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.
In his fourteenth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes that he now identifies with his late mother, paying tribute to mothers around the world who bear the anguish of disappeared loved ones.
Banned in over 100 states, cluster munitions have been used systematically by the Assad regime and its Russian ally to kill hundreds of Syrian civilians—most recently a group of schoolchildren.
Few individuals have caused as much sheer human suffering in Syria as Qassem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian warlord assassinated on Friday.
Instead of publicly announcing a brief ceasefire that could allow thousands of Syrians to flee bombardment Tuesday, the UN communicated the news in a four-line email to NGOs.
On the sixth anniversary of his wife Samira al-Khalil’s abduction, Yassin al-Haj Saleh says uncovering the truth about her whereabouts must be an indispensable part of the Syrian cause.
Notes on life without cash in Lebanon.
Al-Jumhuriya talks to veteran Lebanese journalist Michael Young about the parallels and distinctions between today’s mass protests in Lebanon and the 2005 “Cedar Revolution.”
Assad himself says the “Constitutional Committee” is meaningless. Why are the UN, the EU, and the Syrian opposition going along with the charade?
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.
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.
