8 July 2021
After Denmark’s recent steps to deport Syrian refugees, calls for similar measures are now on the rise in Germany; Syrians’ largest European haven. Is Europe steadily abandoning its human rights obligations?
iran
The recent support for Palestine expressed by Syrian revolutionaries is no surprise, and certainly no contradiction, writes Al-Jumhuriya editor-in-chief Yassin Swehat.
Syrian writer and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh talks revolution, Europe’s Syrian diaspora, and being “tragically hopeful” with Le Monde’s Christophe Ayad on the occasion of ten years since the Syrian uprising.
In a previously-unpublished interview from 2019, the late Lokman Slim—assassinated last week—and his wife Monika Borgmann discuss living in Hezbollah’s Beirut; their film about Syria’s notorious Tadmor prison; the nature of political violence; and the question of fear.
Lebanon awoke Thursday to the gruesome news that Lokman Slim, an outspoken Hezbollah critic and pillar of civil society, had been assassinated in his car.
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.
President Macron isn't wrong to say Islam is in "crisis," but the crisis cannot be separated from the tyranny and violence inflicted on Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere in recent years, argue Farouk Mardam Bey, Ziad Majed, and Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
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.
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.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
Iran has little incentive to help the Assad regime resolve its acute oil crisis, while any help from Moscow will come at a steep price, argues Salam Alsaadi.
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.