Worldcrunch
Events have moved very quickly in the past week in Syria, with the demise of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Amid questions over how the country will be run and fears of more conflict, experts parse the national and international influences at play.
The direction of Syria’s new rulers remains uncertain, but examples of transitions in Iraq, Egypt, Libya or Tunisia after the fall of their dictators highlight the pitfalls to avoid. Will Syria be able to escape them?
Since he fled in the cover of the night to Russia with his wife and three children, Bashar al-Assad’s entourage and extended family have expressed their anger and humiliation at his deception. He also betrayed his regional allies who went out of their way to protect his regime for years.
While the Islamic Republic of Iran mulls an official response to the fall of its Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad, Iranian politicians are already voicing their anger at the “backstabbing” conduct of two key powers, Turkey and Russia. Could Tehran be the next to get left to fend for itself?
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, use of the term “evil” has increased. The more heinous and public the murder, the more the evil of the murderer would be revealed and “the world” would be pushed to intervene. Yet in both Syria and Gaza, that world has been satisfied with symbolic responses.
At a recent festival honoring Syria’s pistachio production, officials made promises about returning pistachio lands to their owners. Yet activists and displaced farmers say their lands are being auctioned off to Ba’ath Party elites, regime forces and their militias.
The Arab front in favor of the Palestinian people is more feeble and ambiguous than ever, even as the people of Gaza are being killed by the thousands. Multiple factors explain this weakness, from fears of a repeat of the 2011 uprisings inside their own countries to longstanding competition with Iran.
Updated Oct. 17, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. Raqqa was declared fully liberated from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria on this day in 2017. Why was Raqqa so important in the Syrian Civil War? Raqqa was of strategic importance because it served as the self-proclaimed capital of ISIS and was a center for the […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out a careful plot to push and ultimately shatter the long-established “rules of engagement” in the Middle East. It caught everyone, from Iran to Hezbollah to the White House, by surprise. The aim is to remake the whole region to revolve around Israel.
Nearly a year into the war in Gaza, the people of Lebanon are paying a price for both a failing of Hezbollah security, and more broadly for a support war so ambiguous that it’s impossible to understand its cause, purpose, or if anything has been achieved.
After a series of Hezbollah pager and walkie-talkie explosions attributed to Israel, Hassan Nasrallah, the movement’s leader, promised to retaliate, while Israel stepped up its air raids. But neither side has a strategic vision beyond the battlefield.
? Ahoj!* Welcome to Thursday, where Boris Johnson faces rising calls to resign, an ex Syrian colonel is convicted in a landmark torture trial, and the U.S. finds loopholes in the Gruyère cheese label. We also mark 10 years since the Costa Concordia disaster off the coast of Tuscany. [*Czech] SIGN UP This is […]
Even Russians are unlikely to have noticed that since Vladimir Putin came to power some 25 years ago, the biography the Kremlin presents of him has been repeatedly altered. A new investigation revealing details about his two sons is but an exception in a long history of authorities carefully hiding facts and evidence about Putin’s life and his relationship with his family and friends — and the Russian people.
Updated August 22, 2024 at 11:50 a.m. The Alan Kurdi photograph was taken on this day in 2015. What is the Alan Kurdi picture by Nilüfer Demir? The Alan Kurdi picture is a photograph taken by Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir. It depicts the lifeless body of two-year-old Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi lying face down on […]
Luna al-Shibl, a media advisor to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was killed in a car crash in Damascus. But many didn’t believe the official account of her death given the Syrian regime’s long history of targeting opponents inside and outside Syria.
Fearing Europe’s shift to the right and a second Trump term, Tehran has dusted off its reformist credentials — with president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian and veteran diplomat Mohammed Javad Zarif — to show the West it is willing to talk. But this ploy will not work again.
The author was from one of the rare families in Damascus who were not direct victims of Syria’s long civil war. But she hardly emerged unscathed.
Under pressure from Arab states and Russia, which calls the shots in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad is tiptoeing away from the Iranian regime, a troublesome ally that has nevertheless spent billions of dollars to help keep him in power.
