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.
Despite holding all required legal documents, our writer was detained at an Istanbul checkpoint and jailed for two weeks alongside dozens of other foreign nationals, all locked up for trivial paperwork issues, many suffering violent beatings and other indignities.
One year on from its uprising, with much of Beirut in ruins, Lebanon is in the depths of despair. Yet a way forward out the abyss remains possible.
Recent court testimony by a Syrian regime “gravedigger” reveals an organized, bureaucratic mass murder machine on a scale larger than previously understood.
As the dust settles after Beirut’s port massacre, a profound sense of disorientation and uncertainty about the future envelops the city.
For fifty years, the Assad regime has stripped Syria’s parliament of both de facto and de jure powers. This month’s “elections” marked a further decline in the already-negligible relevance of the institution.
Al-Jumhuriya asks five prominent Syrian civil society figures how they expect their work to be affected by the new US sanctions package known as the Caesar Act.
As Lebanon appeals to the IMF for aid, it crushes renewed protests at home with deadly force. The Diab government offers little hope of better days ahead, analysts and activists tell Al-Jumhuriya.
Given a rare permit to fly on a military plane from Aleppo to Damascus, our writer encountered soldiers, judges, relatives of high-ranking officials, and a mysterious group of Iranian passengers.
Human rights experts tell Al-Jumhuriya the recent OPCW report on Assad’s chemical attacks could form crucial evidence in future war crimes trials—if there were ever enough international political will to hold any.
Damascus resident Karam Mansour writes a first-hand account of life in the now-empty Syrian capital, where militiamen patrol the streets, shops do business in secret, and the homeless have abruptly disappeared.
With no help forthcoming from the UN or NGOs, local volunteers in northern Syria have taken it upon themselves to help protect displaced camp residents against the terrible prospect of a Coronavirus outbreak.
After a high blood pressure diagnosis, Al-Jumhuriya’s English editor did the unthinkable: he stopped drinking coffee. What followed was weeks of physical, mental, even spiritual torment.
