The way ISIS shocks us with its evil prompts fantasies of retaliation. How can we make these thoughts subside? What does it take not to lose our own civilization? Confessions of a monster.
Tag: syria
Turns in the war in Syria, as well as shifting resources and alliances across the Muslim world, mean tensions are easing between Israel and both Hamas and Hezbollah.
Once a backer of the Free Syrian Army, a harsh reality caught up with this father of three near Aleppo.
Despite lacking basic amenities, residents of a small Syrian village persist in their quest for education. But to keep the children warm in shelled-out buildings, they must bring wood to school.
ISIS imposes harsh morality codes on women and girls in Raqqa, Syria. Now females under 45 are not allowed to leave, and one mother of a teenaged daughter says she knows why.
DAMASCUS — Maher knows more about trash than a nine-year-old should know. “Some of it stinks more than others,” he says, chuckling at his own remarks. “At first I used to feel like I was about to faint before I finished my job, but I got used to it.” It’s not unusual in different areas in and around Damascus to see children and sometimes older men or women climbing into garbage cans, foraging for scraps of food. Passersby often turn their faces away from the scene. The young children who collect goods from the garbage can are often insulted or […]
SARAQEB — Zaytoun and Zaytouna relies on games, stories and illustrations to make life in Syria’s war zone a bit more bearable for kids. Launched in July 2013, the four-page magazine started as a modest project with a team of three people using a small printer and circulating it to a limited number of children. Today, says magazine director Sumar Kanjo, the team includes over 10 writers and 10 illustrators, and Zaytoun and Zaytouna has become a cultural pillar in Saraqeb and other areas under opposition control. In addition to the paper edition, the magazine is launching a website and […]
Damascus regime’s counter-insurrection chief has become a cult hero for his battlefield prowess. But Bashar al-Assad is unlikely to stand for long for worship of anyone else but himself.
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Syria, Making Love And War
As Syria’s civil war rages on, soldiers and supporters manage to finding coves of intimacy amidst the violence around them.
AL-HALBOUNI — Adel, a teenager, worked with his father at their small shop near al-Halbouni, not far from Damascus. By age 17, he had dropped out of school to support his family, as their financial situation grew desperate after years of war. Adel wasn’t a supporter of Syria’s government, but that didn’t prevent him from being forced to fight on its behalf. He was arrested at one of the army checkpoints in the town of Qudsaiya in the Damascus countryside, then sent off to battle. “We were on our way to work,” Adel’s father recounts. “We got stopped at a […]
Amid the mayhem of civil war, huge money is to be made from stealing and selling archeological treasures from Iraq and Syria. ISIS ambitions are fueling an already huge black market.
KOBANI — Sardar is a 26-year-old fighter in the ranks of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known by its Kurdish acronym, the YPG. A former blacksmith, he has taken up arms for the past five years, since he first became involved with the militant group. In his eyes, it is the core of a Kurdish army that will someday represent the future state of Kurdistan. His priority now is to defend the city of Ain al-Arab, also known by its Kurdish name Kobani. The city has been under attack by ISIS since September. “Compared with the weapons used by ISIS, […]
The ISIS terror group believes that if it is Allah’s will, the organization will take over much of the world. But at the moment, Allah doesn’t seem to be on their side.
REYHANLI — At the beginning of this year, Jamal Maarouf was regarded as the new white knight of the Syrian insurrection. Over the course of just a few days in January, Maarouf and his men drove ISIS jihadists out of northern Syria’s Idlib province. Armed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, the leader of […]
RAQQA — Ever since ISIS captured the Syrian city of Raqqa in early 2014, residents have been consumed by fear and caution. The terrorist group has banned a dangerously long list of goods and behaviors, all of which carry a heavy punishment if violated. Most noticeably, ISIS has forbidden women from leaving their homes without the supervision of a male relative, and they must wear what is deemed proper attire, dubbed “the shield” — a long, loose dress that covers them from head to toe. Smoking is banned, while it is also illegal to sell tobacco, recordings of secular music, […]
Radical Islamists zero in on young people in the West who are lonely and disaffected by modern life.
A Syrian activist from the northern countryside talks about keeping alive the anti-regime, non-Islamist revolution amid the constant threat of shelling and the spectre of ISIS.
A Syrian refugee living in a tent near the border with Turkey has lost his home, but he is preserving the family business of creating beautiful works of traditional mosaic art.
U.S.-led airstrikes aimed at ISIS are being met with resistance in Syria. Some ask why it took the death of U.S. journalist James Foley for Washington to intervene.
A steady stream of Syrians are joining the National Defense Force, a loyalist reserve force set up in 2012 by President Bashar al-Assad. For many it’s the only way to make a living.
It shares many of its objectives with the al Qaeda global terror network, but ISIS understands the value of going viral in a whole new way.
On the Turkish border, at a refugee camp where Kurds from the Syrian town of Kobani are taking refuge, the displaced wonder why Turkey and the West aren’t arming them against ISIS.
One slipped away, the other killed his way out of ISIS after witnessing too much brutality from the jihadist group. But as they tell their dramatic stories, sharp differences emerge.
Many local journalists fled Deir Ezzor when ISIS arrived – and the ones who stayed behind are forced to abide by the extremist group’s draconian list of 11 rules.
With no electricity or gas, enterprising locals in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta have begun extracting fuel products by melting plastic scavenged from destroyed buildings.
Turkey’s fraught relationship with Europe and the U.S. should be bolstered by its impressive response to the refugee crisis in neighboring Syria. But now will the West step up?
It is nearly too little, nearly too late, but there is still a way for the U.S. President to be the leader the world needs in the face of ISIS extremism.
This week’s UN General Assembly highlighted the need for cooperation in the fight against ISIS and other Islamic terror networks. And that could extend to sworn enemies.
As white supremacists proliferate in Sweden, a reformed neo-Nazi has been dissuading youths from following his own former path. Now he’s trying to stem growing Islamic radicalism.
-Analysis- One year since taking office, Iran President Hassan Rouhani and his government are confronted with an extremely unstable geopolitical situation across the Middle East. Tehran had long been seen as the main beneficiary of the 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq, but it must now face unexpected difficulties in its neighboring country and former sworn […]
In Tartus, on Syria’s western coast, residents in relative calm. But even here, a new sectarian melting pot and a flagging war economy are beginning to take their toll.
For fear of an Iran-led rise of Shia, authorities from Riyadh to Ankara fed the radicalism that now eyes them as the primary target.
Boys in the eastern city of Raqqa are forced into military training, and say their ISIS instructors show them how to decapitate blond-haired, blue-eyed dolls with kitchen knives.
A year after a chemical attack killed nearly 1,000 civilians in the Syrian rebel stronghold of eastern Ghouta, new fears that the Islamist radical group is building its own chemical stockpile.
-OpEd- BERLIN — American Foreign Policy magazine’s home page is a little bit like a quotation board for security policy strategies. Here you see not only how various players evaluate the world’s conflicts but also how much support there is for their point of view, because the number of times the article has been shared […]
A former cook for the Free Syrian Army, Iftikar al Daye is the 100,000th migrant who has arrived in Italy since the beginning of the year, and a symbol of hope for fleeing refugees.
More than two million Syrian children have lost all access to education. In western Syria, one principal is looking to change things.
Sectarian differences have long created problems for some marriages among Shia, Sunni and others. But with the death and hatred of war, romantic tragedies abound.
The news in quotes, and quotes making news…
As Islamic terrorists press forward in Syria, female fighters and commanders now make up a third of Kurdish forces. “Women can fight better than men,” one says.