7 September 2018
Jimmy Carter’s proposal to rehabilitate Assad and ignore Syrians’ demands for justice isn't just morally bankrupt in the extreme, it also would fail to produce even the “ugly peace” of his imagination.
Bashar al-Assad
How a late French thinker gave us a framework with which to view Syrians as complex individuals, rather than central-casting actors in our grand-narrative fantasies.
The Assad regime is much more than a mere dictatorship—understanding it, and its horrors, requires updating our conventional thinking about murderous states, argues Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
As then-defense minister, Hafez al-Assad was instrumental in Syria’s loss of the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967. His quest to avert accountability for this defeat was at the heart of the tyranny he instated over the following decades, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the June War’s anniversary.
For years, the Syrian regime’s allies in Lebanon have spread crackpot conspiracy theories about plots to prevent the country’s more than 1 million refugees returning. Now they belatedly realize Assad’s own actions may turn their scarecrow into reality.
Al-Jumhuriya talks to journalist Gareth Browne about his week in Syria last month observing a “crazy club” of pro-Assad British parliamentarians and priests.
With over 600,000 Armenians slaughtered on future Syrian territory in 1916, the Armenian Genocide ought to be more than a footnote in Arab history, argues Vicken Cheterian in response to Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
For Syrians, the past is long gone, while the future—a homeland free of Assad—is forbidden, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh in this reflection on exile, time, and revolution.
Rania Abouzeid’s forthcoming book, No Turning Back: Life, Loss and Hope in Wartime Syria, succeeds in humanizing the individual participants in Syria’s agony—victims as well as villains.
In a final death knell for the once-great magazine, Newsweek has stooped in recent days to printing crackpot conspiracy theories about chemical weapons in Syria.
By declining to link their attack on pro-Assad forces earlier this month with the regime’s ongoing chemical weapons use, the US has failed to deter the latter, argues James Snell.
The recent chest-thumping by a top US Army officer about slaying ISIS fighters with shovels inadvertently captures the pitfalls of Washington's policy in the Fertile Crescent, writes James Snell.