Updated June 10, 2024 at 12:40 p.m. On this day in 1967, the Six-Day War ended, as Israel faced off against its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. How did the Six-Day War end? The Six-Day War ended with Israel achieving a decisive victory. Israel successfully captured and occupied territories from Egypt (Sinai Peninsula […]
While the whole world was shocked by Iranian drones attacking Israel, which caused no casualties, nobody pays much attaention to the attacks being carried out by the same Iranian drones in northwestern Syria, where they regularly kill civilians.
Recent changes in Syria’s security apparatus are yet another step in President Bashar al-Assad’s years-long effort to escape the shadow of his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, more than two decades after his death.
Iran’s allies are attacking the West across the region. The Hamas massacre, attacks on U.S. troops and the Houthi targeting of ships are possibly just the beginning. The fact that the Middle East is so unstable today is due to a decision first made by the U.S. a generation ago.
The death of three U.S. soldiers has raised the stakes in a low-simmering, but constant escalation between Washington and Tehran that could explode from the shadows of the war in Gaza — even if by pure accident.
Nuclear weapons are a constant fear simmering in the background of modern-day conflicts. With the potential for Iran to join the Israel-Hamas war, and a threatening Russia at war with Ukraine, there is a more urgent necessity of reestablishing communication channels and confidence-building measures among nuclear powers.
The United States has found itself at the forefront of a conflict that the whole world is following. President Joe Biden faces the pull of public opinion, the threat of Iranian action, and the escalation of the Israeli state.
At the height of the Syrian Civil War, a group of forces came together to reclaim the northern region of Raqqa from the Islamic State. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who were largely comprised of Kurdish fighters, led the offensive. What was the Northern Raqqa Offensive? On November 6, the SDF captured six small villages: […]
What happens next in the Middle East, including a possible expansion of the war at the Israeli-Lebanon border, will be determined by choices that are made in different capitals. Keep your eye on Tehran.
Over the past week, Gaza has been officially under siege, even if the roots have long been planted in the confined territory. Others may say that Israel itself has long felt under siege, surrounded by hostile nations. It’s worth tracing the origins of this policy of war that targets entire populations, from Troy in ancient Greece to Leningrad in World War II.
Many had predicted that the death last month of Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin meant the demise of the mercenary outfit. Yet signs in recent days say the private military outfit is active again in Ukraine, a reminder of the Kremlin’s interest in continuing a private fighting formula that has worked all around the world.
It has been almost 12 years since the author left his hometown, which was at the center of the Syrian uprising. He’s made an academic career studying the impact of war on architecture and cities and researching acts of deliberate destruction.
Syria is positioned to return to the geopolitical fold in the Arab world, but the political structure inside the country is still fractured, facing protests from its citizens and the need to call in the Russian air force and Iranian backers.
With the suppression of last year’s anti-regime protests in Iran, its people can barely stomach the West’s resumption of its business-as-usual approach with the Islamic Republic. The key to challenging the renewed status quo, the author writes, may very well lie with the country’s women.
After the Wagner mutiny, the palatial home of the mercenary group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was searched in St. Petersburg. Among other chilling finds was a framed photograph of the severed heads of slain Africans. It fits in with the profile of a man Proekt media calls “Putin’s Sadist.”
Russia attacks Ukraine with Iranian shahed drones, thinks about buying Iranian missiles, sells Iran Su-35 fighters, and starts repairing its civilian aircraft. How is it that Iran has become Russia’s main ally?
Despite the official “consensus” by Arab League nations to welcome Syria back to the organization after 12 years of suspension, several key countries were opposed on principal — including key questions still open in North Africa.
The Arab League has readmitted Syria, ending the regime’s ten-year isolation. This is a defeat for the West — and an admission by the Arab states that there is no way around Assad.
Thousands of foreign soldiers are fighting alongside Ukraine. German daily Die Welt met a Chechen battalion to find out why they are fighting.
The shoddy homes that collapse on their inhabitants in Turkey’s recent earthquake were badly, and hastily, built as part of a worldwide real-estate fever typically fueled by greedy governments indifferent to safety norms and common sense.
A reflection of what the Feb. 6 earthquake exposes deep problems in Turkish public life over the past two decades, and what we can expect in the coming months and years.
The Feb. 6 earthquake, with a magnitude of at least Mww 7.8, has destroyed thousands of buildings in southern and central Turkey, as well as locations across the border in Syria. Many of the more than 20,000 dead were killed in those collapsing buildings. Yet even as we try to tally to the toll of […]