Alex is a Beirut-based writer, translator, and managing editor of Al-Jumhuriya English. His first book, 'Vintage Humour: The Islamic Wine Poetry of Abu Nuwas', is due to be published by C. Hurst & Co. in November 2017. He tweets @alexjrowell.
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.
Over 40,000 displaced Syrians have contracted tropical diseases in just two months, as a result of sleeping in open fields with no clean water or sanitation; just one aspect of the staggering humanitarian crisis attending the largest wave of displacement since Rwanda in the 1990s.
Over sixty activists from Syria and elsewhere are currently holding a collective hunger strike—dubbed the “Empty Stomachs” campaign—calling for an end to the bombardment of Idlib.
Al-Jumhuriya details the short but unique life of Abd al-Basit Sarout, the Syrian goalkeeper, protest leader, and militant killed fighting the Assad regime this month, and examines the meaning of the “narrative war” that erupted following his death.
An essential new book by the only international journalist to have lived full-time in Damascus post-2011 shows the Assad regime’s criminality to be even worse than previously understood.
What the Assad regime’s inability to break past a small town in the countryside south of Idlib says about Syria as a whole.
In his thirteenth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh pays tribute to those who have given time and energy to promoting her cause.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s twelfth letter to his wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, is penned on the occasion of her birthday, “the only day I’ve ever celebrated since your disappearance.”
Why are the UN and the Syrian opposition taking part in a sham “constitutional committee” designed to rehabilitate Assad?
Russia told south Syria’s rebel commanders it would protect them if they agreed to “reconcile” with the regime last summer. Dozens have since been killed or arrested.
The linguistic feminist and queer struggle should ultimately focus less on technical grammatical distractions than the empowerment of speech itself, argues Nayla Mansour.
A searing first-hand account of growing up gay in Syria; a journey from schoolyard bullying to deep religiosity to pseudo-scientific “therapy” to attempted suicide to, eventually, revolution.
