bear striking resemblance to the regime’s fearsome detention centers.
A former inmate at Syria’s Adra Women’s Prison recounts the struggles, deprivations, and occasional pleasures of food in the notorious jail.
Having expelled whole communities en masse from numerous Syrian cities and towns, a new law now allows the Assad regime to confiscate their properties, rendering their displacement permanent and radically transforming the country’s demography.
In Iraq in the 1990s, the UN came up with an “oil for food” program. In Eastern Ghouta today, the international community is sponsoring a new formula: water in exchange for dignity, writes Osama Nassar from the besieged enclave.
A former political prisoner under Hafez al-Assad recalls the “impossible stage” on which inmates covertly performed plays in one of Syria’s most notorious penitentiaries.
The Coalition’s battle against ISIS in Raqqa is over, but the war between civilians and explosives left by the latter is only getting started, with the death toll of 300 growing daily as desperate amateurs risk their lives to clear homes for a paltry fee.
