4 March 2021
Wejdan Nassif, a friend and former cellmate of Samira al-Khalil, the Syrian democracy activist imprisoned by Hafez al-Assad and then abducted by Islamists, recalls their time together inside and outside prison.
Bashar al-Assad
So powerful are Washington’s new sanctions on Syria that even some opponents of Assad are unsure about them. Our own Syrian reporters have a range of views, two of which are presented head-to-head in this article.
Syrians in Lebanon have greeted the country’s uprising with a complex blend of joy, envy, melancholy, and fear, write Dara Foi’Elle and Joey Ayoub.
A recent book argues violence is not merely an incidental feature of the Assad regime's rule in Syria, but rather an inseparable component of its governance strategy, consciously pursued and pervading almost every detail of citizens' interaction with the state.
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.
The linguistic feminist and queer struggle should ultimately focus less on technical grammatical distractions than the empowerment of speech itself, argues Nayla Mansour.
The departing UN special envoy to Syria was not merely feckless or naïve about the Assad regime; he was an active facilitator of its survival strategy.
The thriving trade in possessions and even infrastructure looted by the Syrian regime isn't just a symptom of economic crisis and a wider moral breakdown following the war; it points to the ever-worsening criminality that awaits the country's future under Assad.
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.
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.